Intro to the Work

A Tale of Two Workshops

Rick’s work, based on the years he has spent in India as both a researcher and practitioner of yoga, meditation, and the healing arts, focuses on interfacing intuitive inner experience with effective action in the world. Laurie Pentell, founder of Sageheart Alliance in Chicago, interviewed Rick about his workshops; that conversation is published below. Rick’s current schedule can be found on the Workshops page of this blog and on www.anticareer.com.

* A note of clarification: The Anticareer Workshop (as it is called in the audio program published by Sounds True) is also known as Create the Work You Love (the book title of the same material), and the Advanced Manifestation program (audio title) is also known as The Alchemy of Abundance (book title). These titles are used interchangeably.

L: The issue of “doing what you love,” “expressing your spirit at work,” “living authentically” and so on, is of primary interest today. Books, CDs, speakers and coaches abound to motivate us to follow our bliss, and I think I’ve read and heard most of them! Yet, your work stands out from the rest; you seem to draw from unique places and anchor concepts and principles more deeply somehow… tricky to try to put into words, but it’s a pronounced experience in your workshops. What do you suppose makes your voice in this crowded field rise above the din?

R: I’ve basically actualized what I teach. I’m not teaching something from a book, I’m not teaching something from anyone else’s system. I’m teaching what I’ve lived, and what I embody. When I work with people, that transmission comes through, and it puts them into their own creative wisdom, which is where manifestation comes from. The work you love is not created by making to-do lists, or processing “the ten times I felt good about myself.” Not that that won’t be helpful, but the work you love is created when you really connect with your creative wisdom and are willing to listen to how it communicates directly to you. That’s what happens in the Anticareer workshop

L: You have a number of careers going on simultaneously, and they all appear to be creative and successful, from what I can tell. Plus, you seem to be enjoying yourself! How did this trajectory happen for you?

R: Well, it didn’t “happen,” it’s always been there. It was just uncovered through meeting a series of mentors who all embodied that authenticity for me. When they died, I had no choice but to go out and start doing this work. The issue of vocation is something that is central—from the point of my family history, my cultural history, and my understanding of what is really important for people in this culture. So it just emerged as an alchemical mix.

L: Does India have anything to do with this? You lived there for years, return often, and seem quite involved with that culture.

R: India is just a backdrop, it’s my way of accessing what’s inside of me. It’s true that after one year of Harvard I dropped out of school and went to India and connected with a lot of the concepts and cultural wisdom there. It just happened, for me, to be the place where I was able to connect to my own flow. I use the chakra system [in teaching], but I don’t see the chakra system as particularly Indian; I see it as universal, which is also how I see the idea of karma. India is just a mirror in which I happen to see myself. But in fact, my main concern is being here because at a certain point in my life, I left India. I made the conscious decision that being in India was not the place I had to be in this lifetime. I had to learn to stand on my own two feet in this culture.

L: What were you “standing on” in India?

R: In India I was standing on the past, on gurus; on the idea that there was some construct out there that they knew that I didn’t. I was standing on a whole cultural construct that was “ready made” for you. And I was standing on the idea of enlightenment, the idea of seeking wisdom, but in a way that was divorced from action in the world. So I wanted to keep the wisdom, but bring it into the day-to-day world.

L: So you returned to New York and immediately got back into college?

R: I came back and tested some waters. I took some college, some philosophy courses, but eventually I went to Columbia University because they paid me. One of the major principles I use in holistic career development is, you have to follow the money. This is different from working for the money. You have to have the where-with-all to be aware of—and follow—where you are being supported.

L: How did you swing getting paid to go to Columbia?

R: I could tell you I’m brilliant, but in fact, it was a time when a lot more money was available for education than there is today; basic educational grants. I took the initiative and went and checked it out, plus I had a karmic connection. Back in India I heard about a woman, Barbara Miller, who taught at Columbia, who was pretty hip. She liked people like us who lived in ashrams, and understood the spiritual side of the Indian culture as well as the academic side. I always find the most important thing in any program—not only in academic graduate programs, but any program—is not the what, but the who. Is there someone there who could be a mentor for you, who can relate to you? That’s what I found at Columbia, a mentor: Barbara Stoller Miller, who was my academic mentor for 14 years, and who was responsible—even after she died— for every academic job I ever held. Before she died, in ’93, she called the dean of Barnard College, and told him if she couldn’t teach her courses the next year, she wanted me to teach them. Which is what happened. So, how’s that for being guided into your life’s work?

