Jesus passed the Pool of Bethzatha. Crowds of sick people — blind, lame, paralyzed — sat waiting for the waters to be stirred. At intervals, the angel of the Lord came down to the pool and stirred the waters. The first person to enter the water after it was stirred was cured of any ailment or suffering. One man waiting there had an illness that had lasted for thrity-eight years. Jesus saw him and said, “Do you want to be well?” “Sir,” replied the sick man. “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get there, someone else gets there before me.”   (John 5: 1-7)
The man in this parable is not unlike many of my male clients who climb the corporate ladder. This man, in any modern parable or myth, has been climbing the corporate ladder for thirty-eight years, with every one getting to the top before he does. Just when he works hard, has all his numbers, some one else sneaks in just ahead of him and gets the promotion. He’s devastated.

“I grabbed on to the rope and all I could think about was getting to the top,” John said in contemporary metaphor. John, a client who is up there in the corporate world, knows only too well the exhaustion of that lame man from Bethzatha. “The pace is killing me,” he says, “but the only way I know how to fix it is to just go faster. No matter how hard I work, no matter how many butts I kiss, I’ve discovered it’s not the ladder to success and security I’m climbing, but Jacob’s Ladder — the ladder between heaven and hell.”    

The corporate world honors ego, not soul. Ego is outer-directed, goal-oriented, efficient. Soul is inner-directed, process-oriented, diffuse. Our friend in the gospel parable has lost all feeling in his legs — in his foundation, in his vitality. He has lost touch with his life force. Jesus, in modern reframe, is a metaphor for soul. Soul comes along and confronts the exhausted ego: “Do you want to heal? Do you want to be whole?”

The paralyzed man’s feelings of defeat, depression, loss of identity pull him down, enable him to get in touch with a deeper need for meaning in his life. He first complains of his situation, defends, then becomes despondent. His emotions pull him in, within, which allows him to shut out the noise and demands of the outside world so he can hear an inner spiritual noise –his own inner voice, his soul.

The angel came down and stirred the waters of his emotions. This allowed him to move within, where real healing begins. He knew what he had been doing outside — fighting to get to the pool, fighting to get to the top — hadn’t worked. He looked to the inside, to his soul, for direction.

Our contemporary corporate climber, in a similiar existential crisis, may, at this point, enter therapy. As a therapist, it is my job to sit with this person long enough until he or she can hear that inner voice and respond to the crisis from within his or her own person. Jesus, in the parable, shows the cripple how he was looking to the outside for what was already within himself. Towards the end of the gospel story, Jesus tells him: The pool is within you. The strength, the wisdom, the answers are all within you. Get up and walk.

Once our cripple could experience this spiritual pool within and not look for healing outside himself, he could feel the stirring. It stirred within. He could move into the pool of his own vitality. He could stand on his own foundation, find his legs and walk. His emotions helped him to move within, to find his new meaning, his new direction. The river within began to flow.

Vern Harper said it a different way: “The faster you go, the less you know.” The more we take on, the more we attempt to juggle without first balancing what we have, the less conscious we will be of what we do. Without grounding ourselves (finding or identifying our legs) in a conscious way, about how we use our energy, how our choices color our outcomes, we find ourselves at the mercy of our unconscious demons. We lose touch with our own vitality.

Our cripple felt his angel, his emotions, stir him from within. He began to feel — to feel life in his legs again. He found the strength he needed to do what he needed. Our soul, likewise, asks us, when we lose touch with our interior world, when we dry out, shut down, “Do you want to be well? Do you want to get in touch with your true vitality?”

Healing and energy and power, all within.

Business is the pulse of our country’s value system. The workplace reflects the moral conscience of our post-modern world, says Matthew Fox: “It is at work more than at church that the real moral – and immoral – decisions are being rendered about the health of our planet, our bodies, our children, our very souls. Work is the adult arena for spiritual decision-making.”

