Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Emily Bennington. Emily is a bestselling author and teacher of contemplative practices for both secular and spiritual audiences. She has led training programs on composure and values-driven leadership for numerous Fortune 500 companies and regularly teaches programs on mindfulness, spiritual intelligence, and nonviolent communication. With Sounds True, Emily Bennington has written a new book called Miracles at Work: Turning Inner Guidance into Outer Influence, where she invites kindred spirits, those who yearn to bring their spiritual selves into their professional lives to begin the adventure.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Emily and I spoke about applying the lessons from A Course in Miracles to business challenges, including working with a difficult manager, feeling overwhelmed at work, and questions of competition that face business leaders. We also talked about what she calls “spiritual intelligence” and how you can tell if you’re growing in spiritual intelligence in your life. Finally, we talked about how, according to A Course in Miracles, we all share the same primary function, which is to be a vessel for the expression of love—which, in the words of A Course in Miracles, is to be a miracle worker at work and in the world. Here’s my conversation with Emily Bennington:
Emily, right here at the beginning, by way of introduction if you will, I’d love it if you could help our listeners understand in your own life experience how your study of A Course in Miracles met the workplace and the challenges of life at work—how that confluence happened in your own life.
Emily Bennington: Well, I spent the first 10 years of my career really in a state of looking at the world through my physical eyes—and what I mean by that is I looked at every person and every challenge and myself through the lens of only what my eyes were telling me is true. Once I started studying the Course, I really developed what it calls “spiritual vision,” in the sense that I was able to look through the behaviors of another person, the personality of another person, to the truth of who they are. What I discovered as a result of that is I was able to communicate with them in a way that they were actually able to hear me and my relationships improved—and as a result of my relationships deepening, growing better, I advanced in my career.
Overlaying the principles of the Course onto the work that I was doing every day wasn’t something that I announced in the office. It wasn’t something that I sort of ran around and told everybody, “Look, this is my secret.” But I did hit a place where people started to notice that something about me had changed and for a long time, I sort of swept it under the rug—that the Course was the secret to the attitudinal changes that I had displayed that it helped me so much at work—but there came a point where I just realized that I had made such a serious transformation in my own career that I had throughout the Course as the reason—and that’s what led to Miracles at Work.
TS: Now, you mentioned moving to what you called “spiritual vision” from physical vision. What’s it like? Spiritual vision—what do you see that’s different?
EM: I don’t see anything differently. What it is is that I know that there’s a difference between what the Course calls knowledge and perception. So, I know for example that when I’m caught up in judgment; when I’m caught up in overwhelm; when I’m caught up in competition, anger, frustration, all of that, then I just know I’m in my own perception and that perceptions are just fleeting thoughts of the mind. They’re not true. The only thing that is true is coming back to the Knowledge with a capital K, that—in Course language—it’s, “Only love is real.” There’s a line in the Course that says, “Nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists.” I know that if I’m in a state of love, then I know that I’m in what is real and if I’m in my own perception, then I’m in a fleeting state that is unreal.
It’s not that I see anything externally “different.” It’s just I’m able to catch myself in the spinning of my own mind and bring myself out of it so that I’m able to again just acknowledge the truth of myself and the truth of the other person. And when I’m in that place, again I just notice that I’m more easily heard and more easily displaying what the world would call executive presence or leadership presence. But for me, it’s more about that spiritual vision. That is the ground that the executive or leadership presence stands on as far as I’m concerned.
TS: OK, there’s a lot to talk about here, Emily, but let’s just get right into it. Only love is real. Here I am and I’m in the workplace. And let’s just pretend I can’t stand my manager. At the same time, I’m studying A Course in Miracles, and I hear—this is pretending here—and I hear something like, “Only love is real,” and it’s also true that I can’t stand this person that I have to report to day in and day out at work. How can I apply the Course in Miracles in this situation?
EM: There is a line in the Course that says, “Only what you’re not giving could be lacking in any situation.” So, if you’re in a situation where you have a boss that you just absolutely can’t stand, one of the things that you’re asked to do is to sort of turn the mirror on yourself and say, “What am I not giving in this situation?” I think when we do that—when we start to say, “OK, what’s going on on my side of the street?”—then we realize that, for example, the boss that we can’t stand may be reacting to some of the behaviors that we are putting forth. So, it’s really just about catching ourselves in that space and acknowledging what it is that we’re not giving that is lacking in that relationship.
