Inner Work

For the week of: August 4, 2003

Content and Process

A true leader of society must be a person of vision who sees the big picture and large scale possibilities. Within our own personal domain, within our individual inner world, the responsibility of leadership can only rest with us. But we abdicate our role, remaining stuck in the quagmire of all the petty, banal thoughts and emotions continually coursing through us. As long as we concern ourselves exclusively with the content of our experience, we have no chance of ordering the course of our inner life.

Spiritual practice, while rooted in the content of experience, brings us toward a perspective on the whole, toward seeing our various processes of reaction and identification, toward stabilizing our sensitive energy and standing in consciousness. We work to see thoughts as just thoughts and emotions as just emotions, instead of allowing ourselves to be driven by their content. Letting the stream of sensory and inner experience pass through us, we learn to live on a larger scale, in the energetic and intentional processes. While attending to the details, we also widen our perspective to the whole.

For this week, notice where you stand in regard to the balance between content and process.

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