The Corporation and Soul

"A soulful approach to work is probably the only way an individual can respond creatively to the high-temperature stress of modern work life without burning to a crisp in the heat. It takes the soul's ability to elicit texture, color, story, and meaning from the tumult of events, to meet fire with fire and still have a somewhat restful existence that is capable of wise policy somewhere at the center of it all. The corporation, in calling for a little more creative fire from their people, must make room for a little more soul. Making room for creativity, it must make room for the source of that fire and the hearth where it burns — the heart and the soul of the individual."
The Heart Aroused

Finding Your Voice

"Our voice, then, is a powerful arbiter of our inner life, our power relationships with others, and a touchstone of faith in the life we wish to lead. In the office we can experience the disciplines of speech, and the inner silence from which good speech appears, as a measure of soul in our lives. Sometimes the voice is cowardly, sometimes courageous, and more often somewhere between the two, but whatever its outward appearance, tempered by the pressures of organizational life it represents the urgencies, desires, or emotional strangulation of a soul longing to be heard in the world."
The Heart Aroused

Inner Soul Images

"Those with busy lives, but bereft of the inner images based on the soul's desires, have empty larders, and no fire in the hearth; they will starve if they are not fed something more nourishing. Especially if the abundant season of fall changes to winter. I remember the story of a Jewish concert pianist, locked into a confined space with dozens of others by the Germans. She survived by playing mentally through her entire repertoire of Chopin while everyone died in a standing position around her. The inner-soul images are different for all of us.
The Heart Aroused

Preserving the Soul

"Preserving the soul means that we come out of hiding at last and bring more of ourselves into the workplace. Especially the parts that do not 'belong' to the company. In a sense, the very part of us that doesn't have the least interest in the organization is our greatest offering to it. It is the part that opens the window of the imagination and allows fresh air into the meeting room. It is the part that can put its foot on the brake when the organization is running itself off a cliff. It's the part that can identify unethical behavior and remind everyone what the real priorities are. It is the part that refuses to shame itself or others in order to make its way through the organization. In short, its identity is not locked into the very fears that stop an organization from having the perspectives and adaptability to save itself."
The Heart Aroused

Good Work

"At its best, work seems never-ending only because, like life, it is a pilgrimage, a journey in which we progress not only through the world but through stages of understanding. Good work, done well for the right reasons and with an end in mind, has always been a sign, in most human traditions, of an inner and outer maturity. Its achievement is celebrated as an individual triumph and a gift to our societies. A very hard-won arrival."
Crossing the Unknown Sea

Making a Break for Freedom

"The severest test of work today is not of our strategies but of our imaginations and identities. For a human being, finding good work and doing good work is one of the ultimate ways of making a break for freedom. In order to find that freedom in the midst of the complex world of work, we need to cultivate simpler, more elemental identities truer to the template of our own natures."
Crossing the Unknown Sea

The Work of Our Ancestors

"We are immensely privileged even to inquire about the meaning of our work. Many of our ancestors pined for good work as they would for a lover, and remained unrequited and stricken by want. Many of our ancestors died while working in dangerous or desperate conditions. Some left good work and found none to replace it. A few, a very few, left little, crossed oceans, and found abundance beyond hope. Others worked hard or traveled to new shores and dutifully sacrificed for their sons and daughters, while their hearts and minds were elsewhere, their own dreams unfulfilled, their innermost selves left high and dry, disappointed by time's fleeting tide. Whatever our inheritance of work in this life, we are only the apex of innumerable lives of endeavor and sacrifice. Where we have come from, the struggles of our parents, our ancestral countries, their voyages, and hardships are immensely important."
Crossing the Unknown Sea

The Excitement of Horizons

"A koan question for advanced Zen students is 'How do you proceed from the top of a hundred-foot pole?' Once you reach a certain stage of mastery, the dangers increase exponentially. In any occupation where we have achieved a degree of competence, we imperceptibly begin to see ourselves as God's gift to whatever world we have decided to occupy with our working bodies.

Every path, no matter how diligently we follow it, can lead to staleness and ennui. We might reach dizzying heights in our organization, occupy the top floor of any given building, or, as a zoologist, make it to the Galapagos islands, but if we lose our horizon and the excitement of that horizon, our high office or our storied islands can seem like a gilded cage."
Crossing the Unknown Sea

The Need for Silence

"All of our great contemplative traditions advocate the necessity for silence in an individual life: first, for gaining a sense of discernment amid the noise and haste, second, as a basic building block of individual happiness, and third, to let this other all-seeing identity come to life and find its voice inside us. In the Buddhist tradition the ability to be happy is often translated into English as 'equanimity,' roughly meaning to be equal to things, to be large enough for the drama in which we find ourselves.

"Almost all of our traditions of instruction in prayer, meditation or silence, be they Catholic, Buddhist or Muslim advocate seclusion or withdrawal as a first step in creating this equanimity."
The Three Marriages

The To-Do List

"Millennia of worrying under night skies have brought human beings to where the complexities of our contemporary societies have almost reached breaking point. In many ways, our to-do lists have become the postmodern equivalent of the priest's rosary, the lama's sutra or the old prayer book — keeping a larger, avalanching reality at bay. Above all, the to-do list keeps the evil of not-doing at bay, a list that many of us like to chant and cycle through religiously as we make our way to work through the commute."
The Three Marriages

Marriage

"Marriage is where we realize that we have also married a stranger whom we must get to know. Marriage is where we learn self-knowledge; where we realize that parts of our own makeup are stranger even than the stranger we have married and very difficult for another person to live with. Marriage is where we realize how much effort we put into preserving our own sense of space and our own sense of self. Marriage is where we realize how much we want to be right and seen to be right. Marriage is where all of these difficult revelations can consign us to imprisonment or help us become larger, more generous, more amusing, more animated participants in the human drama."
The Three Marriages