TS: That’s helpful. Now, you mentioned how there’s these qualities of—I think you called it executive presence—and when it comes to presence, I think people understand that. You know when someone walks in the room and they’re calm and they’re spacious and they listen. It’s a beautiful quality. At this point, in training in corporations, it seems like right now, all the rage is mindfulness training. “Let’s study mindfulness and this will increase our capacity to have this quality of presence whether it’s executive presence or just presence in general.”
But you don’t see very many trainings in A Course in Miracles or spiritual teachings or anything like “only love is real” as the basis of this executive training. It seems like there’s a big leap for people in the workplace to go from, “I’m interested in mindfulness,” to, “I’m interested in a spiritual text like A Course in Miracles.”
Can you talk a little bit to me about how you see that leap? And why does it seem like it’s such a big leap?
EM: Yes, it’s so funny that you should ask this question because in the introduction to Miracles at Work, I sort of share the story about why I wanted to call what I’m doing “a spiritual intelligence” or talk about spirituality as it relates to one’s career, because for years I’ve been teaching many of the principles on the Course to executives in Fortune 500 companies while calling it mindfulness and using terms like values and whatnot. I was really conflicted personally about the integrity of that.
So, turning in my own mind about what to do and if I come out as a “spiritual teacher” for the workplace, then that would just totally tank my corporate teaching gig, which is the largest source of my revenue.
I went to a mindful leadership conference and I raised my hand, stood up in front of 500 people and all of these gurus, and I said, “If mindfulness is a spiritual practice at its roots, then what role does spirituality play in business and leadership?” At that point, you could almost hear a pin drop in the room and the moderator just basically was like, “Business isn’t spiritual, and that’s the end of the story.”
I can make a delineation between mindfulness and spirituality because I think mindfulness—having taught mindfulness for a few years now—I recognize it as the act of noticing and letting go and owning that space between stimulus and response.
Spirituality is something a little different. Spirituality is the spirit that makes spiritual intelligence spiritual. Otherwise, it would be mindfulness, because I feel like in mindfulness, you’re sort of leaning more on your own capacity. Mindfulness is very concerned, as you well know, with the cognitive functions of the brain and what’s going on with the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and all that stuff—and it’s so helpful to fit in that space and to know those things. But on the other side of the fence, there is a power I believe that is higher, greater, bigger, far more expansive than we know or can recognize, and we have access to that.
Spiritual intelligence to me is calling on that power and asking that power to help guide us. Mindfulness can sort of be the thing that opens the door that allows that higher power and guidance to come through. So, in that sense, they’re related. But I make a distinction between what spiritual intelligence is and what mindfulness is. Mindfulness is far more secular to me, as it should be.
To the point of your question, I do not think that people should be running around their offices talking about their particular spiritual path and trying to persuade others to follow it. We do what works for us and other people will know what works by our presence—by our demonstration of the fact that it works through our attitude and, as a result of our attitude, our behaviors that follow.
TS: You used this interesting phrase. You said, “Should I ‘come out’ as somebody who really is drawing these connections between spirituality and business?” [and] that it was a type of bravery, if you will, to speak your truth in this regard. Do you feel, in writing the book Miracles at Work, that you’ve now fully come out in terms of your interest in this intersection between business and spirituality?
EM: Yes. Well, this is certainly one way to do it, right?
Yes. Like I said, I’ve been talking about the principles of mindfulness in corporate spaces for years and what I have noticed over the past few years is [that] when I originally started—and it wasn’t that long ago; five years ago that I started talking about mindfulness—but even at that time, corporations were saying, “You know, we’re not really comfortable with the word mindfulness. Can you call this self-awareness?” which was fine because I would give the same presentation and I would call it self-awareness and no big deal. And what I’ve noticed particularly in the past one to two years is companies are actually saying, “I would like you to come and talk about mindfulness,”—calling it mindfulness, wanting me to use that language.
So, I think that’s a really nice evolution and I’m hoping that at some point, spiritual intelligence will be something that we can talk about in a business context and it doesn’t scare people. But, I get that it does at this point, and I completely understand why.
There’s a lot of religiosity that definitely puts people off and, if you put people off with the language, they’re not going to pick up on the principles. My attitude towards it is just to share the principles and let people draw their own conclusions about what works for them.
TS: I think part of the reason that I was underscoring this idea of coming out to talk about spirit is that it’s just so interesting that we live in a time when that requires courage and bravery because I think of the highly rationally valued emphasis in our culture—that it has [become] somehow woo-woo or something. “You believe in a higher, greater intelligence. That’s suspect.” That’s interesting that we would live in such a time—where it’s terrifying to talk about spirit.
