The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

by Stephen Cope

Gandhi had found the secret of success. He began to look on every difficulty as an opportunity for service, a challenge that could draw out of him greater resources of intelligence and imagination. In turning his back on personal profit or prestige in his work, he found he had won the trust and even the

He came to believe that a human being is really just a trustee of all that he has—that his gifts are entrusted to him for the good of the world. “My study of English law came to my help,” he said. “I understood the Gita teaching of nonpossession to mean that those who desired salvation should act like the trustee who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own.” He saw that true living was living for the sake of others. He was freed from the bondage of his awkward, inept, fearful self.

She saw that she was the sole trustee of her own gifts, opportunities, and assets. It was up to her to put these to work in the very best interests of the world. What was her mission?

she had been dedicating her gifts, her assets, and her opportunities, to herself. She had taken her self as her primary project in life. And this had caused suffering.

called me, excited. “Stephen, I’ve discovered something that’s probably

If you don’t find your work in the world and throw yourself wholeheartedly into it, you will inevitably make your self your work. There’s no way around it: You will take your self as your primary project. You will, in the very best case, dedicate your life to the perfection of your self. To the perfection of your health, intelligence, beauty, home, or even spiritual prowess. And t...

“Hope and fear,” it teaches, “are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don’t see the self as self, what do we have to fear?”

Tao te Ching, Lao-Tzu, makes a stunning prescription for living a fulfilled life:

See the world as your self. Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as your self; Then you can care for all things. See the world as your self. Then you can care for all things! As we age, we wi...

See the world as your self. Love the world as your self. This is a simple reframe—like taking one small step to the side. You only have to love what you already love. For Katherine: Gardening. Editing. Writing. The magazine. You only have to love your little corner of the world. But you have to do it intentionally. And full out. And you

Gandhi began to listen carefully to his inner guidance and to trust this guidance. As a result, his actions were highly creative, and also wildly unpredictable. Gandhi himself often had no idea what creative solutions would emerge from his inner guidance—or when they would emerge. (In later years, when he was back in India leading the resistance to British domination, he would have all of India waiting with bated breath—sometimes for weeks or months—while he sat quietly in his ashram spinning cotton, praying, and

satyagrahi’s object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrongdoer.”

“Select your purpose,” he challenged, “selfless, without any thought of personal pleasure or personal profit, and then use selfless means to attain your goal.”

We work first because we have to work. Then because we want to work. Then because we love to work. Then the work simply does us. Difficult at the beginning. Inevitable at the end.

knows that his True Self is unborn, is undying, uncreated—immortal.

“Free from self-will, aggressiveness, arrogance, anger, and the lust to possess people or things, he is at peace with himself and others and enters into the unitive state. United with Brahman, ever joyful, beyond the reach of desire and sorrow, he has equal regard for every living creature and attains supreme devotion to me. By loving me he comes to know me truly; then he knows my glory and enters into my boundless being. All his acts are performed in my service, and through my grace he wins eternal life.”

In your life? If you bring forth what is within you it will save you.

of us must have one domain, one small place on the globe where we can fully meet life—where we can meet it with every gift we have. One small place where, through testing ourselves, we can know the nature of life, and ultimately know ourselves.

Our understanding of dharma is obscured by the narcissism of our time. Studying the lives of great exemplars of dharma has helped me to see that the primary distortion in my dharma life has been the age-old misery of self-absorption. Deep in midlife I had begun to feel the awful burden of wanting to be special; wanting to be better; wanting to experience every possible adventure in this life; wanting to be, as we have sometimes said at Kripalu, an “expanded self.”

“is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a sparkling success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men.” His vision of the possibility of relief from this burden occurred to me as brilliant: “We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do.”

But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us—whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.”

“We can do no great things,” wrote the nineteenth-century French saint, Teresa, “only small things with great love.”

very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.”