Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga Of Work
A Lecture, Plus A Guided Meditation, Plus A Discussion
Event At A Glance
Theme: A modern take on karma yoga
What: A guided meditation (~30 minutes), followed by a lecture (~30 minutes), then an open discussion (~30 minutes)
Where: Zoom
When: Saturday, July 26th at 12 noon PT / 4 p.m. ET.
How: Register via Luma
How Long: 1 1/2 hours
Offering: Donation—$5, $10, or $15
About Me
I’m a Ph.D.-trained practical philosopher and meditation teacher. Over the past 15 years, I’ve explored—with executives, tech founders, and finance professionals—the things that matter most (philosophy) as well as the deep peace that’s at the heart of our experience (meditation).
I’ve meditated for thousands of hours, originally devoting myself to Zen (under the tutelage of a Zen teacher based in Kyoto, Japan); I still sit 4 hours daily. In recent years, I’ve been instructing others in the Awareness Teaching of Advaita Vedanta, an approach which insists that abiding peace is to be found through clear self-knowledge.
To learn more about me, you can visit my website.
More Detail
Guided Meditation: I’ll begin with an experiential exploration of this theme. No experience in meditation is required, only an open mind and a willingness to follow the line of inquiry.
Lecture: The guided meditation will be followed by a talk (see “Lecture Overview” below). I’ll end the talk with a clear situational practice that you can implement. In other words, I’m most keen to answer the question—“What, for those of us living in the West today, is the practice of the yoga of work?”
Discussion: This is a time for you to present puzzles (“When I’m at work, X is the case.”), to offer objections to the arguments advanced, or to ask questions you’d very much like to have answered.
Chop Wood, Carry Water: Lecture Overview
The standard view of karma yoga is succinctly expounded by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood in How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. They write:
Karma yoga is the path of selfless, God-dedicated action. By dedicating the fruits of one’s work to God, and by working always with the right means toward right ends..., one may gradually achieve wisdom and non-attachment.
As we would expect, they note that this type of path is attractive to highly extroverted people with big hearts. Thus: “Karma yoga is the path best suited to vigorous temperaments which feel the call to duty and service in the world of human affairs.” Hence, when we think of karma yoga in this vein, we conjure up tireless religious figures and social reformers like Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Florence Nightingale, and St. Francis of Assisi, and, as a result of these imaginative sketches, we may conclude that we have no business trying to be karma yogis since humanitarian heroism or ecological activism is not our forté.
To be sure, we wouldn’t be wrong to draw such a conclusion, provided that we accepted unquestionably the standard view, but we could, as I’ll seek to show in this talk, be making a crucial mistake by overlooking a striking opportunity, one—in fact—that’s staring us right in the face.
What I’m terming “a slightly unorthodox view of karma yoga” will seek to take into account, as its point of departure, two basic facts about the modern world. First, one can’t avoid doing work, of some sort or another, on any given day. By my lights, dreaming up a new business with the help of ChatGPT counts as work just as much as picking up dog or baby toys drenched in saliva. Indeed, work of various kinds—bringing your car in for routine service, checking up on lab results, washing dishes, brushing your teeth, attending Zoom meetings, sending out a report, taking a call, reshaping a design prompt, pulling weeds during a silent Zen retreat—beckons in sundry ways throughout the course of the day. And, much to one’s surprise, the closer and more carefully one looks, the more one starts to take note of this overlooked fact that one is, upon waking up, working almost constantly!
Second—and here, I think, is the beginning of a real twist—the modern world in particular offers us what I’ll call “mundane tasks” in spades. The late David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs, may have marveled at capitalism’s ability, at least up until 2018, to create the sorts of meaningless, needless, thankless jobs that do nothing of any relevance, but he failed to notice something that’s far more prevalent and that couldn’t be any more obvious: the ubiquitous nature of mundane tasks.
These two facts—work is nearly everywhere, and the basic unit of modern work is decidedly not the epic project but the mundane task—together invite us to rethink what karma yoga is in modernity: that is to say, which unique gauntlet it’s throwing down for us. In this talk, I’d like to suggest that the two essential questions of karma yoga—“How, through the actions that regularly appear, can I see through my attachments and aversions?,” and “Is there a doer behind any doing?”—can be kept, yet with a view to three updated aims. Let me explain.
The first: it’s thanks to work of all kinds that, from a spiritual point of view, we’re given an in-your-face opportunity to “really see our own shit.” Work, rather than seated meditation, makes this “seeing our own shit” very obvious—if only we have inner eyes to see—since all the resistances plus all the fantasies are revealed in the arising of the imagination. To see your own stuff very keenly is to put it down very slowly.
The second aim is to experience metaphysical humility. Of course, one doesn’t really aim at humility; instead, one recognizes it, feelingly, in one’s heart. And what does one recognize precisely? That—shockingly—one really dislikes so many, many, many things; so very many things about (sigh) so many people; and so very much of one’s unglamorous life; and that, to flee these dislikes, one fantasizes often about an imaginary life that’s beyond these petty dislikes and envies, one that’s stupendously happy. Upon seeing all of this, one feels—slowly, surrenderingly, tenderly—a certain humble existential helplessness, a metaphorical bowing of the head.
Following the slow drop of aversions and the steadying embrace of humility is grace, an understatedly beautiful experiential understanding of ease. Little by little, one finds, in particular, that one is able to carry on a certain task (any task) with a quiet spirit. “To carry on,” in the sense I mean, is to feel that one is not a doer, that there’s “nobody doing anything,” and that there’s just an “axe splitting wood,” just a “bucket carrying water.” “To carry on” is to make no fuss, as though a brush saturated with paint were, without any resistance or giddiness, simply gliding across a canvas.
I believe that philosophy and spirituality, if they are to be worth anything at all, must be in step with their time. This slightly unorthodox view of karma yoga—considered, updated, revised—demands not that we become heroes or saints but that we, steadily and steadfastly, realize that we’re honest nobodies who, like a Daoist sage, happen to be walking along a crowded street without leaving a single trace behind. To be serenely invisible is, it turns out, very beautiful. It is to die and, in the next breath, to be reborn into new life.
How To Register
Go to Luma and click on “One-Click RSVP.”