EM: But, if you look at Pew Research—the latest Pew Research survey says that 84 percent of the American population identifies with some sort of brand of faith. Eighty-four percent of the American population identifies with faith in some way, and yet, we’re supposed to hand that on a hook when we walk into work every day and absolutely separate those things in our life. What I’m saying is that you can integrate them. You can integrate them in a way that is not only effective for you, it helps you live with more peace, greater ease, more composure—all of these things are qualities that help you at work. If ever there was a time where we needed to work with greater composure, it’s now because of the speed and the challenges that we’re all facing at the moment—challenges that have never been seen in business before. So, we need to be able to respond to those challenges in a way that doesn’t make us emotionally unzipped.
This is the realm of spiritual principles. This is where our spirit can help.
But you’re right. Just one practical example about the way that it’s “brave” to step forward with this is, from a practical publishing standpoint, the way that I sell books is I go into an organization that hires me and there’s 100 people in the audience, let’s say, and they buy 100 books. Now, I’m at a point where I have to one-to-one sell books individually because a corporation is not going to hire me to come in and talk about A Course in Miracles but they are interested in the underlying principles found in this book. I just wanted to be honest about where the principles are coming from because I don’t want to go to my grave and have people think that these were my ideas, because they’re not. They’re fundamental Course principles, and it’s my job I feel to—it’s like the relay race. I have the baton for the Course on this particular area at this particular moment in time and I want to pass it on to those who could benefit from it.
TS: You’re using this phrase “spiritual intelligence” and that this is a particular kind of intelligence that can benefit us not just at work but in the totality of our life. Tell me more what you mean by spiritual intelligence and, like in other kinds of intelligences, how do I recognize it? If somebody has a high IQ, we can test. We can say, “That person’s incredibly intelligence. Look at their command of language, knowledge, et cetera.” If someone has high emotional intelligence, you can say, “Look how calmly they speak to people who disagree with them, et cetera.” What about spiritual intelligence?
EM: I want to back up—if you don’t mind—a little bit and kind of give you a little context as to where I’m coming from with spiritual intelligence. I graduated from college and came into the workforce, and one of the first things that my boss did—and I will forever love her for this—is she put me through a Stephen Covey training. In Stephen Covey’s training, I learned the classic pyramid that he has, where it’s the maturity continuum where you go from dependence—where you’re dependent on other people to meet your needs—to independence—where you’re capable of meeting your own needs—to interdependence, where you’re capable of collaborating with your team to meet mutual needs. For a long time—because I think the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was published in ’89—people sort of thought that’s where the emotional maturity continuum stopped. Then there was all this work around EQ, which I think is rooted in part in Covey’s work but there’s all sorts of work around emotional intelligence—but that’s not the whole story. There is another level, and the next level is spiritual intelligence, where it’s not enough for me to just know that I’m interdependent with you, that we need to work together to achieve something healthy and functioning for everyone—but I am you.
If I can look at you from that spiritually intelligence place of knowing that it’s not just that I want to work well with you, it’s that I know that on some fundamental level—some level that we cannot see with our physical eyes—we share the same source and that’s what makes us one. Now. if I’m able to look at someone and see that—and again, I don’t tell them this necessarily unless we’re in this conversation. But if I can see it—if I can look at someone else and see that about them; that the truth of who they are is the same as the truth which is who I am—then I’m going to work with them differently. So, to me, there is that sort of clinical definition of spiritual intelligence, which is the ability to work with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the circumstances. Now, working with wisdom and compassion, and inner and outer peace—that is a recipe for success as far as I’m concerned, but it’s also very secular.
Again, we need to call spiritual intelligence what it is: it’s an [infusion] of spirit into the work that we do. So, it’s not so much that I’m relying upon myself to have all the answers and I’m relying on my own capacity to be composed through very challenging situations. It’s that I know that I have access to a power greater than my own that I can call upon regardless of the situation that I’m in. So, that to me is the distinction and what that gives me at work is a tremendous amount of ease, a tremendous amount of peace, a tremendous amount of grace that I carry into every interaction that I have.
TS: Once again—not to fixate on this idea of measurement because I know not everything of value you can put a tape measure on or count numbers in association with it—but is there a way that you would say, “Ha, you know, that’s how I measure spiritual intelligence,” or, “I can tell that that person has a lot of spiritual intelligence.” You can just tell from the outside.