In addition to efficiency experts, then, we need soul experts in the work place. All persons have soul – that innate capacity to reflect, to experience deeply, to use imagination to enlarge vision and vitality – but not every person finds it easy to access soul. Nor does every business.

Soul is not measurable like a bottom line on a spread sheet, but it colors every interaction between employer and employee, between company and client, between citizen and world. You know, just by your dealings with a business, whether the work force feels valued and included in decision-making, if environmental concerns are utilized, if there is a commitment to working with the local community for shared prosperity.

It’s not what is done, but the way it’s done that suggests soul. Soul grows along side the product or service and manifests in the interactions with the public. Consciously or unconsciously, a business creates its own theology of work, its own rituals and ethics. It manifests whether or not it values human beings, whether it honors the earth, if it is committed to conservation of resources.

I was touched by the story of the manufacturer who pre-paid his employees a full years’ salary when his factory had just burned to the ground. Is that not soul? Does that not suggest a particular theology of work or work ethic? It’s not just the generosity of his gesture, but what it said about his grasp of employer-employee relations, the importance of family, his understanding of how the emotional wellbeing of his workers has a direct relation to the wellbeing of his company.

You can tell when a business or enterprise is out of touch with its richer possibilities. Workers are drained, demoralized. All they can see is the piece of paper in their hand with the next scheduled meeting or deadline. Work becomes purely instrumental in getting what liberates them outside the workplace rather than an expression of their talent or passion. Creating more sheltered time, time to reflect and renew, is lost. The business for whom they work focuses on profit and expansion. It makes no room for shepherding the human heart.

Businesses that enhance human life, that value and work to restore and sustain the natural enviornment, are more environmentally sensitive, family friendly, worker empowering, and community oriented. It is an extension of our own soul work, when we get involved with a business, to be aware of the mission statement and business ethics it adopts. Our concern for the earth spills over into our concern for a business philosophy that reflects community wellbeing.

The first known people to work our great land, to harvest its fruits, were Native American. These peoples were grounded in a work ethic or spirituality that called for no decision-making of any kind without consideration of how it would impact their children, down to the seventh generation. How well are we who inherited this great land doing in this respect? Are we really leaving the world a better place, environmentally and spiritually, for the generations that come after us?

It’s time for us to stretch our imagination, our mental muscle-power, and our financial resources to create more person-centered technologies in order to enhance American business without starving the American soul. 

“Busy has become a four-letter-word,” Sheila winced, speaking of the work ethic at the office. “If you’re not busy, something’s wrong with you. If you slow down, people think you’re not ambitious enough. The panic around competition fosters decision making from the dark side.” 

Sheila had just come from a meeting in which she learned about her employer’s plan to replace her department with more sales. “’Restructuring’, they said. ‘Tightening up the bottom line’.” Her company was opting for more foot soldiers and salesmen over people with creative ideas. In terms of the bottom line, aggressiveness does seem to be more valued than creativity. 

Competition in the corporate world is stark. It forces us to think in economic terms instead of human terms. Competition grows between workers within the same organization – to keep their job, to get a raise – rather than the team working together to compete with other, outside companies. The focus or purpose becomes that of the individual, with no focus on the good of the whole, even when the whole means the rest of humanity, as in environmental considerations.

“Companies don’t care about their workers anymore,” Shelia said, speaking of the dark side of decision making. “The only thing they care about is, ‘How much money can I make?’ — not we, owners and workers together, but ‘How much money can I, the owner, make?’”  If the accepted values are competition and individual gain, then taking into consideration the needs of those behind me in line means falling behind myself.

For an individual company to keep moving ahead, it seems, getting new business is more important than creativity or human relations. Personal worth is measured in dollars rather than in personal gifts and talents. There’s never enough.

Isn’t there a story about a tree in the middle of the Garden of Enough? Wasn’t there more than enough to go around in that garden, but the two inhabitants wanted more? More knowledge? More power? Aren’t we still fighting over the rights to such a Tree of Knowledge — the knowledge of how to create a leaner, meaner money machine — no matter the consequence to the garden itself? Concerns for the environment always seem to lose to concerns for the bottom line.

