The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (2 page)

This is a book about dharma—about vocations and callings. It contains many stories of illustrious lives—true stories of lives that many of us already know and admire. It also contains stories of what I have called “ordinary lives”—lives that are in many ways just like yours and mine. I have included so-called ordinary lives for a reason: It is impossible to understand the living truth of dharma without getting close to the lives and experiences of real practitioners. But in writing an “experience-near” account of these ordinary lives, I have had to face a difficult challenge: how to tell the stories of my friends, students, and colleagues without invading their privacy. I have chosen in almost every case in this book to create composite characters—sticking as closely as I can to the emotional and psychological truth of real experience, while creating essentially fictional characters and dialogues. Many of us will see aspects of ourselves in these characters and conversations, of course, but, aside from a handful (whom I have given their real names), the “ordinary” characters in this book do not, and are not meant to, represent any actual persons.

One additional proviso: The book that you are about to read is an examination of dharma in the light of the teachings of the two-thousand-year-old Bhagavad Gita. But this book in no way purports to be a scholarly or technical exegesis of the Gita. Many fine scholarly treatments of this scripture are readily available. This book is something altogether
different. What follows is an experience-near account of one practitioner’s thirty-year engagement with the Gita. Its purpose is simple: to awaken the mainstream reader to the genius of this magnificent text, and to elucidate—through stories—some of its most important principles for living. It is my hope that the reader, once alerted to its genius, will go on to investigate the Gita’s complex and subtle teachings more closely—and at that point, more scholarly treatments of the text will become useful and, indeed, invaluable.

INTRODUCTION

What do you fear most in this life?

What is your biggest fear? Right now.

When I pose that question to myself, the answer is this: I’m afraid that I’ll die without having lived fully. OK, I’m also afraid of pain—and of dying a difficult death. But that’s for later. Mostly, right now, I’m afraid that I may be missing some magnificent possibility. That perhaps I have not risked enough to find it. That maybe I’ve lived too safe a life.

Thomas Merton says, “
What you fear is an indication of what you seek.”

In my case I think this is certainly true. And deep in middle age, I can feel the
seeker
in me become just ever-so-slightly desperate.

One of the ways this desperation shows up is in my reading. I’ve always been a reader, to be sure, but lately the temperature on the dial has been inched up. Something new: I’ve become a
voracious
reader. I am hungry to hear other people’s answers to my questions—particularly other people who might be experts in this problem of possibilities: Thomas Merton, Garry Wills, Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Karen Armstrong, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost. These are just a few exemplars of the struggle to live fully who tumble around in my head. What can they teach me about desperation and fulfillment?

And so, I read. Usually from about 8:00 to 11:00 every night—often
propped up in bed, with an unruly stack of books perched on the table next to me. I read with pen in hand, and have lively conversations with my authors. I scribble in margins; I make exclamation points and stars; I draw arrows from one page to another, tracking arguments.

Every now and then, in my quest for answers, I stumble across a sentence that stands up and shouts at me from the page. Here is a sentence I read recently in the pages of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

“
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

What?

I sat up in bed. I circled the whole sentence.

If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you
.

I have to admit that the second phrase of the sentence hit me the hardest. It will destroy me?

In retrospect, I realize that I felt the punch of that second phrase only because I had genuinely experienced moments of the first.

I
do
know the experience of bringing forth what is within me. For most of my life, these bringing-forth moments have been fleeting. But twice I’ve had the experience sustained over a period of years. Both times this happened while I was writing a book. Writing required everything I had, and then some. It flayed me alive. But I kept coming back again and again. I kept bringing forth the best that was in me. I can’t say whether the books that came forth are good or not. Some say yes and some say no. It doesn’t matter. It seems that it was the
effort required to bring them forth
itself that saved me. I noticed later that
having written them
did not really bring me squat, even though most people—including myself—thought that it should.

I have friends who are right now bringing forth what is within them. Anyone can see it in their faces. These are people who leap out of bed in the morning. They are digging down. Connecting with their own particular genius, and bringing it into the world. They are bringing forth their point of view, their idiosyncratic wisdom. They are living out their vocations. And let me tell you, they are
lit up
.

This way of lit-up living can happen in any sphere. Not a single one
of my lit-up friends is writing a book, by the way. One of my friends, Mark, is busy building a new institution—an alternative prep school. My friend Sandy is mastering the art of nursing hospice patients. (Can you imagine leaping out of bed in the morning to confront the dying? She does. And actually, I
can
imagine it.) One of my friends is busy mastering Beethoven’s string quartets. Day and night she practices. My friend David is on fire—creating an entirely new genre of landscape painting. Alan is mastering the art of gardening and just, really, the art of living life as a naturalist. My sister Arlie is mastering the to-me-incomprehensible task of parenting an adolescent—but with such relish you cannot believe it.