EM: Well, for myself, I knew that my practice of the Course is working because I was able to handle situations that would have made me completely emotionally untethered before in a way that was really grounded. So, something would happen—like an email would come in or interaction with a person would happen—and before, I just knew that I would take the bait. And I didn’t, and I wouldn’t—and more than that, I didn’t want to.
When I started to have those little things pile up, eventually I looked back and I was like, “Huh, I’m evolving,” and beyond that, people around me started to notice. My husband for sure was like, “What are you doing? That’s different.” And in addition to that, my boss started to notice and those around me were sort of picking up on [it]. I had people say, “What are you doing?”
That’s one way to “measure”—you measure just by [how] your relationships [are] improving. Are you at more peace? How do you feel? Are you approaching each day with more composure and, as a result, more joy? All of those things are a ways to measure your success.
TS: Now let’s take for example getting a difficult email or getting a difficult phone call from somebody—and, you know, difficult [in that] we all know what triggers us, but it could be somebody saying, “I reviewed this paper that you wrote and found several errors,” or something like that. That would be the kind of thing that might upset me, knowing that I made a bunch of errors that I hadn’t caught. You’re talking about how over time, using the lessons of the Course, you weren’t as jacked up over the moon or whatever. When you got an email like that, you had a different response. What principles were you applying when receiving a difficult email like that so that you looked at it differently?
EM: One of the critiques of “love applied at work” is that it’s too soft—that if you are in a stage where all you’re doing is seeing the perfection in the other person and “the spirit in them is the same as the spirit in you” and this whole “Namaste consciousness” at work every day—that you’re going to get into a place where you lose your edge. I can’t tell people how to lose their edge on a podcast called Insights at the Edge, so we have to figure out how we’re going to keep our edge.
So, one of the principles from the Course that I love is that it defines love not so much as running around in this, what I call “cloying state of sweetness” where you’re overly affectionate in ways that are completely inappropriate at the office.
The way that the Course asks you to look at love is searching yourself for littleness. What it means by that is love is searching your own mind for the littleness that occurs through thoughts of judgment; thoughts of fear; thoughts of blame; thoughts of overwhelm; thoughts of critique; thoughts of self-sabotage, self-blame. “Why did I make so many errors in that report?” and whatnot. So, if you search your mind for those and you learn to notice them and let them go, then that in turn becomes a form of love for yourself and for or the other person. So, that’s the principle of the Course that’s definitely helpful at work.
TS: Now you mentioned to inquire when there are thoughts of blame. I get that—punishing other people. But then also thoughts of overwhelm. I think a lot of people have a sense of feeling overwhelmed in their work. I know when we do check-ins here at Sounds True where people are just talking about how they’re doing. A lot of people will say, “Oh my God, I’m so behind.” I certainly have lots of thoughts of overwhelm during the course of my work week. How would I apply teachings from A Course in Miracles to that sense of overwhelm?
EM: There’s a principle of the Course that is “you create what you defend against.” So, this would apply to overwhelm in the sense of: if I’m feeling overwhelmed and getting defensive about how overwhelmed I am, then I’m projecting that sense of scattered-ness—which is only making me feel more overwhelmed. So, it becomes this cycle. And if you can call out the cycle, then you can be very aware of what it is that you’re putting out because what you’re putting out is coming back to you.
Let me give you another example of that that is applicable to work. I was on a study group the other night with some Course students and we were talking about our fears. So, what is it that we have the biggest fear of? Then there was one women on the call and she said, “I am afraid to fail in my business, but I’m holding to this fear because the payoff is if I am scared to fail, then I’m going to work harder. And the working harder is what causes me to succeed.” But as it turns out, she wasn’t succeeding.
So, we have to go back to this principle of creating what you defend against. She was afraid of failure, so she was putting out this energy of neediness and desperation and manipulation on her sales calls, which was causing people to not want to work with her, which was causing her to be in this place where she felt lack. So, her fear of lack and her feelings of lack was putting out this energy of lack, which is causing more lack to show up in her life
So, the same thing is true in everything. So, the Course says you think you have many problems but you only have one—and your one problem is that disconnect from the capital-S Self.
If you can just recognize these patterns, then you start to realize, “Oh, well—regardless of what challenge I’m facing in the external world, it all comes back to the way that I’m perceiving it and the way that I am disconnected from that higher source and if I can get that right, then the ripple effect is that things in my life will fall into place more than they are at the moment.”