“The corporate world has injured my self worth,” Sheila moaned. “They took what I had to offer them, my creativity, used it, then they dismissed it as insufficient. There was never any positive feedback, only negative motivation to develop more, more, more business.” Even the salesmen who had good people skills and took good care of their existing customers were told this was no longer good enough. New business was the only way they could hold on to their jobs.

Each of us has to determine for ourselves what is enough. Sheila tried to work it out within her own situation. “I’m going to have to find something that will ensure my having an internal sense of success rather than an external one.” That may mean a lower salary. “I’ll have to enjoy it myself and appreciate my own abilities. I can’t be dependent on external rewards or motivation; but, how do I find a career at my age,” she asked, “with that kind of internal reward?”

Thomas Moore, in Care Of the Soul, offers insight. “The more deeply our work stirs imagination and corresponds to images that lie there at the bedrock of our identity and fullness, the more it will have soul.” (185) The more our work awakens in us a feeling of our own worth – a real appreciation of our own gifts – the more satisfying and liberating it will be. What we do has to have some integral connection with who we are as a person.

We are human beings first, workers second. Does what I do allow me to be creative? Allow me to be in and to nurture essential relationships? Contribute to my feeling of aliveness? Free me to act with conscious integrity? Does what I do allow me to make time for beauty in my life, for soul time, allow me to “bend time” so I can include those things that heal and hold and whole me?
Does what I do flow from my essence and not just something I have to will myself to do?

If these factors are present, perhaps our present circumstance or career choice is enough. If they are not, all the competition and energy with which we choose to participate in the race toward emotional security will never be enough.

“What do I have to do to take my life back?” Sheila asked. Joseph Campbell once observed that all mythic adventures begin with people who were initially lost, stuck, confused about something. I told Sheila she was right where she needed to be. She was asking the right questions that would lead her to the next right step. 

“They ring the bell, and if you’re lucky, you get the cheese, the crumb from the corporate table,” my client began. He was discouraged, complained of low self-esteem, exhaustion. “The only trouble is, the harder you work, the more you conform, the cheese, the crumb, keeps getting smaller.”

Tom is a talented, sensitive young man, trying to have a piece of the American Dream. Part of the dilemma, for me, is with the dream itself. It used to be that, if I work hard, I can make my dream come true. Now it’s, “I deserve it.” Our life work is no longer the outpouring of our giftedness but the badge of our entitlement. I’m entitled to the prize because I expect it.

Exploring this with Tom, he sinks deeper into his chair. “We want it all, don’t we? We want to love what we do and get all the rewards that are out there. But they promised us! They say, ‘If you behave the way I tell you to behave, I’ll give you the reward, the cheese.’” Tom was angry that the control was all theirs — his time was all theirs. He felt trapped, in a box. “They beat you into submission,” he sighed. “It sucks the life out of me.”

We started talking about his life, where he felt most alive. “The sports part of me is the soul part of me,” he said, his passion beginning to stir. “That’s where I take risks, am a free spirit.” Tom was a surfer. His dream was to one day live at the beach. What he loved about himself had nothing to do with what he did as a living. He leaves his soul at home when he leaves for work.

He began complaining about not being allowed to do anything creative, “original,” in his job, that he does what they tell him to do, that at the end of the day, he feels “used up.”  I shared with him my belief that energy that revitalizes you and opens up even more energy is soul energy, when what you do comes from your passion and aliveness. The rest is will energy, when you will yourself through something. Will energy exhausts and drains you.

We explored images of him surfing through some of the work he presently had to do, feeling the wind and battling surf pull him in directions he didn’t expect. How could he use that energy in his job now? We explored realistic expectations and alternative career options. He said something about “moving my ladder to another wall,” citing the mid-life-crisis metaphor of climbing to the top of the corporate ladder and realizing the ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall all along.

