Being Spiritual and Practical

If you've spent any time working on yourself, the pattern will look familiar. There was a stretch of your life when you were driven and hungry to get somewhere. Then something shifted. Maybe you hit a wall and burned out. You turned toward spirituality, started living for something bigger than a paycheck, and after that your old appetite for getting ahead just wasn't there anymore. A lot of spiritual and religious people carry themselves this way, which is partly why outsiders read them as unmotivated.

Some people call this the lightworker syndrome. You want to help, you want your presence to matter to other people, but the fire for ordinary worldly goals has gone out. The problem is how it looks from the outside. To the very people you're trying to serve, you can come across as lazy, and once that impression sticks they stop listening. They won't take your advice and they won't let you lend a hand.

It also explains why so many gentle, giving types end up in a hard place emotionally, sometimes in a psychiatric ward. You pour yourself out for others and discover the world has little patience for sensitive people. Those who operate purely on self-interest will happily accept your generosity and keep taking until there's nothing left of you. Some of them will mock you on the way down or step on you while you're already there. The strange part: plenty of them have no idea they're doing any of it. That's just human nature running on autopilot, acting without a thought for anyone else, right up until a person decides they've got their own growing to do.

So how do you shake the lightworker syndrome and get your drive back? You plant your feet in the real world. Keep serving people as well as you can, but draw lines. Nobody gets to treat you like a doormat. And there's no law saying you can't be every bit as ambitious as you once were.

There's another layer to this. Having lifted yourself to a higher state of mind, you're actually equipped to live a fuller, stronger life than before. Some people are afraid of that strength, so they pretend their worldly ambition has simply vanished. Once you've grown enough to stand firmly in reality, though, you see the trade was never real. Serving others doesn't require giving up your own aims. Stay focused on other people and, oddly, your own needs tend to get met in the bargain, almost on their own. When your attention is that fully turned outward, you find yourself reaching your goals with far less strain than the grinding effort you used to put in. Your awareness climbs higher still. You locate your real purpose in helping other people and get your own satisfaction as a byproduct.

The Jewish philosopher Viktor Frankl put it this way in Man's Search for Meaning: we discover our own purpose by helping others discover theirs.

It's a common experience to feel like you're sacrificing a great deal in service to other people, then watch it all circle back to you regardless. When it returns, the weight feels lighter, because you never had to spend the energy you would have burned from a lower state of mind, back when you chased your own goals and only bothered with others out of duty or religious obligation. This is also why spiritual and religious groups so often gather in mental hospitals, and why support groups like Emotions Anonymous carry a spiritual thread. People reach for a higher purpose when they're down. They get back on their feet once they recognize their own power and potential, though it may take a long stretch in the wilderness, doing the slow, demanding work of growing up on the inside.

- Erwin Wooten