TS: There is just one more piece I wanted to follow up on with you, Emily, which is you talked about the Stephen Covey model—how we move from dependent to independent to interdependent. And in the Course in Miracles, we take that one step further. We’re not just interdependent, but I am you. In appreciating that, the question that came up for me and applying that to business is how through the lens of A Course in Miracles, you would relate to your competitors in business? I am you, but yet I am going to outdistance you by far because you’re my competition, right? How would you view that?
EM: Well, I think from a Course perspective, [I would] just kind of back up a little bit. It’s not so much that you’re even viewing other people as competitors. So, if I’m constantly looking at what the other person’s doing and measuring my success against how successful they are, then I’m not really looking at what I’m doing. What I need to be doing in business that’s going to give me the edge is focusing on how I’m showing up in every single moment.
So, that’s what the Course would ask you to do. It’s not so much to pay attention to what the other person is doing, but to pay attention to what you’re doing and whether you’re doing that to the best of your ability and without the littleness that I talked about before because I think we can get caught up in competition and the emotional and mental energy that that causes in us against creating what you defend against. It calls us to behave in ways that are little.
So, we want to get away from that and go more to what the Course would call “magnitudes.” We want to be more expansive than that. The Course—again, you think you have many problems but you only have one. If you don’t recognize what the source of your success is—right? The Course would ask you to measure your success by how in alignment you are with the capital-S Source, and that’s what you take in every moment. What the world tells us—and this is the difference between physical sight and spiritual vision—is that our success is in what’s outside of us. It’s how we’re measuring up, it’s what job title we have, what office we have, how many dollars are in the bank—all that stuff. So, if we’re measuring our success by all that’s outside of us and if we’re measuring our success by a source that’s constantly changing and going up and down, then how can we not always be grasping in response to that?
What we’re being asked to do is, again, just turn the mirror around, focus on what we’re doing, and—as we show up as our highest self—then the situations in our life will naturally unfold to their highest good as well. So, I’ve seen that in my own career and I’ve seen it many times in the careers of others.
TS: Then what if somebody just said from—I’m just going to take it a little bit further—”Look, I’m dealing with a certain amount of market share. I hear what you’re saying, Emily, but you work with sophisticated executives and—you know—there’s a market share issue and my competitors taking more of it. I know you want me just to focus on my part, but I can’t help but be attentive to that—responsive to that—and that matters to me.”
EM: Yes. So, OK. So, let’s say that market share is the metric that we’re measuring our success on—and I definitely get that we all have numbers that we’re trying to meet. I’m not immune to that. So, there are numbers that I look at too. But if I’m only looking at the number, then I’m going to be fixated on the number and I’m fixated on the result, and I’m not fixated on what causes that result. So, my focus is in the wrong place.
Instead of focusing on the number, focus on what it is that you can do to get the number where you want it to be. Your market share’s not so good—what do we need to do? What’s step A, B, C, et cetera? And so that’s where we put our attention because that’s something we can control. If we’re just focused on the number, then we’re just going to spin about the number and nothing really is going to happen other than sitting and stewing in our own anxiety.
TS: OK, now you mentioned that all of the problems that we have in our business life—and I could present to you many different cases of, “How do I apply the Course to this? How do I apply the Course to this problem, this question?”—come down to, “Are we aligned with Source or not?” and that this is what we need to focus on. Is that correct?
EM: Yes, and it’s not just the Course that says this. Many of spiritual paths—I mean, Mahatma Gandhi said, “As the means, so the end.” That’s really just what we’re focusing on. It’s not so much that I need to tap into this at all times and this is my constant state of where my focus is, but you’ll know when you’re out of alignment with it. You’re out of alignment when things in your life don’t work.
So, that becomes the path that you walk, and as you walk that path, what you start to notice is that your own—what I call “shaken snow globe mind” starts to settle, your relationships improve, other people calm down in response to your composure, and things just work easier and better. That’s the way that I want to show up at work every day in response to the challenges that I’m facing and that’s what other people follow.
I think when we’re talking about how to grow in our careers, if you grow in your career, it’s going to mean that you assume some sort of leadership role. Well, if you’re going to assume a leadership role, then what do people follow? They’re not going to follow your angst about the numbers, right? They’re going to follow you because they get the sense that you’re in it for something greater than yourself. So, if we could just have that conversation at work and with ourselves every day, then we would show up at work as people others want to follow, and it’s not because of all that we’re doing. That’s just the price of entry [that] you have to do to get the job and to get the promotion, all that stuff—but that’s not it. What it is is the being. Where we measure our success in work is in metrics—and there’s a reason for that, and that has its place, but there’s not enough focus on the being piece.
