by Connie Zweig
There is in this quality of life a sense of fate without mercy, effort without Eros. Like the devastating recurring problems of humanity on a global scale, like the painful recurring downward spirals in every intimate relationship, the work is never done. The tasks probably will not be completed; the worker will most likely go unrecognized; and the stone will inexorably roll downhill again. The stone, like the shadow, carries us down from the heights, forcing us to face limits, loss, and ordinariness. It will not permit us to outwit death, but it will teach us secrets if we can learn to listen.
Perhaps it is our thinking about work that needs to change; perhaps it is our fantasy of work that sets us up for the frustration, even damnation of a Sisyphus. Perhaps it is this, after all, that leads to a deeply felt enmity between life and work. The purpose of this chapter is to question archaic assumptions about work and to bring psychological insights into this arena. We hope to renew a sense of work’s purpose, deepening its connection to soul life. We aim to lift work out of a workaholic culture and set it in the context of a larger life—and to help individuals make of their lives a work.
Archetypal psychologist James Hillman has pointed out that to understand individual psychology in the West we need to understand the ideas and images of business, because they provide the inescapable warp and woof on which our behavior patterns are woven. He writes:
To set aside the profit motive, the desire to possess, the ideals of fair wage and economic justice, the bitterness over taxation, the fantasies of inflation and depression, the appeal of saving, to ignore the psychopathologies of dealing, collecting, consuming, selling, and working, and yet to pretend to grasp the interior life of persons in our society would be like analyzing the peasants, craftsmen, ladies, and nobles of medieval society all the while ignoring Christian theology.
Hillman’s analogy is fitting: Like Christianity, business is the framework in which we live. Moreover, work itself has become a religion; it is pursued with religious fervor and filled with the idols of a faith. But tragically for many of us, work, like much of institutionalized religion, has lost its soul.
What do you passionately desire from work? When do you feel most alive and inspired? What is the stone that you push uphill—that is, the burden that opposes and resists you at work?
THE PROMISES OF SHADOW-WORK: NURTURING SOUL ON THE JOB
While shadow-making begins at home and continues at school, it is highly refined at work, where the persona is required to fit tightly if we wish to achieve success. In fact, many workplaces institutionalize individual shadow-making by implicitly demanding adaptive, accommodating behaviors and discouraging authentic emotional exchange. They often outlaw the discussion of certain topics and may try to discourage dissent. They tend to encourage projection to scapegoat troublemakers, uphold denial through workaholism and alcoholism, and typically hoard power in a few hands. The result: a climate that increases shadow and decreases soul.
This is a commonplace context in which we work. And because it is so pervasive and so familiar, like the sea in which we swim, we typically remain unconscious of it. We simply assume that we cannot be ourselves at work. We believe, instead, that we should disappear and become who they want us to be. To that end, many of us follow orders, even when we don’t believe they will yield the desired result. We protect our superiors, even when we don’t believe they command respect. And we look away from ethical violations, colluding with others in a conspiracy of silence.
This widespread workplace ethos remains unconscious for another reason: We grow up in schools in which we learn to sit still, regardless of our bodily needs. We learn to submit to others without question, obeying outer authority and disobeying the inner voice of the Self. We learn to compete with peers as enemies, rather than as worthy opponents who inspire us toward excellence. And we learn to structure our days around Cronos time: one hour per topic. Rushed to achieve academically, at an early age we are encouraged to leave behind childish ways, including imaginary play and reverie, the deep sources of creativity. At a later age, we are encouraged to leave behind the arts and humanities, all too often banishing our unique talents into shadow.
With this preparation, we enter the workplace and find that, like individuals and families, each company has a persona or public face and a shadow, which may not shine so brightly: HMOs that purport to be client-centered restrict doctors’ prescriptions to medications bought in bulk discounts; an alternative health care group fires women employees who become pregnant; a snack food company that promotes to the gay market secretly funds antigay groups; and a highly creative industry takes for granted seventy-hour workweeks, disregarding employees’ health, emotional well-being, and family life.
At the individual level, each of us also lives this lie, a split between persona and shadow, a Faustian bargain in the arena of work: We give up individuality to fit into the collective mold. We trade off soul for money. We sacrifice creativity for security. We surrender emotional relatedness for a mantle of power. Turning a boss into a parent, we become childlike and mute to achieve safety and approval. Then we pick up our shields and come to believe that we are what we do, that our function is who we are. We become so identified with the character who sits at the head of the table in the workplace that we create persona work. As one client put it, “I can’t allow my wife to visit me at work because she wouldn’t recognize who I am there.” In this way, we sacrifice our souls and create the very thing that we dread the most: soulless work.
In medieval society, despite primitive living conditions, work was imagined more soulfully. People joined guilds to apprentice with a master of a particular craft—painters, potters, weavers, masons. The guilds brought social order and offered individuals a valued sense of place in the scheme of things. Each craft had a patron saint, who linked the activity of the craft to the divine realm. The doing of the craft became both a source of identity and a way of life that was inherently worthy. In addition, viewed as the transformation of raw material into beauty, of the invisible into the visible, craft was thought to be work of the gods.
