Are you really '‘doing the work”?
Art: The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse
by Lian Brook-Tyler
The reasons your partner, family, and (potential) clients aren’t ‘DOING THE WORK’ will often be the same reasons you aren’t (especially if you think you are)…
Let’s begin by defining what’s meant by ‘the work’ as it’s become a term adopted and repeated in ‘conscious’ circles, often without understanding the first principles of what it actually means.
The term ‘the work’ comes originally from The Great Work, or in Latin, the Magnum Opus, and it came from Hermeticism and then used in ceremonial magic traditions descended from it. It is the path of spiritual alchemy, symbolised by the creation of the philosopher's stone, which represents the reclamation of the soul from the unconscious, the attainment of transcendence, and ultimately union with universal consciousness.
Put more simply, the Great Work entails devoting to know, accept, be responsible for, and unite with all parts of oneself, which is really all parts of everything (but attempting to leap directly to “Oneness” will typically result in bypassing the very parts of us needed for the One to be anywhere close to an embodied truth.)
The work requires going deep into our wounds, disentangling ourselves from conditioning, becoming conscious of the mechanisms that allow us to function well in a family and culture that values a certain kind of functioning, to meet and reclaim all of the hidden, lost and rejected parts of ourselves, including the painful, shameful parts that we can’t acknowledge lie within us and so are projecting onto others.
The Great Work is the work of individuation, transcendence, and union, hardly typical human endeavours, and therefore it is beset with bewildering, terrifying, humbling, heart-breaking gauntlets which make it possibly the most treacherous path a human can embark upon.
And yet, the term ‘doing the work’ has been diluted and popularised to mean almost any kind of self-improvement or self-care work, from energy healing, embodiment, journalling, and sitting in circles to coaching, counselling, CBT and EFT, and yet, whilst those things might be effective in dealing with surface issues, can be a necessary precursor to doing the work, and can sometimes be done beneficially alongside or in service of it - they’re not doing the Great Work (with a few exceptions which I speak about below).
You might be thinking… But what does it matter, aside to purists and pedants (which admittedly, I can be)... Surely ‘doing the work’ is a good thing, even if it's not the 'Great Work'?
Yes, and... The challenge with doing work without a conscious understanding of and choosing into the Great Work, is that even if it brings beneficial and desired changes, it will almost always also result in repressing, contorting, shaming, aggrandising, controlling, and abandoning parts of ourselves (especially our inner child)... Just in new, more hidden, and more brilliant ways (the more brilliant we are the more sophisticated and convincing those ways are).
Some of the other ways we believe we’re doing the work (this is by no means an exhaustive list but speaks to the most common fallacies):
Working with a coach or mentor to learn to sell or market more effectively - this one requires real honesty to identify because it’s not always spoken of directly, especially when charismatic leaders, cliques, and cult-like thinking are at play
Training in a methodology, however transformative, healing or spiritual
Working with a life coach
Masculine/Feminine polarity work
Spiritual seeking via new age and ‘neo non-duality’ ideas and teachings
Diving into archetypes via astrology, Human Design, and Gene Keys - believing because those systems talk about shadow, we are really doing the work to integrate it
And again, whilst this kind of work is rarely engaged with as the Great Work, some can be used in service of it, when done consciously *FOR THAT PURPOSE* (if I could underline and highlight those three words, 8 million times I would, and I know even then they still wouldn’t be seen or fully understood because of the parts of each of us that are stacked against that happening), which means devoting to becoming aware of how we’re projecting our unmet needs upon them (which is possibly the hardest thing of all to see and keep seeing).
Side-note: I am also not knocking any of these things - I have done almost all of these at some point - some were empowering, illuminating, some were even healing (a vital component of individuation) - and almost all of them also allowed me to aggrandise or bypass parts of myself. I also still regularly use some of them, only now in service of the Great Work.