I see that—maybe not with Sounds True—but I see that in organizations from coast to coast and international. It’s just not really the priority yet. But with the growth of mindfulness in companies, I’m seeing that change—which is good news.
TS: You said this “calming down of the shaken snow globe mind.” That was a cool phrase. I’ve never heard that before—that image. I think we all know what those little snow globe shakers are. Did you come up with that, Emily? Was that an original phrase of yours?
EM: I think. I don’t know; I’ve been using it forever. It’s actually the first slide that I have in my presentation. I’ll say, “How many people’s minds feel like this?” Everybody in the room raises their hand and yes, our minds are like shaken snow globes. We need to learn how to settle them. The bad news is we haven’t been taught before, by and large, as a rule. But, the good news is that there are certainly some tools that can get us there and I, for one, am testament to the fact that the tools work. The Course has been my biggest tool by far.
TS: In the Course, as a tool, one of the things that you point to in your book Miracles at Work is that when we need help, and we have this moment, we know we’re not in alignment, that we can pray. We’re having a conversation and we’re allowed to talk about spirituality. We’re allowed to talk about praying. It’s OK, right here in this conversation, Emily—you and me—full permission. My question to you is somebody says, “You know, I know there are times when I need to pray. I’m OK with that word even, but I don’t quite know how to go about it. How do I even ask for help? How do I increase my sense of being connected to Source and that Source will help me in this situation?”
EM: That’s a great question. One of the prayers from the Course that I love is, “Please help me this differently.” If you’re in a situation where somebody’s coming at you and you feel attacked, then what we want to do—what feels natural to us—is to attack back. And so, if we can just get to that place where we stop—and this is where mindfulness comes in, because mindfulness is what reminds us to take that pause, right? We need to have that circuit breaker that says, “Woah, stop.” In that space between what stimulated us, what triggered us, and how we respond—in that space is where the prayer is. The prayer is, “Please help me see this differently.”
One thing that I learned from the Course is that you do have to ask. You can reorganize your perception. You have guidance. You have the eternal connection to love and wisdom and compassion, but I have noticed from my own experience—and the Course says this in many different ways—you have to actually ask for it to happen. When you say, “Please help me see this differently,” inherent in that is not, “Please reorganize my external circumstances so that I can be at peace.” What you’re asking is for you to see it differently and as you see the situation differently, you behave differently—and that’s what changes your external circumstance. It’s not so much that some genie swooped in and made everything right. It’s that your mind shifted from a place of fear and lack and lowercase-S self to that place where you are connected to the higher Self. That’s what brings you peace and that’s what causes you to behave with peace.
Another prayer—and I’ll just mention this very quickly—from the Course that I love that I’ve used—many times I’ve used it. Not too long ago, in a plane with ridiculous turbulence was one of those moments when you’re really scared I was out-of-my-mind scared, and you just sort of close down a little and say, “I will be still in an instant and go home.” I just kept repeating that. “I will be still in an instant and go home.”
That is a reminder that we can use in the turbulence in the air and in turbulence in the office. It’s just that one of those little things. If you just take that pause and say, “OK, I have a choice in this moment,” then that can reorganize your thought patterns.
TS: I’m wondering what you might say to somebody who has been chronically frustrated by not having the kind of meaningful work they wish they had and they know they’re stuck. What prayer might help? “How could I see this differently? Well, the truth is I just see it as a place I’ve been stuck for a long time. I’m going to need a different prayer. If anything, actually I’m praying for a miracle, even though I don’t understand what that word means exactly. Maybe Emily will help me understand what a miracle is too, because it seems like I need one.”
EM: Yes. Well, in that case, obviously prayer is appropriate for any situation, but what’s coming up for me in a situation where someone feels like they’re stuck in their career and they’re not having the effect on the world that they would like is sort of a reorganization of what their real “career” is. From A Course in Miracles’ perspective, everyone has the same career, right? We all have different jobs, but we have the same career—and that is to be clear channels to the expression of love. That is the definition of a miracle. That is the miracle in A Course in Miracles—an expression of love.
