Does Your Work Create Inner Violence?

This past weekend I did a presentation for Debby Hoffman Adair’s In the Presence of Positive Women group   (https://www.facebook.com/InthePresenceofPositiveWomen) on Energy Awareness and Chakras. One of the issues that emerged in the discussion was the effect of modern life and technology on our life experience and relationships and how our life force energy is affected. The short answer to that– it is and it is not a pretty picture! The good news though is that if we begin to educate ourselves about our inner landscape and learn how we truly function we can retain our vitality, enjoyment and effectiveness! (And that of course is what Living Energy Works programs are all about—education and tools for transformation)

This morning I found this article in my mailbox which goes along with part of the discussion we had this weekend and I thought you might enjoy hearing what two wise men have to say about inner violence. Next post: Decrease Inner Violence, Scattered Energy and Ineffectiveness

This post will include information as well as a recorded podcast to help you begin to quiet your inner world, to center and ground your energy and enter the quiet wisdom space.

This article is from ON BEING with Krista Tibbet

The Modern Violence of Over-Work

by Parker J. Palmer (@parkerjpalmer),  weekly columnist

Thomas Merton — Trappist monk, gifted writer, social critic, and spiritual virtuoso — has inspired many people. I’m one of them.

Merton wrote these incisive words in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander more than fifty years ago, but they are no less true today than when he wrote them.

“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

I first read this passage in 1970, when I was caught up in the frenzy of working as a community organizer in Washington, D.C. To this day, I re-read them often because they remind me to ask myself a critical question that I too easily forget: “What do I need to do right now to tend the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful?”