Today, with the swift pace of change, early retirement, and an epidemic lack of mentoring, the lineage of work is lost. In addition, when we think of a craft we imagine a hobby or a pastime activity that ends in the production of a handmade object, in contrast to a machine-made object that we produce at work. But for some guild members of earlier times, a craft was an initiatory process, a sacred means of self-discovery, a full-time activity that awakened the subject, as well as produced the object.
In a similar way, with shadow-work many activities in the workplace can become sacred or soulful. Despite widespread institutional impediments, they can become opportunities to deepen self-awareness, nurture the soul, and serve others. Certainly, the job needs to get done; at times, the job may seem tedious or fruitless. However, if we can learn to observe ourselves, discover the shadow characters that interfere with our self-esteem and effectiveness on the job, and obey the voice of the Self, eventually we can return the King to the head of the table and regain our equilibrium at work. For example, we may meet a shadow character that is pushy and self-promoting, or greedy and ambitious, which sabotages team spirit with others. Or we may uncover a character that is secretly lazy and indolent, which unconsciously opposes a more conscious desire to get ahead. As we romance this shadow character, we can discover its deeper need—the gold in the dark side. As a result, its influence recedes and we become more self-directive.
As we are challenged to learn new tasks and face frightening feelings of incompetence on the job, we also meet the shadow, and we may secretly feel like a fraud, as if we are faking it. Or we may secretly feel blamed, as if we are the company scapegoat. With shadow-work, the characters of the fraud and the scapegoat can slowly become more conscious. As we romance them, they have less hold over us; then we have more choices to respond differently.
In addition, when we learn to identify our emotional reactions on the job as projections fro
m the past—“I can’t stand that ambitious coworker, that power-hungry boss, or that demure, helpless assistant”—we can defuse negative feelings, reduce blame, slow down roller-coaster rides, and thereby decrease overall tensions in the workplace. In this way, each of us can become a more empathic, healing presence at work.
As shadow-work continues, inner freedom can grow. As a result of reconnecting with that part of us that has the capacity for soulful work, our dependency on employers and organizations may lessen. Eventually, soulful work can become, like the breath, a mast to which we are tied. As jobs come and go and relationships ebb and flow, our work can be a familiar place for productivity, contemplation, pleasure.
With shadow-work, then, we can use the job to enhance our self-knowledge, instead of permitting it to use us and eventually deplete us. Like the Roman god Janus, whose two-faced image adorned ancient homes, we can look in two directions at once: inside at the process of working and outside at the product of work. In this way, we can make of ourselves a work.
What shadow character sabotages your efforts on the job? What is being sacrificed by your Faustian bargain at work? How can you nurture your soul to make up for this sacrifice?
A PORTRAIT OF THE NEW EMPLOYEE: A SUFI TALE
Today, besides the widespread loss of soulful work, many people face the devastating loss of employment of any kind. Like the world of relationships, the world of work is undergoing tectonic shifts as job security becomes an illusion and rising unemployment becomes a global trend. As companies continue to downsize, dismembering an organization by cutting off thousands of employees, people feel bereft and betrayed. Their Faustian bargain—we became trained professionals who work hard for the company in exchange for job security—no longer holds. The new contract: The job is only as good as the next paycheck.
In the inner cities of the United States, the scenario is painted in darker colors: Chronic joblessness has stripped many potential workers of individual initiative, creating an unskilled underclass. Coupled with poor education, racism, and isolation, chronic unemployment has broken the bonds that reinforce community.
This widespread contraction—the dark side of work—also has a light side: an expansion of opportunity in other sectors. Despite the extinction of millions of jobs, there has been a net increase of 27 million jobs in the United States since 1979. Although sophisticated technology is replacing people in every sector, it also frees us from the drudgery of routine work and connects us instantaneously, via the Internet, to the global marketplace. With these systemic changes, a portrait of the new employee is emerging: resilient, self-promoting, technologically literate, capable of handling complexity and tolerating ambiguity. He or she is a lifelong learner who is willing to make lateral moves, acquire new skills, and, most important, assume responsibility for his or her own security. For those with the temperament, education, and know-how, more inventive entrepreneurial projects are available than ever before.
Together, these paradoxical trends—economic turbulence, ethical crises, and expanding opportunity—signal widespread upheaval in the world of work. Of course, the dark side of work taints the rest of life as well: If we have fewer chances to use our capacities, we will feel less acknowledged, more pressured to perform, and more endangered. If our sense of identity remains hooked to a particular job, if our self-worth is synonymous with our net worth, then our self-esteem plummets even as we work longer and longer hours. And we come home depleted, spreading a pessimistic mood to our families or repressing it into shadow with drugs, alcohol, food, or television. Typically, we blame ourselves, rather than cultural institutions and assumptions, for not being able to change our lives. As a consequence, our relationships suffer, becoming tense with resentment or deadened of feeling, which contributes to the other epidemic breakdown of marriage and family.
