Creating the Work You Love by Rick Jarow - Excerpts

Creating the Work You Love: Courage, Commitment, and Career. Rick Jarow. 1995. ISBN 0-89281-542-6

EXCERPTS

If we are in deed the same beings in the working world as in the more shrouded realms of inward experience, then why shouldn't our inner and outer worlds support one another? I contend that until we move in this direction, none of our good intentions will change the nature of employment in this society, and unless we change the way in which we approach the act and art of making a living, it will become increasingly difficult to cultivate any sort of inner life at all.

… we have arrived at a point at our social evolution where being an artist of our lives, and creating lives that are authentic instead of accepting or assuming ready-made models, is requisite for entry into the coming century.

If our work does not have this sense of transformation, of working in congruence with an inner ideal, then it will be experienced as a curse. We will shirk difficult conditions and take the path of least resistance because we will not believe in what we're doing, and we will have no larger sense of why we're doing it. On the other hand, if we feel that our task is worthy, the smallest charge can be accomplished with enthusiasm.

… a first step in reversing the idea of work as a curse is to move toward caring about one's work as much as about one’s life.

It requires courage to live from one’s authenticity and commitment to stay the course, but the effort to do so reveal subtle laws that are as real as the rates of currency exchange.

The inhibiting of one’s image-making power is essential to enculturation of the paradigm of productivity. For reverie - taking long, slow dream walks and the like - waste valuable, “productive” time. Instead of being trained in the possibilities and uses of the imagination, we are encouraged to have it siphoned off by television.

To “ask” is to take up the way of inquiry as opposed to the way of complacency. The victim learns not to ask too much, for it may upset the powers that be. As one question after another is buried within, the child/adult is bent into the mold of acquiescence until true inquiry becomes next to impossible. Underneath the facade of the complacent, respectable victim there's always despair.

In order to move from dream to reality, you have to put the dream to the test, and the only way that happens is by risking it in the crucible of action.

As in the first and single most important step in Alcoholics Anonymous, the denial must cease and the admission must be made: Our working lives have become unmanageable. Whether on the janitor’s stool or an executive's chair, there is a feeling that forces out of our control are creating uncertainty, a dispirited fatigue, and a muffled frustration that makes it seem normal to dread Monday mornings.

To test life, to allow life itself to lead you and care for you, is not a parlor game. In order to move into your way, you may have to put everything on the line. You may be asked to give up the rewards you have coveted for so long. But life will respond because you've asked it to; you have looked into life itself. And the results grow slowly, but they develop into a deep self-faith and trust in life.

Integrity appears when our principles become so established that they supplant survival as the motivating human mechanism. From this place, principle may be worth more than life itself.

Genuine self-acceptance translates into self-respect, which then becomes self-reliance. Self-acceptance is really life acceptance – accepting the current, finding and tuning in to the energy of life itself and all its subsequent potential.

Notice where there is frustration and resistance in your daily life. Do you feel frustration around time constraints? Money? Relationships? Know that these are never the underlying issues; these are symptoms.

To get what you want, the success books tell you, you have to be able to see your goal, to visualize the object in detail, to affirm its reality daily, to hold it in your mind. Then your dream will come true. The problem with this strategy is that what we want on a conscious level is often at odds with what we crave on the unconscious level.

Opening to and tracking feelings of restlessness and frustration instead of trying to mask them is the second stage in developing an anti-career. You need a considerable store of self-worth to do this, in order to work through past disillusionments and disappointments without turning them against yourself.

If one is intent on establishing a career that nourishes one's soul as well as one's body, there is serious excavation work to do, and this work almost always involves coming to terms with one's parents, the deepest embodiments of our conditioning. It is said that, if one wants to understand one's own destiny, one need look no further than the life path of one's parents, as much for the roads they have not taken as for the ones they have.

Work is reserved for grownups because it is not fun; it is about the serious business of survival or status-seeking. But when we have converted our basic energy into integrity, dismissing survival as the foremost imperative, we feel the bliss of our being, and status-seeking is seen for what it is – a poor substitute for loving and being loved.

