EmployeeNext: Creating success and joy at work

I have just finished spending the weekend on retreat with some of my favorite friends.  These are people who I don’t always socialize with but we are like-minded, in the way we live our spiritual and emotional journeys.  One of the greatest gifts of these times together is the authentic and honest conversations we have with each other, loving conversations without ego, warm, helpful, deep and true.

One of the things I strive for in my life is to integrate from within — to merge my perception of myself intellectually, my perception of myself spiritually, with others perceptions of me.  My friends often tell me things they see in me and I am surprised.  My own perceptions, at least initially, are not the same.  So my task is to take these observations inward, to feel them, see if they resonate with truth.

And they do.  I find that my own intellectual voices are often really not mine — they are learned, old ideas — from our culture, from my family, from my teachers, perhaps from some painful past experience only dimly remembered.  My perceptions are often really the judgments of these voices.  Unless I think deeply and reflectively, I don’t realize these voices are not mine, these opinions really not what I beleive.

I had a friend once in San Diego who used to say “are the voices in my head bothering you?”  These days, I find that the voices in my head often are bothering me!  Keeping me bound fast to old ideas.  I don’t have to listen.  I can instead, listen with my heart.  Decide what is true for me.  Act on it in love and service.

We are alive, deep within.  Our creator, “the spirit of wisdom and love” as my teacher Father Terry says, lives so closely within us that we can’t see Him.  But we can feel Him, deep within our hearts.   And from that place, ever so slowly at first, we can begin to live.