“I have to change my perspective,” he said. “Getting it right, having-it-all is a myth. I’m breathing! That’s the gift!” Tom was realizing that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow isn’t the gift, that the rainbow colors themselves are the gift. Living is the gift. Creating a meaningful life is the gift.
Our work has to flow out of our fullness. Otherwise it is just about survival, the hunt for that pot of gold we call “security” – something that changes with the whims of the times.

“What would make my heart sing?” he mused, drifting off. “It would probably be something counter cultural to the American Dream, but I really want it. I just don’t know how to get it yet.”
Clarity is the beginning of insight. The rest will come in time.

Tom and I talked some more that day, about his dreams, about the woman with whom he was engaged, about parts of the country he would one day like to live. I think he was beginning to process things in a different way than when he first sat down with me that morning. His energy was beginning to come back. He had connected back up with his imagination. He was breathing.

When Tom got up to leave, he turned to me and smiled. “I get it,” he said. “The only bell that has to ring is inside me.”

Our humanity flows from the heart. Our life work, therefore, should be mindful of the needs of the heart or it will be about survival rather than fulfillment.

Early in its history, mankind set up communities. There was a division and sharing of skills, of labor. Men participated in the hunt; women participated in gathering food and child care. Both were vital, important to the whole. Eventually, there was a sharing among tribes.

Mankind builds society and then is influenced – determined, really – by his own creation, without realizing it. He is born into a society and has to build a life, create a life, from the social structures or circumstances handed him by those who set up his society.

We engage in enterprise – enter-the-prize. What is the prize? In business, in today’s economic life, the prize is an accumulation of wealth, money, what is now synonymous with security and power. Money was first introduced as a means to simplify the bartering of skills or goods. Money is now considered an end in itself. Having has become ownership of a thing rather than acknowledgment of a personal quality or gift within a person. This confuses the human heart.

This dilemma can be addressed early in a person’s life, within the family. A vocation, the calling forth of a person’s gifts and talents, must grow out of solid ground, in a strong sense of self — self esteem. If a person feels cherished, encouraged to discover his natural gifts, talents, skills early in life through the positive mirroring of his parents, his community, his social world, he will know early how he can contribute to the society in which he finds himself.

The prize is already within him — his self-esteem, his self-awareness, his self-motivation. He can move out into life with enthusiasm, with breath, enlivened, and take on whatever venture best allows him to express his creative energies. This nurtures the heart rather than depletes it.

If a person emerges from family life feeling less-than, demoralized, repressed, he has already received the message he is damned. His anxiousness will be the ground from which he acts. The energy with which he approaches an enterprise will be the drive for survival rather than an expression of his gifts. The “sweat of his brow” will be, for him, the only way he attains the prize.

The prize was deprived him even before he left home. He sees the only way of being saved, of saving himself, is by the doing. Work becomes a sentence, a burden, rather than a fulfillment. When a society is condemned to this level of survival, it places mankind in danger. It drains his resilience; he becomes depressed, jaded. Bad times become a threat to his existence rather than a natural balance in the up-and-down flow of life.

Work, as all of life, has its healthy aspects and its unhealthy aspects. A person with strong self-esteem can draw on his inner resources and not be dependent on the fickle economic roller coaster. He knows what nurtures his humanness — his family, his friends, his connection with the universe, not his economic stature. He can use his gifts anywhere.

Real poverty is a poverty of vision, when a person looks at life, defeated and pessimistic, without any hope of opportunity. Real poverty is a poverty of spirit, a spiritual malaise that so deludes a person he doesn’t even realize he is poor in the true sense — devoid of heart. He is led to believe that money rather than the quality of his relationships will nurture his humanness. 

How do we structure the work environment so we have truly human experiences within it — so we can fully develop and express ourselves as human beings — keeping an eye on the welfare of the whole? This is a question that has dodged a complete response since the beginning, for it includes society, the individual, the environment, the globe, and the future of mankind. The question itself and our attempt to imagine such a reality are part of our creative genius.

