The Great Work of Your Life
Page 1
Praise for The Great Work of Your Life
“I am moved and inspired by The Great Work of Your Life, the clarity and beauty of the lives lived in it, and the timeless dharma it teaches.”
—JACK KORNFIELD, author of A Path with Heart
“Stephen Cope has brought the full force of his brilliant mind and expansive heart to capture the wisdom and spirit of one of history’s most revered and insightful scriptures. The Great Work of Your Life is a remarkable testament to the power of these teachings and the timeless light they shed on how we each can craft our most glorious life. This is a must-read for anyone aspiring to lasting happiness and real fulfillment.”
—ROD STRYKER, author of The Four Desires
“This book extends an impassioned, compelling promise: It is possible to live this life as a direct expression of your heart and spirit. Through masterful storytelling about extraordinary and ‘ordinary’ individuals, Stephen Cope unfolds perennial wisdom teachings found in the Bhagavad Gita that can illuminate your path. Not just inspiring, this book is a fascinating read!”
—ANNE CUSHMAN, author of Enlightenment for Idiots: A Novel
“Stephen Cope’s brilliant re-interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita for modern seekers is the next best thing to having the great god Krishna himself appear in your chariot—or the front seat of your car—and give you an inspirational pep talk as you commute to work. A master storyteller, Cope examines the lives of ordinary and extraordinary human beings through the lens of the Gita’s ancient wisdom to illuminate how each of us can identify and manifest our unique calling—leaving his readers both humbled and inspired.”
—TARA BRACH, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance
“Stephen Cope’s genius is to connect the ancient tale of Krishna, Arjuna, and their mythic dilemmas to our very own lives through figures we not only admire but can relate to. The Great Work Of Your Life fearlessly bridges this gap, and its arc is incandescent.”
—CHIP HARTRANFT, translator, The Yoga-Sutra of Patañjali
“Who else could bring the ancient wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita to bear on the lives of such a diverse cast of seekers in such a captivating way? Stephen Cope is a masterful storyteller who grabbed me from the first chapter and held me until the very end. His friends became my friends, his heroes my own, and their triumphs and sorrows touched me deeply. And of course throughout, he gently reminds us all that these profound teachings can help us show up for our own dharma and lead us to do ‘small things with great love.’ ”
—LINDA SPARROWE, editor in chief, Yoga International and author of The Woman’s Book of Yoga and Health
“The Great Work of Your Life is a timely and timeless must-read book. Within its pages, Stephen Cope contemplates the profound meaning of the Bhaghavad Gita, as it applies to our modern life. Exploring the call of dharma, he shows Krishna’s step-by-step teaching in a way that will uplift you from within. It’s essential for those new to yoga and inspiring for the seasoned practitioner and yoga teacher.”
—PATRICIA WALDEN, international yoga teacher and co-author of The Woman’s Book of Yoga and Health
“Stephen Cope presents an insightful look at the role of dharma as explained by Krishna to Arjuna in the timeless scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Skillfully interweaving Arjuna’s story of conflict and doubt with stories of both great and ordinary men and women, Cope illustrates how the rich wisdom of the Gita can transform our actions into spiritual practice and guide us to ultimate freedom and fulfillment.”
—PANDIT RAJMANI TIGUNAIT, chairman and spiritual head, Himalayan Institute
“The Great Work of Your Life masterfully unfolds the stories of everyday people like you and me, as well as those whom we cherish as our heroes and heroines, revealing the doubts, fears, trials, and passions we will all face when we dare to live an authentic life of purpose and meaning. It will deeply inspire your heart, soul, and mind and lead you ever more deeply into finding and celebrating your own dharma.”
—RICHARD MILLER, PhD, author of Yoga Nidra: A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing, president, Integrative Restoration Institute, and co-founder, International Association of Yoga Therapy
“This is a captivating and compassionate guide to the deepest questions of our existence. Stephen Cope ingeniously helps us to ‘remember’ who we really are, uncovering genuine happiness and expressing it through our dharma, our authentic work in the world.”
—SARAH POWERS, author of Insight Yoga
“Stephen Cope hands us the secret keys of understanding and wisdom found in the sacred pages of the ancient Bhagavad Gita. He asks us the right questions, provokes, and motivates us with courage not to retreat from the world but to advance with profound enthusiasm.”
—LILIAS FOLAN, PBS host and author of Lilias! Yoga: Your Guide to Enhancing Body, Mind, and Spirit in Midlife and Beyond
“Cope weaves together personal narratives of ordinary and extraordinary lives within the framework of the Bhagavad Gita, making the timeless scripture even more relevant to the intricacies of our twenty-first century lifestyle. A pertinent book, for NOW!”
—NISCHALA JOY DEVI, teacher, author of The Healing Path of Yoga and The Secret Power of Yoga
“The Great Work of Your Life is a portal into the soul of yoga. It reveals how fresh and versatile the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita is for people of any era or stage of life. This book is a must-read for anyone wishing to penetrate the mystery of what the ancients called karma and dharma and we moderns call living an authentic life.”
—SCOTT BLOSSOM, LAc, CAS
Copyright © 2012 by Stephen Cope
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Permissions constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cope, Stephen.
The great work of your life : a guide for the journey to your true calling / Stephen Cope. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53568-9
1. Spiritual biography—Hinduism. 2. Vocation—Hinduism. 3. Bhagavadgita—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BL1170.C67 2012
294.5′44—dc23
2012000863
www.bantamdell.com
Jacket design: Carlos Beltran
Jacket photograph: © Don Klumpp/Getty
v3.1_r3
Every man has a vocation to be someone:
but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this
vocation he can only be one person: himself.
—Thomas Merton
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
A Note to the Reader
Introduction
PART I
Krishna’s Counsel on the Field of Battle
ONE The Four Pillars of Dharma
PART II
The First Pillar: “Look to Your Dharma”
TWO Jane Goodall: Trust in the Gift
THREE Henry David Thoreau: Think of the Small as Large
FOUR Walt Whitman: Listen for the Call of the Times
PART III
The Second Pillar: “Do It Full Out!”
FIVE R
obert Frost: Find Out Who You Are and Do It on Purpose
SIX Susan B. Anthony: Unify!
SEVEN Camille Corot: Practice Deliberately
PART IV
The Third Pillar: “Let Go of the Fruits”
EIGHT John Keats: Let Desire Give Birth to Aspiration
NINE Marion Woodman: When Difficulties Arise, See Them as Dharma
TEN Ludwig van Beethoven: Turn the Wound into Light
PART V
The Fourth Pillar: “Turn It Over to God”
ELEVEN Harriet Tubman: Walk by Faith
TWELVE Mohandas K. Gandhi: Take Yourself to Zero
Epilogue
Dedication
Notes
Permissions
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
A NOTE TO THE READER
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 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.)