When work is worship

When work is worship

 When work is  When you work with  all your heart and mind, your work acquires a  worship meditative quality and  your output becomes  extraordinary, says  Swami Chaitanya Keerti 

Often, I meet people, and as I ask  them how they are doing, they  start complaining about their work; they are generally bored  with the work they do. Either the work is not of  their choice or they simply don’t want to work.  They are forced to work as they have to earn  money. They feel no joy in the work. It is very  rare to find someone who is really happy and  satisfied.  What is missing in their work? I would say, a  meditative quality or a prayerful heart. With a  person who always finds fault with his work, it  is certain that he or she lacks enthusiasm and  blames it all on the work. It is enthusiasm that  works wonders. Enthusiasm creates energy  and changes the quality of work; then it is no  longer a burden or a duty. The mundane also  becomes sacred.  

Do what makes you happy 
For example, I know a friend in Denmark who  was a good therapist. He was not getting any  clients. One day he saw an advertisement in a  newspaper: A school needed a cleaner. This  therapist applied for the job of a cleaner and  got it. He went to this school in the evening and  did the cleaning job. He felt happy and healthy  doing it all alone (there was nobody around  to bother him). As a therapist, he was not so  happy listening to the problems of the sick minded people the whole day. Those problems  were depressing, and he too was getting  affected by them. It is a well-known fact that  more psychologists go mad or commit suicide  than people of any other profession. Their  head is a great sucker. 
I am giving this example just to convey that  we need to do our work without getting too  identified with it or making an ego issue out of  it. The ego is poisonous. Also, we should not  give too much respect to the so-called high class work. People making roads should be  respected as equally as the people working in  corporate offices or government offices—they  are all interdependent. You might feel pleased.

Giving equal importance and dignity to seemingly ordinary work broadens our vision  
if someone comes to clean your office before you come, and you can  have a bad mood if it has not been cleaned. The person who cleans  your office needs to be treated gracefully, as the work he does is  equally important—it can affect your work. Giving equal importance  and dignity to seemingly ordinary work broadens our vision.  

The dignity of labour 
In this way, one can start enjoying life wherever one is, whatsoever  one is. If one is a cobbler one remains a cobbler. Jacob Boehme was a cobbler; he remained a cobbler. Gora was a potter and he  remained a potter. Talking about him, Osho says: Gora, one of the  great masters, was a potter. After his enlightenment, he continued  to make pots—that was the only art that he knew. But the art  changed totally. His pottery became almost sculpture. Another man  Enthusiasm creates energy and changes the quality of work; then it is  no longer a burden or a duty. The mundane also becomes sacred. So was Kabir, who was a weaver. When he became enlightened he continued to weave, but  his weaving became totally different from that of any other weaver in the whole history  of mankind. The love, the blissfulness, the silence—it all became part of his weaving.  Raidas, another master, was a shoemaker. When he became enlightened, he continued  shoe-making, but now his shoes were such that people loved to keep them on their  heads and not wear them on their feet. They were coming from the source. It was no  ordinary shoe-making; it had a quality of its own.  There are stories of people who were robbers and thieves, who have also attained.  What was their secret? Just the same. And I know people who have lived in a Himalayan  retreat for their whole life and have not attained to anything. It is not a question of  quantity; it’s not how much you do but the quality that you bring to it. You can just walk  and it can be meditative; you can just sit and it can be meditative; you can eat and it can  be meditative; and you can just take a shower and it can be meditative. There was a Zen master who used to chop wood as an ordinary woodcutter, but  when some visitor would come to learn meditation in his monastery, he would go to a  particular place and sit there to teach meditation. Zen teaches ordinariness. It exalts  in the ordinary. Life is ordinary and if we accept it totally, then the same ordinary life  becomes extraordinary. Acceptance makes it so. Accept any work with joy; it becomes  sacred and satisfying.