Healing Your Relationship with Work and Finding Joy

Dec 18, 2012 | Sufism

Work can be a place to express our creativity and passion for service. Or it can become an experience of frustrating, anxiety-provoking stress.

Are you experiencing JOY at work?

If so, you are likely expressing your unique talents in a way that is meaningful and nourishing to yourself and others. In a phrase – you are working “from your heart.”

If this joyful scenario seems like an impossible fantasy, you have lots of company! Business-as-usual is rife with compromised values, a focus on coping skills, and the necessity of playing politics and watching your back. Good people can easily lose heart at work and begin to accept their predicament as normal or inevitable. And if we are unaware of a better alternative, our stress and heartache becomes toxic.

I did not learn about this in a textbook. I burned myself out at age 27, thinking it was the organization that was unhealthy.

But truthfully, I needed to heal my relationship with myself.

Until then I could not make my complete contribution in a healthy manner. I needed to let go of my judgmental nature and tendency to write others out of the script. I had to learn that my feelings of inadequacy were coming out in behaviors that occurred to others as arrogance. Yuk!

It took me years to learn these lessons, but my deepest healing occurred very quickly when I realized that God comes running to us when we just take the first few steps. The practice of remembrance has been my lifesaver. It was truly a revelation to discover that our hearts are full of the divine qualities waiting to be reawakened and that God’s love is always available. Is it time to reawaken your heart at work???

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Love and Service,

Paul Hamid Werder
Faculty at the University of Sufism