Have you had periods in life when you leapt out of bed in the morning to embrace your day? Once this happens to you, once you live this way, even for a few hours, you will never really be satisfied with any other way of living. Everything else will seem vaguely wan and gray. Everything else will seem, as Henry David Thoreau said, like “a distraction.”

Maybe you’re saying to yourself: It’s not that black-and-white. You can’t live this way all the time. Maybe this guy (me) is just in a dry period—something like what the Christian saints called “a desert experience.” Maybe these dry periods are just as productive, really—and every bit as necessary—as the wet periods. Maybe you can’t even dream of bringing forth what is within you without a requisite amount of aridity.

This is a good point. Besides, it is impossible to tell from the outside who
is
and who
is not
“bringing forth what is within them.” And, in truth, leaping out of bed in the morning really has very little to do with it.

But still. There is a vast difference between the desert experience of the saints and watching endless reruns on TV, isn’t there?

But for now, here’s an experiment. Stop reading for a minute, and ask yourself these questions: Am I living fully right now? Am I bringing forth everything I
can
bring forth? Am I digging down into that ineffable inner treasure-house that I know is in there? That trove of genius? Am I living my life’s calling? Am I willing to go to any lengths to offer my genius to the world?

For me, truthfully, when I pose these questions to myself, I hear myself say (as I shuffle from one foot to the other), “Well, yes, I’m just in the process of instituting a new
plan
that will bring me fully alive again.” Hmm. That’s a no, isn’t it? But
why
is it a no for me just now? And what can I do about it? Do I have any control over these things? Is it just, well, karma?

I see my own concerns about fulfillment played out nearly every day of my professional life. I work at one of the largest holistic retreat centers in America—the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. We see more than 35,000 people a year here in our sprawling, former-Jesuit monastery perched high up in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. Our guests come for various kinds of retreats: yoga, meditation, self-inquiry, couples’ work, healthy living. And almost every single one of them comes here in some phase of the mission to find this secret, hidden, inner possibility spoken of in the Gospel of Thomas.

A true story: Whenever I teach our program participants here at Kripalu, I begin by asking them to name what they’ve come for. Seventy-five percent say it straight out: “I want to come home to my true self.” Over and over again in almost those exact words. “To come home to my true self.” Where have these people been? The same place I’ve been, lately, I guess: Unclear. Confused. Paralyzed by doubt. Gliding. Drifting. Mesmerized by the old tried-and-true distractions. (And maybe some of us have truly been in the desert.)

Most of our guests come to a yoga retreat because they know by now that the yoga tradition is almost entirely concerned—obsessed, really—with the problem of living a fulfilled life. The yoga tradition is a virtual catalog of the various methods human beings have discovered over the past 3,000 years to function on all cylinders. This includes everything from the world’s weirdest diets to the most sublime forms of prayer and meditation—and ecstatic experience. One of the greatest archetypes of the yoga tradition is the
jivan mukta
—the soul awake in this lifetime.
The soul awake
. I like this aspect of yoga, because it means awake
in this lifetime—
not in some afterlife, or heavenly realm, or exalted mental
state. And so these contemporary seekers come to yoga, seeking—as I did, and do—inspiration for living.

The yoga tradition is very, very interested in the idea of an inner possibility harbored within every human soul. Yogis insist that every single human being has a unique vocation. They call this
dharma
. Dharma is a potent Sanskrit word that is packed tight with meaning, like one of those little sponge animals that expands to six times its original size when you add water. Dharma means, variously, “path,” “teaching,” or “law.” For our purposes in this book it will mean primarily “vocation,” or “sacred duty.” It means, most of all—and in all cases
—truth
. Yogis believe that our greatest responsibility in life is to this inner possibility—this dharma—and they believe that every human being’s duty is to utterly, fully, and completely embody his own idiosyncratic dharma.

Most of the people I teach here at Kripalu catch on to the idea of dharma right away. They often say that they feel comforted that someone has taken the trouble to give a name to this urgent and irksome call that has flashed in and out of their brain for so long, like a lamp with a bad connection.

Not only did yogis
name
this hidden inner genius, but they created a detailed method for fulfilling it. In fact, the ancient treatise in which this method is spelled out is hands down the most important and well-loved scripture in the world of yoga.

I am referring, of course, to the 2,000-year-old treatise on yoga called the Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God. It is the world’s greatest scripture on dharma.

In India, every villager knows the story of the Gita. It is the story of the warrior Arjuna and his divine mentor, Krishna. Arjuna is supposedly the greatest warrior of his time, but really, he is just astonishingly like we are: neurotic as hell, and full of every doubt and fear you can imagine. The Gita tells how Krishna taught Arjuna—
even
Arjuna—to embrace his sacred vocation. In India, Krishna and Arjuna are pictured everywhere and their story is played out in temple carvings and icons of every variety, so even illiterate folk know the tale. For two thousand years, people have read or chanted the Gita daily, just as we read our Bible, or Torah, or Koran. The Gita is the one book Gandhi took with
him to prison, and one of the few that Henry David Thoreau took to Walden Pond.