If you’d like to listen to a narrated version of this essay, find it on the “A Wild New Work” podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, SoundCloud, or right here on our website.

I grew up in a devotedly Christian household. We went to church each Sunday and were deeply rooted in the community there for many years. As a child, I felt supported and seen by others in our church, and I felt my own relationship to God blossoming within its walls. One year at “Camp Christian,” when I was 11 or 12, a counselor pulled me aside and said that he could tell my connection to God was really strong, and my face became flushed with pride. It was one of the nicest things an older person could say to me.

As I entered my middle and high school years, my religious life changed and became peppered with teenage angst and rebellion, but the thread of Christianity ran through it all. I still prayed often and felt supported by my relationship to God. After high school, I decided to go to a small Methodist college in Seattle where theology courses and attendance at chapel were required. I gladly dove into the culture there and voluntarily attended church with friends on Sundays.

My junior year of college, I had an elective credit that I needed to fulfill, and Women’s Studies 101 was the only course that worked with my schedule, so I signed up. Taught by a theology professor, our class curriculum was hardly shocking, but it opened up a new world of questioning social norms and behavior that I’d never encountered before. Feminism would become the gateway to an entirely new spiritual outlook, but I wasn’t aware of that yet.

After that class ended, I decided to make Women’s Studies my minor and signed up for another course titled “Women in Christianity.” One week we were studying the concept of Calvinism, which is essentially the belief that some souls are pre-destined for heaven, and others are not. The way I heard it, those souls that weren’t pre-destined were shit out of luck and couldn’t get into heaven no matter what they did on earth.

The weekend after that class, I had my first and only panic attack. I became convinced that pre-destination was real and that despite a lifetime of devotion to Christ, I would never get into heaven. I was so distraught that I called my professor, who I was close to, and begged her to meet me. She agreed to let me come to her son’s baseball game the next day.

Amongst the din of pre-adolescent boys playing ball and with tears streaming down my face, my professor named all of the reasons why Calvinism was wrong. She assured me that there was no true cause for concern. While I tried to take solace in her words, something inside of me had irreversibly changed.

A few days later, the distress lifted, and I began to get angry. I realized that I wanted no part in a belief system that would cause me to feel so abandoned and condemned. Like a waterfall, doubts and revelations cascaded into my brain, and I felt more clear than ever that Christianity wasn’t for me. I stopped going to church, I met the minimum requirements for my theology courses, and I spent the rest of my time in college distancing myself from the religious culture I’d known.

The problem was, since Christianity was the only belief system I was familiar with, I thought that the alternative was to reject a spiritual life completely. For the next seven years, I avoided anything that smelled of religion or spirituality. I read Richard Dawkins and other prominent atheists, I scoffed at anyone who could believe there was more to this life than what science could prove, and I was completely miserable.

Over lunch on my 24th birthday, my mom told me that she was sad for me, because she knew that without Christ in my life I’d always feel empty. At the time, I probably rolled my eyes, but something about what she said rang true, and it haunted me.

Without any sort of spiritual center, life felt dreary and arduous. I drank a lot, got into bad relationships, and made a lot of poor choices in my career. Using my intellect alone, I made huge, sweeping decisions about volunteering abroad, going to graduate school, and moving to a new city. While I don’t regret any of it, I see now how much of it was done out of a desperate desire to find a sense of purpose.

When I moved to Portland in 2014, I recognized that the feeling of pushing through life and barely enjoying it was weighing me down. I serendipitously connected with a therapist in town named Rachel Rockey, and in our first session, I told her that I wanted to regain a sense of my identity. I told her that I felt lost at sea, anchorless and alone.

A few months after beginning to work with Rachel, she suggested that I try meditation. Curious, I created a little space in my apartment and just sat there, noticing my breath for a few minutes. A few days later, I read something inspirational and then sat, just noticing my breath and the thoughts that came into my mind. A few days after that, I lit a candle and extended my routine.

I knew right away that I’d come back to a well that had been closed off inside of me for the last seven years, and I felt the sorrow of having been dis-integrated for so long. I was hooked on my daily centering practice, and I consider it to be what truly changed my life and career five years ago.

My spirituality has transformed since my childhood, but what remains the same is a sense of connection and respect for that which is sacred and unknowable. While I don’t practice Christianity now, I’m grateful for the spiritual foundation that it gave me and respect those who ascribe to that belief system (or any other).

I use the term “spirituality” to include any practice that connects someone to what they consider to be divine, otherworldly, or precious. It can include religious practice, an informal, solitary worldview, or a blend of both. The purpose of this series is not to tell you what spirituality is or isn’t, but to awaken you to your own connection to the divine mystery and invite you to incorporate it into your career.

I’ll share some of the concrete ways that I do this and how I encourage clients to do this in parts two through four of this course, but I want to emphasize at the outset that reconnecting with my spirituality has completely transformed my career, and I believe that’s possible for you, too.