So now we have a mutual - if maybe uncomfortable and unwelcome - understanding of what the Great Work isn’t, here’s the main forms that doing it can take (this again isn’t exhaustive but are the most accessible and effective ways, especially for those of us in the West and/or a Western worldview):
Doing shadow work and inner child work with a therapist or guide - IF they’re equipped to do it properly and well, which is *much* rarer than you might think (see recent episode with William Apple on this topic)
Men or women’s work IF it’s intentionally created in a way to do process what’s uncovered and activated - I believe the ManKind Project is a good example of this
Working with teacher plants IF the devotion, reverence, community, and guidance is in place to integrate what is shown (this is exceptionally rare, even when it’s supposedly in place)
Learning from a true elder or initiated teacher in a spiritual, shamanic, or esoteric lineage in a way that compels you into the depths of your soul to find, bring back and make whole what you discover there - This is challenging because there are few of these people available to learn from and most of us have the sense to run kicking and screaming when we find one!
And usually doing the work will require several of these different forms coming together over time and space, for example, sitting with a plant teacher and then working separately with a therapist to integrate it, or more rarely, working with several different strands woven together, as is the case with the alchemical and shamanic work we do at Be Mythical.
It’s taken longer than I anticipated to speak about what the work is and isn’t, but it has made clear the first reason we don’t do the work: We don’t understand what the work is and therefore are innocently doing other alluring things that we see others doing who say that they’re doing the work!
The next common reason is that other things are taking priority in terms of where we invest our time, attention, energy, and money… Sometimes this is *entirely* right for where we are (the Great Work is really not for everyone, at all times), and sometimes it’s because of one of the reasons below.
A lack of understanding of the reason to do the work - we are so conditioned to go for known, direct, linear, and supposedly logical routes to resolve the challenge in our lives - I spoke about this briefly in this week’s podcast (see link to clip below), I tried seemingly everything to resolve my chronic facial pain, including alternative solutions, not realising it was a symptom of a deeper wound that I wasn’t ready to face.
We are scared consciously or subconsciously of what it might require of us - the fear is understandable because the Great Work will necessitate going to the darkest, most painful, most lonely, and taboo places at times, we need to be aware of and ready for that.
We’re struggling to justify it to people who we consider stake-holders in our lives, such as partners, close friends, and parents, perhaps they don’t understand or value it or they fear us changing and what it might mean for the relationship, and we’re still looking to them to make us feel secure and approved of before we make a choice.
I write this not to make anyone wrong for not doing the work, but to show how we’re all journeying - or will journey or have journeyed - with much the same reasons not to, that often we will project onto others, rather than be honest and accountable for it within ourselves.
If we can be honest and accountable about those reasons within ourselves then firstly, it allows us to tend to what’s in the way of us doing the work (which magically enough, is probably going to mean doing the work…), and secondly, from that place it makes much more sense - logically and intuitively - for others to choose us, if we’re change-workers, as their guide, teacher, or coach to do their work with.
Because the reasons your partner, family, and (potential) clients are really ‘doing the work’ will often be the same reasons you are.
All my love,
Lian
P.S. There’s so many nuances and subtleties to this subject that this post (even though it became much longer than intended) can cover, and my intention isn’t for this post to be perfect and complete, it’s decidedly neither of those things, and it’s certainly not to say that people doing the Great Work are better than people not doing it, or even that doing the Great Work is better than not doing it, but simply to shine some light on a misunderstanding that I’ve been nudged to illuminate more directly than I have in the past.
P.P.S. Description of the artwork chosen:
"It pictures the titular character of Tennyson's poem, also titled The Lady of Shalott (1842). In the poem, the Lady had been confined to her quarters, under a curse that forbade her to go outside or even look directly out of a window; her only view of the world was through a mirror. She sat below the mirror and wove a tapestry of scenes she could see by the reflection. After defying the curse by looking out the window at Camelot, the Lady has made her way to a small boat. This is the moment that is pictured in Waterhouse's painting, as the Lady is leaving to face her destiny. She is pictured sitting on the tapestry she has woven." -Wikipedia
P.P.P.S. This blog post went on to be explored in podcast episode 450 ‘How to know if you're really "Doing The Work"?‘
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