What does Spirit mean for you?

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one… the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy…

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can…

Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

George Bernard Shaw (playwright and social activist, 1856-1950)

I’m with GBS on this! Shaw was writing at a time when religion was still a given, but he wanted to free the spirit from churches, priests and dogma and reclaim it for all of us - as something we can live every day - and that infuses our life between birth and death with meaning.

History has a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water: so as modernity embraced science and speed, it consigned religion to the dusty corners, the cults and the fundamentalists, and we became wary of words like spirit or soul.

In a world that champions individual freedom we have forgotten that we belong in and to the world – whether that be our family and friends, nature, or a bigger sense of global belonging. We have a distaste for moralising and extol the joys of being untethered, accountable to no one, masters of our own destiny.

And yet we long for connection. Loneliness is epidemic in westernised countries. And even work or a life that seemed attractive and pleasurable at first can come to feel meaningless.

When we find our ‘tribe’ or the place that makes us know our life matters we breathe a sigh of relief.

This is what I felt when I first learned about Psychosynthesis. It felt, I told colleagues, like coming home. I breathed out deeply. The ah-hah moment was life changing. This is what I had been looking for without knowing it.

Here was a way of seeing the world that brought all I loved together: therapeutic rigour with creativity, language and the arts with science, joy and laughter with attention and care to our woes and challenges. Here was a model of the psyche that included the passage of time and our interdependence with others and the world around us.

I learned tools and approaches that enabled me to “stay with the trouble” - as Donna Haraway puts it - without giving way to despair, others’ or my own. I learned to gently holding my clients’ spirit – their self-worth – in my hands, like a fluttering dove, until they were ready to reclaim it for themselves. My coaching and leadership practice were immeasurably enriched.

This now is the model for our Spirit at Work leadership coaching programme.

We are meaning making creatures. It’s why we love stories - not just to entertain us but because each contains a nugget of meaning to help us make sense of a confusing world.

For me spirit ties all this together - it’s the spark that helps me find a sense of meaning, that keeps me seeking purposeful work and ways to contribute to my world, that reminds me to see the beauty, even on a flat, grey day in London! Spirit can be the bright new buds of Spring, the fresh stream filled by winter rains, or the fire that enlivens. When we talk of a spirited horse or the spirit of place we can feel the vitality, the energy surging through.

In our Spirit at Work programme we create space and practices that allow each person to connect with and express spirit in their own way. We’re not embarrassed to talk about the higher values of beauty, love, compassion or courage - and how we might live these in small or large ways.

In the context of a world rocked by crises – wars, fires, floods, social division and loss – the steady flame of spirit reminds us to hold hope alive.

At Spirit at Work it means we focus on the conversations that matter – as coaches and leaders and humans – about meaning, purpose, identity, joy, contribution. So that our fears or fury don’t overwhelm or paralyse us, and so we can build strong futures. And through practical tools and approaches we learn how to create the enabling space to hold these conversations with our clients, teams and colleagues in the workplace.

So what does spirit mean for you? Join us on the Spirit at Work programme and find out!