Well, how do we get to a place where we feel like we can express love and why do we not do it? Well, we don’t do it because we’re so caught up in our ego-mind that tells us that we’re separate, that tells us that the anger that we feel is real, and that the person who caused that anger deserves our justice—like we need to get back at them for what it is that they do, which only recreates those patterns that keep our relationships stuck in negative places.
What we’re doing with the Course in Miracles is unwinding all of that. So, to the point of your question about when we get stuck in our career, what we can do—I think right now, we’re at a place where we feel like if we’re not impacting thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions, then we don’t have a meaningful career. That’s just not the case. What the Course will tell us to do is to look at every interaction that we have as an opportunity to provide a miracle to someone else—to take maybe the arrows that they had swung at us and turn them into flowers, and to give them back to them. As we give the flower and we transform the arrow into the flower, we show the other person what can be done.
That is one of the things about the Course that just deeply resonated with me and is so applicable to work— that we are so starved for exemplars of grace in business. We are so starved for people who do show up every day with wisdom and compassion. From my experience, it takes this perspective to behave in that way. The more we behave in that way, we show other people what is possible for themselves, and as they learn what’s possible for themselves, then they’ll show other people what’s possible for them and the chain continues.
That, to me is just—just to go back to your very first question of, “What have you gotten out of this?”—that’s it too. It’s all this sort of stew of lessons that you pick and choose what to apply when. But when you look back on your life and your career and your effect on others, maybe it’s just one person, Tami. Maybe it is one or two people, but when you look back and you say, “I made a difference with them,” then you know that that was your real career regardless of what your job title is and your business card says.
TS: You talk about how—and you mentioned here—how we all share this same primary function [of] becoming—you’re saying it here in this conversation—becoming a vessel of love—a vessel for a miracle to happen and to impact another in that way. It’s so interesting. I think most of the time we’re not in touch with that. People have a sense that, “My function or my purpose has something to do with [something] specific about my life.” Do you know what I mean? “I’m a writer,” or, “I’m a healer,” or, “I’m a parent.” We don’t think, “We all share this same primary function.” That’s a very profound idea, I think.
EM: Yes, there’s a line in the Course that says something like, “There’s a question you must learn to ask in connection with every page and it’s, ‘What is the purpose?’ and whatever that is, it will direct your efforts automatically.” I just love that so much, because if you say for example, “What is the purpose of my career?” well you can line up the metrics. You can say, “I want to have this many euros in the bank or sell this many books,” or blah blah blah. But if you just say, “Well, my purpose is to be a clear channel for the expression of love in this moment,” then again it puts the emphasis back on what you can control. I can’t control how many books I sell. I can’t control who buys them on Amazon. What I can control is how I show up and as I show up to my highest self, then hopefully people will be inspired to hear and read what I have to say in my book. So, that’s a to affect the sales.
What is my purpose? Well, my purpose is to show up in my full magnitude and to be an expression of love. What is my purpose in this contentious meeting? Well, my purpose is not to get caught in fear. My purpose is to be a demonstration—to stand for what the Course calls “stand to the alternative,” which means you’re standing for a love that is not what we recognize as standard operating procedure in business. We’re standing for something different, and what we’re standing for is that spiritual intelligence. The more that we do that, the more that we recognize that that is in effect our purpose.
If we can just ask ourselves in every situation, “What is the purpose here?” we can get ourselves out of a lot of twisted stuff. Just one real quick example of that, and then I’ll pass it back to you because I’ve been going on here: I see people who are in disagreements at work. What they don’t realize is that at the heart of their disagreement is not only their shared Source and their inner being, but at the heart of their disagreement they have the same purpose. They have the same goal, and if they can just see that—if we can just stop and say, “What is the purpose of this?” then it really becomes the speed bump that allows us to behave with more wisdom and compassion, which is another way of saying that we’re behaving with love.
TS: One of the things you mentioned, Emily, in Miracles at Work that I didn’t know was that the book A Course in Miracles itself actually came from an environment that was a dysfunctional workplace environment, we might say—that it came out of that—and, in a sense, even in response to that. The scribe Helen Schucman actually became inspired or part of the process was in response to the dysfunctional academic environment she was in. I wonder if you could tell that story for our listeners.
EM: Yes. So, Helen Schucman was a psychologist in New York and she was very accomplished. She was also very stubborn and aggressive and stuck in her ways. She had a colleague Bill Thetford, who she worked with—and she loved Bill. She really liked him and admired him and respected him but there were aspects of their personalities that just completely rubbed up against each other. And I’m sure we’ve all seen this in our own work lives where we just have somebody that we like—that we could grab a beer with them after work—but things that they do in the office just drive us crazy.