L: You live in grace, my friend. In your work, you emphasize the practice of alignment. Can you explain a little bit about “alignment”?

R: I can explain about alignment, but alignment must be experienced, not explained. I can say, here’s the door, but you have to walk through it. Alignment is the experience of the creative intelligence of existence, it’s the experience that your life actually makes sense, that the things that happen to you and the things that you do are related. Take the analogy from chiropractic of aligning the entire spine. In my work, it means being in your right place in your right time, which happens by giving up your illusory ego agendas and opening to the true agenda that is within you. Be willing to allow the universe to participate and lead you instead of creating your own little melodramas.

L: I’ve taken your Anticareer (Create Work You Love) workshop twice now, and I’ve seen people become deeply moved by where you lead them. It seems the entire concept of one’s work is a much deeper psychological, emotional issue today than it was a generation ago.

R: Yes, that’s true.

L: Do you think we were just better “silent sufferers” back then, or is there some cultural explanation as to why right livelihood has become such a top priority to us today?

R: There are a lot of historical issues involved. This is a culture that has opted for freedom, for a pursuit of happiness, and creating your own ideal world, so to speak. This is a culture that invented labor unions to give people a better life; this is a culture that opted for democracy. The communists offered employment, and in 1972 Moscow claimed bragging rights, saying they had full employment—but that system collapsed because it was providing work, and people don’t want work as much as people want meaning. What they really want is meaning in their work, the sense of doing something for a reason. If you can find meaning in your work, that’s much more important than the work that you do.

The desire to have meaningful work can only come at a certain level, because first you have to have food in your stomach and some relative employment. “Meaning” is not the first thing on the radar screen. To me, in Maslovian terms, we have reached a point that we can request or demand or at least think about not just survival, which is the first of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but self-actualization through your work. So to me, it’s a cultural symptom. A few generations ago, people were just happy to get food on the table; that was the purpose of work.

In other cultures we’ve seen other purposes of work. For instance, in the Native American medicine wheel, the lodge of work is the place where you learn about Spirit, you learn about Spirit through your job. Khalil Gibran said work is love made visible. So these ideals aren’t new, it’s that a threshold of people have reached a place where it’s important enough to them to make it happen. After all, your work is going to determine a lot of things in your life, including where you live and your community. You spend about one-third of your life working, so the effects of work on your consciousness are fundamental.

I think that in the consciousness movement in the 60’s and 70’s, there was a huge emphasis on experience, but then the question became “Ok, now how do I integrate this experience into my life? How do I ground this experience while I’m driving my car to the mall, or doing whatever I have to do? The idea of spiritual experience that is divorced from working reality has, to me, a false ring to it. It cannot actualize a society; it’s just an individual trip. And as nice as individual trips are, they have very little social significance. If you want to support consciousness and spirituality in the culture, you need to have to the socioeconomic base to do it. People working eight hours a day in boring jobs that they hate, that have no meaning and pollute the environment, is not going to support a reflective, meditative, compassionate, responsible culture. People are tuning in to this.

L: You endorse and teach a “holistic approach” to career development. What do you mean by “holistic” in this context?

R: It means you don’t start with the job, with fixating on the job. The job is a part of the whole. Instead of fixating on the job and sacrificing your life for the job, you focus on the whole being. The idea is, when you align the whole being, the right livelihood emerges as a consequence of that. So holistic career development considers your whole person: the quality of life, relationship, health, how you live, where you live… it considers how what you do integrates into the entire gestault of your life, as opposed to trying to develop work, or career, that doesn’t take your personal, social, or spiritual life into account.

L: You work with chakras in this holistic process (in Create the Work You Love); how do chakras figure into it?