There is no fire, no life, no excitement in a society where feeling has been devalued or siphoned off into mindless destruction.

To develop an authentic mode of work, we must get down to the feeling level, to a place where the life current that we contacted energetically expands into a feeling, into a desire to act, to do something that is meaningful.

We must be willing to nurture our goals, to see if they are indeed to be nourished by our feelings, our dreams, and our life force. Nevertheless, we must choose on some level so that we can move into active participation with our possibilities.

What is really important in terms of how you spend your days and nights? What has empowered the basic movement of your life so far? What are the passions that rule you? Who are the gods and goddesses at whose altar you sacrifice your time and energy? Until you have done substantial investigation here, do not enter into the activities of decision making and prioritizing. First you must see where your attention has been focused, and why.

The development of a soul-based career is an organic, step-by-step process; it does not come in a sudden flash. The process asks us to be realistically idealistic, that is, to find a focus and then to patiently allow the path to unfold. Our priorities will change over time. This is only natural, and knowing this can fuel current projects. We understand that they are not forever, and so for now we can give them all we have got to give, for they are aligned with the ongoing process of our coming into wholeness.

This is crucial to understand: To the degree that your priorities are clear and aligned with your whole being, the job, the place, and the people will manifest like clockwork, because you have done the necessary inner work. No more effort is needed, and there is no effort more important than developing this clarity of vision.

Once our goal/priority is set we then ask, “Am I at peace with my goal? Does that ring true? Does it make me want to get up early in the morning and get right to it?” If our priorities are still couched in “shoulds” and “oughts”, we do not really move with them. They are masks for other, more important issues that we have not yet uncovered.

Receiving support from others is a natural outcome of alignment. When we're clear about our intent, others whose intentions consciously or unconsciously resonate with our own will appear.

As we open to our own visionary wisdom, our sense of timing opens as well. Instead of being run by the clock, we begin to find ourselves in the right place at the right time, and as we do, we become cognizant of a different type of clock, one that runs not by strict economic or mechanical laws but that instead synchronizes with the rhythm of our beings as we begin to trust its accuracy.

Dreams are the level that must nourish our work if our work is to nurture our inner development in return. And that, after all, is the true purpose of any work.

The strategy for managing your time and energy is to have your priority so rightly and deeply ingrained in you that you can naturally work your day around its power, as opposed to working around other people's agendas.

Most goal-oriented people place high value on outcomes because they still see themselves enmeshed in poverty. Therefore the best they can become is someone or something other than who or what they are.

The moment we opt for action, the door opens wide. It may not be the particular situation the expected, but we have crossed over the line of the doubt and hesitation, and the natural release of energy will begin to activate and concretize the vision. We will begin to move with enthusiasm. New energy will create new ideas, new enthusiasm, and new resistances. This is all part of the process of trusting, asking, listening, and living.

When one is inspired (or one may even say impregnated) by a living vision, the psyche and hence daily life will organize itself around that vision, not around the contemporary nine-to-five expectation. And true magic can be effected by the way in which we order our daily lives ... Instead of sacrificing our lives to the crippled vision of industrial productivity or to the whimsical apathy of nonengagement, we can allow our heart's vision to create its corresponding lifestyle.

If you do what you love, the money may not follow, but you will become yourself - you will ultimately understand the wisdom of your life process and you will die with integrity and peace.

... the first step in creating a work situation that will nurture your soul is the willingness to take the risk of making an investment in yourself and in your truth.

If we do not have a direction, our integrity ask us not to contrive one, not to desperately seek someone or something new to believe in. If there is no flame to fan, no investment to make, let's have the courage to face it, to stand naked in the pit of absence and let our processes be born from it. If we allow ourselves to go deep enough into the water, we will eventually find the fire. At these times of not knowing, I often encourage people to take a moratorium before changing course, taking the time to process and let external things unfold in their own way. The willingness to lie fallow invites the spark that will ignite the flame.