I guess right before a terrible meeting with the department or maybe after it, Bill said to Helen, “There must be a better way. There’s got to be a better way for us to work.” Helen stood up and said, “Yes, I agree with you and I’m going to help you find it.”
As a result of that, as the legend has it, that’s when A Course in Miracles started coming through. But, it started when Bill said there must be a better way and when Bill said there must be a better way, it was in response to a dysfunctional work environment—toxic work environment.
TS: OK Emily, just a couple more questions. I’d like to know what one of the most challenging situations is that you’ve been in at work and you’ve really tried to apply these principles from A Course in Miracles and you were like, “This is a tough one,” and then how you got through it.
EM: There’s a quote in the course that says, “Your sighs now betray the hopes of those who look to you for their relief.” This speaks to what I was saying before about [how] as we show up in the fullness of our magnitude, we demonstrate for others what is possible for themselves. That’s really hard because when you’re not feeling in the fullness of your magnitude on Monday morning, for example, or after a meeting where you just feel like you got kicked in the teeth, then it’s difficult to sort of overlay what you know is true, but you know the principles that you’ve learned onto your direct experience.
So, I’m human. I’ve gotten shorter with people than I intended to. For me, it’s not so much that I make these really big career mistakes and that they end up—my integrity suffers. For me, it’s just these little things. Seth Godin talks about death by a thousand cuts. For me, it’s just the little things, where I screw up and I have to go back and apologize or make amends in some way.
The practice of the Course has been beneficial for me because it says repeatedly, “Choose again, choose again, choose again,”—that no matter what happens, no matter what you did, it doesn’t change the truth of who you are, so just choose again. Choose better. Be better next time. And to me, that’s been fundamentally helpful.
TS: Then just one final question for you, Emily. It’s not a small one. I think a lot of people right now are not just feeling the need to invoke Miracles at Work, but they’re wanting to invoke miracles for our world—miracles in this time. There’s a sense of despair and grief and glumness as well as—I think for many—a dawning sense of new empowerment and engagement. But this idea that we could be miracle-makers in the world, not just at work—especially when we see various kinds of injustices in front of us or concerns about the state of the environment [and] species extinction—what do you think it takes to be a miracle worker in the world?
EM: I think that it goes back to what I was saying before about searching your own mind for littleness. What I mean by that is it’s easy to pick up a newspaper or read a headline online or look at the state of our country right now and say, “We’re in dire straits and as a response to that, I’m going to shrink or complain or post on Facebook about how bad it is.” When we do that, we’re just contributing to the negative energy. What searching our own mind for littleness is is to say, “Where am I in this heightened state of judgment?” because just throwing stones at what’s happening in the world doesn’t change anything. What we have to do is search our mind for the littleness, search our mind for the judgment, and then as we dissolve that within our own mind, then we’re able to show up more empowered—to use your point from before. We show up in a more empowered place and then we’re able to effect the change that we seek.
I’ve seen this—I’m working with Marianne Williamson right now in her Sister Giant initiative, and I’ve seen this in action. My husband got very mad at me. This is a personal anecdote. But, my husband got mad at me before the elections for doing nothing but sitting on the couch and watching CNN and complaining about the state of our union. He’s like, “This is not helpful. Sitting in this energy is not helpful for you and it’s not frankly helpful for me as I pick it up on my way out the door.” He was like, “Whatever it is, you need to deal with that.”
I was like, “You’re right. I need to take what I’m feeling here and actually put it into something constructive.” I heard Marianne say that hopeful solutions—hopeful change is borne from hopeful solutions, or something like that. Be a part of the change. I started with her Sister Giant initiative, and now I have this vehicle for my pent-up frustration and I’m able to affect the change that I want to see in the world in a way that feels good.
I could sit and stew about it or I could actually make a change. But to make a change—and this is the key point—to make a change, I have to show up in that space as somebody who’s not just a complainer, who’s not just focused on the problems, but as somebody who’s able to effect the solution. That to me is how you show up, particularly now, when everything, when the sky really does seem to be falling in a way that is both powerful and effective.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Emily Bennington. She is the author of a new book. It’s called Miracles at Work: Turning Inner Guidance into Outer Influence. Emily, thank you for what you’re doing and thank you for stepping into a role and becoming—as you write about in the book—a leader of magnitude: someone who’s leading with presence that people can look to. Thank you.
EM: Thank you, Tami.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