Just as we proposed reimagining the experience of dating, the search for the Beloved, as a mirror of the search for the authentic Self, so we can reimagine the search for soul on the job as an inner process. On the outside, it may look like the pursuit of the ideal job, the best salary, or the most creative opportunity. But beneath the boundaries of awareness, another process is taking place, as described in an ancient Sufi tale called “Fatima, the Spinner, and the Tent.”
As a young girl, Fatima, daughter of a spinner, traveled with her father to sell his goods. When a storm shipwrecked the boat and left her father dead, Fatima, half-conscious, could barely recall her former life. Wandering on the sands, she was found by a family of cloth-makers, who taught her their craft. Later, she was on the seashore when a band of slave-traders landed and took her captive. Traveling to Istanbul, they sold her as a slave, and her world collapsed again.
A man who made masts for ships bought Fatima, and she worked with him and his wife in the wood yard. She worked so hard that he granted her freedom, and she became his trusted helper in her third career. When she took a cargo of ship masts to sell overseas in China, a typhoon again cast her upon a foreign shore. Weeping bitterly, she despaired of her unfortunate fate.
But there was a legend in China that a woman stranger would arrive who would be able to make a tent for the emperor. To be certain that this stranger would not be missed, the emperor sent heralds to the villages in search of foreign women. When she was brought before the emperor and asked whether she could make a tent, she agreed to try. She asked for a rope, but there was none. So she collected flax and spun it into rope. When she asked for cloth, the right kind did not exist. So she wove some strong fabric. When she asked for tent poles, there were none. So she fashioned them out of wood. When these elements were ready, she made a tent like those that she had seen in her travels. And the emperor, in his gratitude, offered her the fulfillment of any wish. She chose to settle in China, marry, and raise many children.
Like Fatima, many of us will be shipwrecked at least once in our lives. We may suffer severe losses in the world of work, forcing us to face our limitations and the greed and insensitivity of others. Like Fatima, we may appear to be victims, forced by circumstance to move from one corporation to the next or to create several careers. If we become dependent on organizations—if we allow the character of the company man or woman of past generations to sit at the head of the table—in the current climate we set ourselves up for betrayal. This character, a friend in the past, today has become an enemy.
Instead, with resilience, self-confidence, trust, and the tools of shadow-work, our lives, like Fatima’s, may not be what they appear to be: For her, each unpleasant twist of fate turned out to be an essential part of her apprenticeship. Like her, we may weave together the fibers of a patchwork life that does not resemble those single, linear career tracks of past generations. Finally, like Fatima, whose name contains “fate” (fati), we may be surprised by the colorful fabric that is the outcome.
Where is your sense of security rooted? What shadow character stops you from seeing a challenge as an opportunity?
In the next few sections, we will describe how to use shadow-work to overcome the self-destructive habit of workaholism and to defuse negative projections between colleagues and collaborators.
MEETING THE SHADOW OF WORKAHOLISM: OVERCOMING THE INNER TYRANT
In some sectors of Western society, we have come to believe that work is life; we live to work rather than work to live. We have come to assume that all of our waking hours should be consumed with getting a job done, earning a living, or trying to attain security for the future. Therefore, the time for soul shrinks drastically and Cronos, father time, becomes a slave driver as nine-to-five jobs stretch into eight-to-six or even eight-to-eight jobs. The weekends disappear as we catch up on reading, writing, or filing for work. And deadlines loom overhead, like an ever-present guillotine about to drop.
We define this kind of workaholism as a behavior pattern that is out of relationship with soul and soul time. Instead of feeling in tune with the natural cycles of the body and the seasons, instead of experiencing periods of no-time in
a creative flow state, we feel constantly that we are running out of time; it is a scarce commodity that is counted in nanoseconds. As a result, we push harder, using caffeine to stem the tides of our bodies’ rhythms or, worse, cocaine. We fight against the organic cycles of rest and the natural urge toward reverie. Ultimately, we lose touch with our bodies, which grind on at work like soulless machines.
Some workaholic people develop strange symptoms: chronic fatigue, insomnia, impotence, headaches, depression, and multiple addictions. In Japan, where some companies installed beehivelike sleeping quarters so that workers did not need to go home, the government coined a term: karoshi refers to the results of work practices that disrupt people’s life rhythms and lead to a buildup of fatigue, potentially resulting in fatal disease or suicide.
For some, workaholism is an attempt to ward off the anxiety that would arise if we faced our inner emptiness or feelings of depression. But instead of going through the anxiety into the underworld depths, we just go back to work. Like alcohol and drug addiction, which camouflage the soul’s needs by covering them over with a chemical high, workaholism adds mortar to the fortress of denial; its single-minded, myopic devotion to doing an efficient job closes our eyes to what we are actually doing.
To begin to address individual workaholism as a shadow issue, we need to uncover the character at the head of the table who turns the workplace into a battlefield of enemies to be conquered. The Greek hero Hercules, revered for his strength and self-confidence, may stand behind some workaholics, urging them on to overcome opposing forces in exploit after exploit.