Have you ever wondered how to align your career with an inner life? Unfortunately, the inner life for many people is no more than a derailed train. Many people set off in pursuit of a career inspired by an inner life but quickly lose sight of their goal. The stress of working 40 to 50 hours a week, climbing the corporate ladder, commuting, paying bills, raising children, can derail even the most determined.
With so much going on with careers, many of us have a tendency to rationalize our inattention to the inner. We are so busy putting out fires and racing to deadlines that anything else can go on the back burner. That’s the path of least resistance.
It’s understandable. The inner life becomes a luxury. Some people think they can attend to it after they retire. After all, they are good people. They go to their religious services, pay their taxes, and obey the law. They don’t see the need.
Because most people don’t have the perception of the vastness and riches of the inner life, they don’t realize they are living on the surface of things. They don’t realize that some people are diving for pearls while they are content collecting seashells. They never suspect that an inner life can integrate with their outer life and transform their career lifestyle. They have no idea that the inner realms of possibility can give their career meaning, and with that meaning, enthusiasm. They don’t see the big picture.
My father was one such example. He was a pharmacist. He would be on his feet all day. Sometimes it was for a 14-hour shift. He would get one day off a week. He was so tired that all he felt like doing when he got home was have a drink and a cigarette. And then another drink and another cigarette. On and on it went, night after night after a hard day’s work. He had a heart attack on the job and died. He was 62.
That made a deep impression on me. Life had to have more meaning than that. The shock of his death, of him working himself to death, served as a wakeup call to me.
This type of lifestyle is all too common and I promised myself I would do things differently. And I did. I never smoked to relax or drank alcohol to cope. It was just seven months after he died that I discovered the bliss of an inner life. That changed everything.
If I found myself in a job where I couldn’t feel the joy of being, I would quit. I wasn’t going to go through life unhappy in what I did for a living. And by being committed to happiness in my work, I kept my inner life in a state of joy.
A career with an inner life is not something to be lived or experienced at some future date. It’s meant to be lived every minute of life, regardless of what you are doing.
The bottom line is that we are spiritual beings. The inner should always take precedence. If something in your outer life is smothering your inner life, then a change has to be made. Sometimes the change only has to be your perception. Sometimes the only change to be made is to bring awareness into what you do, and then do it wholeheartedly. I have found in my life, in numerous occupations, that doing something half-hearted takes much more effort than doing something wholeheartedly. And it’s not nearly as enjoyable.
The reason for that is that when I do something wholeheartedly, I am connected to my source of being. I have an endless supply of energy. The work I do sustains rather than depletes. There is a certain joy in doing something with all of my heart. There are far less distractions, the time goes by quickly, and there is a certain satisfaction knowing that I am doing quality work. The work becomes an expression of my inner self. The inner has merged into the outer.
I once had a job that involved a lot of paper work. It was monotonous. I caught myself looking at my watch several times in the afternoon to see how many more hours or minutes I had left to endure. That was when I knew that I was not living in the present moment.
That night I cut a piece of paper that would fit perfectly over my watch dial. I glued it onto the watch crystal and I wrote the word “Now” on it.
The next day at work, whenever I looked at my watch to see how many more hours of work I had, I saw the word “Now.” It was a reminder to put my whole heart into what I was doing, to become fully engaged with the work. It served to keep me living in the present moment.
When you have experienced this state of being in your work, you are bringing inner awareness into it. Your work becomes a form of mysticism-an unclouded perception of Reality. Your consciousness is using your outer life as a form of expression. You are in the world but not of the world. It leads to the knowledge that you are not your body and not your mind-you are consciousness-which existed before you took birth and which will exist after you die.
The more consistently you can root yourself in your consciousness, the deeper will be your inner experience. This inner life correlates with the perception of oneness and the infinite intelligence that pervades life. This leads to an increase in intuition and synchronicity. You become aware of inner promptings.
If you live your life in this way I guarantee you will not go through a mid-life crisis. How could you with everyday filled with meaning and fulfillment?
Wherever you are in your life, and whatever you do in your life, you can start this now. The inner life is not something to be enjoyed in the future, but throughout life. You can experience it now. Life, every moment of it, is an opportunity to celebrate being alive.
