Andrew Harvey, author of The
Hidden Journey and A Journey in Ladakh, had a mystical experience in the early
stages of his spiritual journey. He felt his body fill with soft light, and
then began to hear a voice. He knew it to be the voice of Mother Meera, his
teacher. She said:
You cannot transform what you
have not blessed. You can never transform what first you have not accepted and
blessed.
I wonder how many of us are
trying to transform our lives, our work, and our organizations without first
blessing them. What does it mean to “bless” something? One definition is to
“make holy.” In your work, do you see yourself as holy, as connected to the
Divine? Do you see the Divine in others? Do you see the Divine working through
the organization?
I believe that an organization
has a soul, one that is made up of the collective souls of the people who have
worked there and who are currently working there. The Organizational Soul is
particularly influenced by the dreams, visions, wounds, and shadows of the
founding members, and of the current leaders. To bless your organization means
to see the Organizational Soul as holy, even if you are not completely happy
with the way things may be manifesting in the moment.
Another definition of blessing is
“to ask Divine favor for.” In our spiritual work with organizations, we can
pray for our organizations, and can visualize the best possible outcomes.
When I was a manager at
Honeywell, we actually had a network of people throughout different divisions
of the organization who prayed for organizational healing. We met once a month
by teleconference and would talk about what needed healing in each of our
divisions. We then would chose a time when we would all commit to prayer or
meditation on behalf of the organization. This was not an officially sanctioned
group, and there is no way of knowing whether or not our prayers made a
difference, but we all felt that it was worth doing.
A third definition of the word
“bless” is “to protect from evil or harm.” A friend of mine, who is in charge
of Marketing Research at a large bank in New England, is a practitioner of
Wicca. It is part of her regular practice to visualize her son, her house, her
car, and her company surrounded in protective white light. She says prayers of
protection for all of them. In these days of corporate corruption and greed, I
imagine that many people are praying that their workplaces be protected from evil
or harm. One other very important way to protect your organization from evil or
harm is to tell the truth when you see evil or harm taking place. It is
extremely important to take a stand for truth and to not turn your head the
other way when you see wrong-doing taking place.
Those of us in the spirituality
in the workplace movement are committed to transforming ourselves and our
organizations, and to supporting business as an agent of social and spiritual
change in the world. Let’s make sure that we are blessing ourselves and the
institutions that we want to see change. It is all too easy, especially these
days, to see business and organizations as evil, soul-less, and full of harm.
But if Mother Meera is right, we will not be able to bring about the transformation
we envision, unless we:
- Make our workplaces holy.
- Ask Divine favor for our organizations.
- Protect our organizations from evil or harm.
Contributed By:
Judi Neal
Director, Tyson Center for Faith and Spirituality in the Workplace
University of Arkansas
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