How to Merge Work and Spirituality

Turning hard work into a rich and meaningful ritual.

I spent most of my adult life trying to avoid work, regarding it as an obstacle and refusing to let myself immerse in its flow. My work-life-balance was skewed; I always had things to do to distract myself from working. I succeeded in many endeavors, but it was always that kind of fix-everything-in-the-last-minute success. A one that is preceded by enormous anxiety and followed by indifference.

I always had this lingering belief that I am above what I am doing. All work tasks seemed boring and trivial. I spent most of my work time reading irrelevant books or following soccer news. I tended to believe, I’m preparing myself for a future breakthrough. This kind of a moment when I finally realize my purpose, implement my talents and do something worthwhile. Until that happens, I used to just pretend I am working as hard as others. At a certain point, pretending coalesced into black holes in my soul, sucking my energy into one dense spot of misery.

At the bottom of desperation, where you have nothing more to lose, the secret just revealed itself to me as if life was waiting for me to reach the bottom to get it out. The key is to transform work into a spiritual matter. Spirituality doesn’t lie only within religious rituals. It is ever present in the perseverance and passion with which we tend to simple tasks. Every part of work, no matter how normal and trivial it seems to be, could open a window for satisfaction and fulfillment, if only it was done with deep devotion and truthful imagination.

Freud was asked one day about what could a normal happy man do well. The questioner definitely expected a complex answer, but Freud’s answer was dangerously simple: “love and work”, he said.

I decided to love and work, learnt and am still learning few lessons that I share in the coming sections.

Sign you work with your soul

True self can be found in the simplest of tasks. To convert your mundane work into a mystical experience, you should start at loving what you do and committing to it. Only when your work harmonizes with your inner self, would you gain satisfaction. When work isn’t reflecting the real you and is only a place to showcase your fake self, secondary needs like status or money magnify and become more essential than they are.

Whatever your profession is, it must align with your overall value system. It must propel you forward towards what you consider meaningful in life. If you do what you know to be worthwhile, you will be able to develop a moral obligation towards it. You will sign it with your soul, because even if nobody else sees it, you know that God will.

Dismantle the myth of rest

I was creative in devising ways of resting withing working hours. I complained of how dull my work is, how it is not intellectually engaging, how it is exhausting without enough rest. Paradoxically, as little attention as I devoted in the past to work, I always had a total breakdown at the end of each day. The longer I rested, the deeper and more intense my misery became.

Sometimes we tackle work with carelessness and hesitation, thinking that working hard would tire us and leave exhausted and depressed. It turns out that the opposite might be the case. One could never enjoy rest, if it didn’t follow work. Dedicating your full attention to work is a potent antidepressant.

When you have a lot of time to spend alone doing nothing, you face the real danger of tearing yourself apart. Whoever works with real dedication never wonders if he is happy or not.

Be humble enough to learn

As long as you cannot do a job properly, it would never satisfy you. You wouldn’t be able to commit to work, if you always feel you are inefficient. We may hide that for a while, but once against the tide, we get exposed and our frailties bring us down. Doing a proper job is your imprint as a human being. It’s a sign of maturity.

Answering questions about the essence of life won’t inform us about the right tools to fix the leaking faucet, or the right recipe for a delicious cake or the right sequence of notes to play a specific musical melody.

No spiritual achievement is ever able to compensate for technical deficits.

Delegate to win

On the contrary, if you are technically superb, you may tend to carry out all the roles. You will rarely delegate to your colleagues or employees, because you don’t trust them enough. When you do that, you don’t only rip others of their chance to show their abilities, but you also fail to have a holistic success. When tasks multiply, you would suffer from chronic fatigue, and worse you may feel, you are not well appreciated.

Sharing responsibilities with the team, preserves your energy and stimulates the skills of others, achieving a better outcome for everybody.

Don’t lose yourself

What we want is not necessarily what others expect from us. If expectations do overcome your desires regularly, everything you do would be for the benefit of others: our parents, teachers, spouses, friends and even our children. This happens while your original self is losing its soul and what characterizes it.

Dealing with yourself with such hostility shakes your spirit to the extent that you become unable of expressing any true emotions, other than the vague misery that begets the feeling of work’s absurdity, sucks the loving energy and propagates black thoughts throughout life.

Winning by Losing — Learning from Women

As years run by, many successful individuals get scared with the prospect of retirement. Throughout their career, they defined their self-worth very much in terms of their work, that they become anxious about who they actually are if not doing this job. After lives based on winning one promotion and one bargain after the other, retirement tastes like loss. For men especially, it resembles castration or even death.

Transcend the Win-Lose model

Ending a career or losing money or health usually evoke deep psychological pain. Elderly men look older, weaker and more isolated than elderly women. Authority and the confidence it generates which are basic parts of men’s psyche slip from their hands gradually. Women are generally more efficient in establishing fundamental personal relationships characterized by constancy and permanence that helps to overcome the loss.

If winning is restricted to career, wealth and power, while ignoring health, truthful intimacy, and emotional engagements in daily life, that very winning would be nothing but the major loss.

Women carry children. They bring them up, secure nice meals for the family, clean the house, do routine daily tasks, take children to schools, playgrounds and their friends, get them back, read stories for them before sleep, feel worried for their children’s sickness, school and social life. All that while leading full time jobs.

Dr. Jordan Peterson says: “Women know what they have to do, while men need to figure out what they have to do”.

Men have a lot to learn. They have to examine the real motivations inside those women. They have to do their jobs with respect and conscientiousness and to build at the same time intimate, permanent and constant relationships that may help them overturn losses into wins.

Happiness lies in subtraction

When we try to analyze happiness logically, we break it down to measurable parameters: nice clothes, marriage, promotion, car, vacation, wealth, and we multiply them in an addictive manner, ending up in a place where all these accumulations block the light finding its way into the world.

Adding to what you have already cannot bring fulfillment, let alone happiness. The continuous desire to own things works against happiness. You could only reach happiness, when you desire what you have already. Achievements and collectibles are recorded as additions, while happiness is measured by subtractions.

Loving God means emptying the house, so that light could sneak into it.