Do You Hate Your Job?
If you’re in a job you don’t enjoy – whether that’s because the work isn’t stimulating, you don’t feel fairly treated, or you don’t like your co-workers or boss – it feels pretty crappy.
Essentially there are three things you can do. The first is to do nothing, in which case you’ll keep experiencing the same stuff over and over.
The second thing you could do is to change your job. Either within the same company, or to a different one.
And the third is to change the way you think about your situation.
This powerful line from A Course in Miracles gets to the heart of the matter: “Your thoughts determine the world you see.”
Marcus Aurelius said something similar around the year 175: “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
In other words, if we can manage our thoughts, then we can directly control our experiences. So where do our thoughts come from? Hint: it’s not our brain.
Our thoughts originate within the mind. Unfortunately we can’t conceptualize what mind is, since it isn’t within our sensory three-dimensional realm. Mind is outside of time and space. So trying to wrap our heads around it is futile.
There are two components to the mind: ego and spirit. They are mutually exclusive, and we are always choosing one or the other. What we can be in touch with is which we’ve chosen. And we know that by our thoughts.
Whenever we have thoughts of sadness, fear, shame, lack, or any other negative emotion, we’ve chosen the ego. When we choose the mind of spirit, or what the Course refers to as the Holy Spirit, then all our thoughts are of love, a unity with everything, and peace.
So back to our crappy job situation. We can do whatever we feel compelled to do – whether that’s sticking with the current situation or leaving. But by observing our thoughts along the way, we can recognize when we’re in our ego mind. And we can gently say to ourselves these words from the Course: “I give everything all the meaning it has for me. And I could see peace instead of this.”
Observing the ego (in us and others) – without judgment – shifts us into the mind of spirit.
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