In the seven years I spent wandering in the proverbial desert of desolation, I limped from job to job, changing course frequently and always clamoring for something better. I probably spent over $100,000 on volunteering abroad and graduate school, both huge decisions that I made because I didn’t know what else to do and wanted to feel reassured that everything would be okay. After graduate school, I got a job in Human Resources and completely burnt out within a year because I didn’t have a strong sense of self and tried to find my value in my performance evaluations and salary range. Needless to say, none of it was pretty.

It’s not that everything is perfect now that I meditate for 20 minutes a day or pray about my business, but I will say that in the last five years, I haven’t made nearly as many decisions out of fear or desperation. I’ve connected to thousands of people who needed my support, and I’ve felt deeply fulfilled through the work that I do. I also know what to do when I feel stuck or confused, and I have more clarity than ever before about how I want to work and the contributions I want to make.

When I see clients or people in my community incorporate their own spirituality into their career, I see similar themes: ease, a sense of possibility, and often a reflection of that in the material world via new opportunities, more money, or greater alignment in their work. When things get difficult, they have their own tools for regaining the clarity that they need, and they become much more resilient in the face of layoffs, transitions, or failures.

Now, there’s a risk of spiritual bypassing here, which is what happens when people say that if your life is hard or if you can’t find a job, it’s because you’re not being spiritual enough or are somehow sabotaging yourself with toxic thoughts. While it’s true that our inner processes and mindsets are incredibly influential over our careers, it is also true that sometimes job markets just suck, or managers are jerks, or we just made a wrong turn and need to find our way again. I would never tell mistreated workers that the abuses they experience are simply because they haven’t done enough spiritual work. We live within capitalism, which is a system of exploitation, and I won’t ignore the fact that some of us avoid the worst situations due to the color of our skin, or where we were born, or how well we fit into society’s definition of “normal.”

“Work as a Sacred Practice” isn’t about putting all of your eggs into the spiritual basket and just hoping things work out. This course and the philosophy within it is designed to help you supplement the action you’re taking with a deep connection to and reverence for what is immaterial. Work is sacred because it’s an expression of your life force. Even if you despise your job, you’re still there expending energy and devoting time and attention to it. I believe that everything that exists is sacred because it’s an expression of Spirit. And I especially believe that your heart, body, and mind are precious things that deserve to be honored no matter what you do for work.

This course is also not about doing whatever it takes to be more productive or fit into capitalist expectations for what your career should look like. I’m not interested in joining the cacophony of those who want to show you how to push harder, do more, or go faster. I’m much more interested in helping you find your own perfect pace, the timelines that work for you, and the wisdom that will help you unfold in a graceful way.

To summarize, here are the primary benefits I’ve seen to approaching work as a sacred practice:
* Clarity about what kinds of work environments are best for you
* An easier time drawing boundaries for yourself and for others
* Strategic awareness about how your gifts want to be expressed through your career
* Trust that no matter what, you will be okay
* Empowerment to go at your own pace and make the decisions that align for you
* More energy to take the steps that you most want to take

When we do our work from a spiritual place, we remember that we are expressions of the divine and that there’s more to this life than entering hours into a timesheet or getting on a conference call. We know that our value doesn’t lie in our job title, how many LinkedIn followers we have, or how much we get paid. Our careers are undergirded by a deep current of wisdom and vitality, both of which can lead us into modes of service that honor ourselves and what our souls came to this planet to do.

You may not believe that you chose to incarnate into human form or that you chose your parents or where you’d be born, and that’s okay. I believe it, and I believe that if you’re reading this and you’re curious about your career, it’s a good indication that your soul wants to grow through your work and contribute something meaningful to the planet before you die. One of the ways I’ve learned more about how my soul wants to grow is through astrology - specifically by learning about the North Node in my natal chart. If you’re interested in learning more about your own North Node placement, there are details and a link in the Astrology section of this learning module.

As we go through this 4-part journey together, I encourage you to consider the nature of your spiritual life and how you connect to the divine, Spirit, God, or whatever name you use to describe the animating life force that connects us all. And if you consider yourself an atheist, you’re welcome here, too. Even if we don’t use the same language, all humans are designed to connect to what feels sacred to them, whether it’s a place in Nature, cycles of life and death, quiet time alone, or meaningful traditions.

As you explore your own spirituality, consider how you might bring more of it into your career. This is what we’ll begin to explore in part two of this series, “Daily Practices to Sustain You.”

Thank you for being here and for sharing this time with me. I encourage you to check out the supplemental materials to support your learning this week, including:

* Journaling prompts
* A Tarot spread
* Astrological insights about the North Node
* External resources to explore

If you know others who would benefit from this course, you can send them this link to sign up for the series: https://mailchi.mp/6843ad029e7b/workasasacredpractice