The Grace of the Impossible
Meaning, Purpose, Care and Cure
hello everyone,
My Zen@Work Catalyst group is in full swing: an eight-week group intensive for each of us to catalyze the next stage of professional life with the support of community, meditation and (for some) microdosing. It’s a powerful ride.
Part of the power comes from clearly identifying our core personal values, and having our professional goals flow from them. All of the “manifestation” and “mindset” skills you may have learned over the last few decades, as effective as they can sometimes be, are hampered when your view of yourself is too small, your understanding of your own agency too limited.
What will really blow your life open (in a good way) is to invite a paradigm shift in your self-understanding. To go from a limited self-centered view of things, to a more expanded view: one in which you are an integral part of the universe, affecting and being affected by all beings all the time. Everything you do (and say and think!) matters.
(As an aside, I’ll say here that the allies I mention above — meditation and plant medicine — are helpful accelerants to this paradigm-shift.)
We tend to not see our true nature out of habit. That old bugbear, “conditioning.” But it’s true. Infants experience unity, but our developing egos close it off. That’s ok, it’s how it works.
When we shift to a more inclusive paradigm, everything changes. We strive for bigger goals, even impossible goals. Our “goals” in fact climb the ladder of significance and become more like “vows.” To strive endlessly to connect, create, love …. whatever is most important to us.
Living by vow is a paradigm of care, not a paradigm of cure.
The paradigm of cure leads to the cult of “success." The obsession with winning/losing, accomplishment/failure, divorced from all considerations of context, feeling and capacity. The paradigm of cure views illness as something that must be defeated or eradicated.
The paradigm of care is in the everyday. It’s about the quality of attention you bring to your self, your loved ones and your work.
In the Zen understanding, all life is about “care.” As the fourth and final of the Buddha’s “Four Noble Truths”, the Eightfold Path is nothing but a set of guidelines for taking care of our lives.
When we adopt the paradigm of cure, coupled with the simultaneously less self-centered and more inclusive sense of ourselves, a kind of grace may descend.
You find your purpose not in a goal, but in an abiding sense of meaning to your life.
If you would like to explore how to open this dimension in your life and work, I invite you to sign up for a Free Discovery call now. I will meet you deeply and help you unfold.