R: They are just a learning device, a way of mapping the issues on the way toward developing alignment. I could just as easily have used Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, but I use the chakras because, first, I think they’re cool; and second, they also marginalize me and I like to be “from the outside.” But the main reason I use them is because they are situated in the body, and I firmly believe that in order for a career to be holistic, nurturing, and healthful, it must support your body, it can’t be something that’s destroying your body or ignoring your body. So by taking your issues through the chakras—like issues of abundance, connection, focus, sharing, creativity, spiritual alignment and all the rest of it—we get to fully develop the work in a very visceral, kinesthetic way.

L: The way you “do life” makes for quite a model. You seem to be in unobstructed flow, continually. Where did all this come from, for you? Did you “come up” this way?

R: No, I didn’t come up this way. I had a kind of mutation! I came up as an all-American kid, and experienced some sort of mutation, at which point it all crystallized. I think the reason for that lies in various choices along they way, such as having the courage to leave Harvard when I was 19 to follow my heart [to India]. I had a lot of grace, and a lot of great teachers. In a recent Advanced Manifestation class in the Open Center in New York, I asked people to write mission statements, and also asked how they understood their mission statements. For myself, I feel like I’m someone who has been touched by a tiny drop of the grace of God, and I want to communicate that through the issues of right livelihood.

L: Is “manifestation” synonymous with “creativity”?

R: It has a slightly different focus. I see creativity as the act of perception, the way you perceive the world and relate to the world. The focus of manifestation is on the external, on what you literally produce through your creative process. So manifestation is the visible side of creative process.

L: In public venues, you teach various versions of, essentially, two core themes: The Anticareer (Create the Work Your Love) Workshop, and The Alchemy of Abundance (Advanced Manifestation) Program. How, if at all, are these two workshops related, or how do they compare?

R: The Alchemy of Abundance, or Manifestation, workshop is a level up from Anticareer/Creating the Work You Love. Plus of course Anticareer is focused on your work in the world, whereas Manifestation is all-encompassing. Once you know the basics, or have a sense of where you want to go with your life, then Manifestation addresses the art and science of getting from point A to point B, and actualizing dreams and intuitions into the physical world. Manifestation teaches you how to move things into visible, tangible, practical forms: how to get the money, the time, the support, the materials and resources to do what you want to do. That’s manifestation. It is not wishing, hoping, thinking, or praying. It is producing in this world what you need to engage in your highest dharma, you highest level of effectiveness, potential, and ecstatic whatever.

Manifestation is about understanding how your life manifests from the inside out. So instead of just getting from A to B in the usual way, you open up and develop the very deep wisdom of how action is preceded by thought, how thought is preceded by imagination, and how imagination is generated from the desire-body and the heart. You begin to work through the heart to configure your whole system so that you literally become a fountain of creativity. You begin to understand and experience the creation flowing through you at every moment, and how every thought, wish, and experience has consequences and creates realities, and you begin to open your consciousness to the multidimensional realities that are created through you on a moment-to-moment basis. This tremendously enriches your life and takes you out of the linear concept of existence. Then you can see yourself as an eternal field in the play of consciousness, in which there are many rooms you can walk into and share your loving and compassionate energy. This all proceeds out of the deep connection with abundance, where life is no longer a struggle, but becomes an offering and an experience to be shared rather than something to be fought for, or protected from.

Advanced Manifestation is where you learn to create realities, and understand what’s happening to you—and everyone else—from an entirely different level. It’s where you go beyond the narrative of the ego in understanding your life, and open up your life to where it’s an exchange with divinity. You manifest through consciously connecting with various expressions of divinity and living in a cooperative relationship.The Anticareer Workshop focuses specifically on creating work you love, on the issue of right livelihood. Advanced Manifestation/Alchemy of Abundance focuses beyond livelihood into the nature of reality, and how you participate in that nature of reality.

These are life-transforming, culture-transforming, highly experiential workshops. People who attend them are probably not just looking to get a better job or align their work with their spirit; they are people who are seeking to change the whole construct of work in this culture. They are pioneers, people who really want to make a difference here. The teachings apply the healing wisdom of the great spiritual traditions to the reality of our life, and guide us to perceive and relate to life on a level that is profound as opposed to petty. This really gives us possibility to build vessels that can channel love and compassion in the world. That’s ultimately the bottom line of it all.