As we move from Center into the field of time, we live in a culture that expects us to be productive and to contribute to the welfare of the whole. We each have our particular work, our gift, our calling.

What is our work? Our work is to discover how we can best use our gifts and energies in ways that enhance and ground our life, our creativity, and that do not take us too far from center. When our productivity flows out of our self-esteem and creativity, we thrive. When our productivity drains us of our spirit and creative energies, we falter. 

The business world functions on its own rules and ethics. The task for all of us is to create avenues of work that support and enhance nature, our world, our human experience. Our work can be more a part of our wholeness rather than the disruption of it.

“I always rolled sevens,” Steve smiled with shy humility. “I was always lucky where I landed, no matter the turn of the wheel.” Steve, now 62, was a corporate executive and very successful in his career. He retired two years ago and suddenly finds himself disoriented, confused. “I can’t tell if my life is what it should be, or even if I’m happy,” he complains. “There’s no measure or feedback in retirement.” Part of him enjoys the time to be. Part of him doesn’t.

“It was always ‘Do and then you’ll know yourself’,” he said. “Accomplish something first, my father always told me, and that will be your identity, how others will know you; how you will know you. I feel lost now, about who I am. There’s no business card to hand someone. I don’t have an identity.”

Steve’s plight isn’t unique in the corporate world. The outer journey of accomplishing, producing, providing, supersedes the inner journey of self-reflection, value clarification, spiritual awareness. The inner journey has to wait until there’s time, until goals are accomplished, until financial responsibilities are met. By then, it takes more than time on one’s hands to know how to step on the path of self-awareness and inner growth. There’s no executive plan.

“I always told those who worked for me, ‘Don’t confuse your job with your life’, and now I think I did just that. I know it sounds strange,” Steve confessed, “but I’ve had a hard time, with retirement, not being important to anyone.” Without a recognized position or role with which to project himself, Steve doesn’t know why others should care about him, what he wants from his relationships, how he wants to fill his open schedule, whether or not he likes his wife.

After convincing Steve he is right where he needs to be – dealing with his present moment – we began the slow excavation of his person. Steve has to build an inner man from the inside out, to create a person out of the fragments he does know about Steve-the-human-being. What is Steve passionate about? Does he have any hobbies? Is he a man who allows others close to him or does he maintain emotional distance? 

Plato was right – Know yourself (first). Be. Then you’ll know what you want to do. Your doing will flow out of your being, your passion. If you’re used to having to make only the big decisions – which stock to buy, what company to sell – start paying attention to the small ones – Do I want pizza or hamburger tonight? Do I want to take a walk with my spouse after dinner or read a book? How do I want to spend time with my grown children? It’s about becoming conscious.

It’s the outer and then, if the inclination is there, the inner journey for most corporate workers in our culture; a move “from success to substance,” from doing what you must do, to doing what you were really born to do – become a fully developed human being.   

The trick is learning how to do this before retirement, creating the kind of passion for life and interests while you are in the full bloom of energy, to have a life to enjoy and to which to redirect your focus. It’s keeping one eye on the invisible world while you’re fully invested in the visible world. So the invisible world of soul and aliveness trying to connect up in you won’t be such a dilemma when retirement offers the time to enjoy this part of the personality.

Steve’s emotional well-being, his self-esteem, was tainted at an early age by his father’s insistence he wouldn’t feel good about himself until he successfully accomplished something – the “accomplish something first and that will be your identity” thing. If Steve felt cherished and enough just as he was, as a child, he could have chosen a life work, a career, out of his giftedness and not out of a sense of obligation, or survival, or the need to prove his worthiness.

The opportunity to develop our unique gifts and interests has be to recognized as important in our childhood in order for us to keep this vital connection with ourselves alive and well throughout our business career. Then, retirement will be welcomed as a natural blessing after a long and fulfilling adventure of self-discovery and self-expression, a time to enjoy all the things we love about ourselves but never had the time to fully set free.