Description
Discover the deep purpose hidden at the very core of your being
To know your true calling – your dharma, as the yogis say – is perhaps the greatest desire within each of us. And yet, few can say we know our purpose with absolute certainty. Fortunately, there is a time-tested guide – an ancient map – for discovering and fulfilling your unique calling. In The Great Work of Your Life, Stephen Cope walks you through each step of the journey.
Cope teaches that the secrets to unlocking the mystery of your dharma can be found in the spiritual classic the Bhagavad Gita – a timeless tale about the path to dharma, told through an instructive dialogue between the fabled archer Arjuna and his divine mentor, Krishna. In The Great Work of Your Life, Cope uses Arjuna’s journey as a framework for each of us to discover our own dharma, masterfully weaving together stories of both well-known and ordinary Western lives. Throughout the book, Cope explores the “Four Pillars of Dharma”, or the stages we move through as we fulfill our own true callings. Each pillar is illustrated with riveting true stories, including:
- Jane Goodall’s ability to follow her heart without question
- The little-known tale of Walt Whitman’s dharma discovery in the second half of life
- How living your purpose can be like training for the Olympics in the story of Susan B. Anthony
- Ludwig van Beethoven’s triumphs over childhood abuse, depression, and going deaf
- Gandhi’s transformation from tongue-tied youth to leader of the Indian independence movement
- Understanding how divine guidance works with the life of Harriet Tubman
- Additional insights and tales from the lives of both famous luminaries and everyday people
“We feel the happiest and most fulfilled when we bring highly concentrated effort to our true calling”, teaches Cope. Moving and inspiring, The Great Work of Your Life is a call to action and step-by-step guide for each of us to discover and embrace our dharma.
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Kathy H –
Easy to read and full of great insights. Love the way he interconnects the Gita with stories of some of his acquaintances and their journeys while also weaving in history of some of our greatest artists and humanitarians all the while helping you to realize that they were all just average people to begin with. Loved it.
Swati –
My favourite work by Stephen Cope is “The Wisdom of Yoga”.
A book that changed my life and made meditation a very credible and enticing life practice for me.
It’s a very profound, deeply insightful, and incisive treatise on teh subject written in a very light semi-fiction format that makes it readily accessible and digestible by the average reader.
My heartfelt gratitude to Stephen Cope for producing such a work of art.
Have already gifted that book to atleast six different people!
Lourdes S. –
Beautiful, wonderful book. A book I will definitely return to many times
Daquan M. –
I purchased this book by recommendation of Chat GPT and I must say that this was well worth it. I could resonate with most of the examples having lived some form of it myself. It opens your eyes or in my case, reopened them.
Angela Risner The Sassy Orange –
Finding this book was very crucial for me. For years, I’ve been trying to fit myself into an expected mold. My parents were born during the Great Depression. They came from very poor families, and to them, success was a job that didn’t involve physical labor or coming home covered in dirt. My dad wore a suit and tie to work. That was a measure of success.
I was raised to want to work in an office. Actually, my parents wanted me to become a pharmacist, but I couldn’t imagine anything more boring. I was artsy. I majored in music. And then I ended up working in an office. This is what I was supposed to do.
But it wasn’t. And for twenty years, I forced it to work. But I was never completely happy. And over the years, I became ill. From the recycled air in building where you couldn’t open the windows. From sitting 8+ hours per day, 5 or more days per week.
We weren’t made to do that. Our bodies were never meant to be so stagnant. Now that I’m finally healthy again, I don’t ever want to go back to corporate. I don’t want to sit for 8 hours per day. I want something that allows me to be active and yes, even to get dirty.
Stephen Cope had a similar journey. Trained as a psychotherapist, he went to the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health for a four month retreat…and never left. He found his dharma, his calling, there as the Director of the Institute for Extraordinary Living.
Cope has written several books, but this was the first of his that I’ve read. I plan on reading the rest, too. This book focuses on the Bhagavad Gita and the lessons Krishna taught to Arjuna:
1. Look to your dharma. Discern, name, and then embrace your own dharma.
2. Do it full out! Do it with every fiber of your being. Commit yourself utterly.
3. Let go of the fruits. Relinquish the fruits of your actions. Success and failure in the eyes of the world are not your concern. “It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else.”
4. Turn it over to God. All true vocation arises in the stream of love that flows between the individual soul and the divine soul.
Cope uses the stories of Jane Goodall, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ghandi and man others, as well as his own friends to illustrate what happens when dharma is embraced or pushed aside.
There are so many great points in this book, I can’t share them all, but here are a few favorites:
•”Dharma,” he says,”is the essential nature of a being, comprising the sum of its particular qualities or characteristics, and determining, by virtue of the tendencies or dispositions it implies, the manner in which this being with conduct itself, either in a general way or in relation to each particular circumstance.” The word dharma in this teaching, then refers to the peculiar and idiosyncratic qualities of each being.
•Remember Krishna’s teaching: We cannot be anyone we want to be. We can only authentically be who we are. If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not, it will destroy you. And what, precisely is destroyed? Energy is destroyed first. Those shining eyes. And then faith. And then hope. And then life itself.
•The false self is a collection of ideas we have in our minds about who we should be.
•Furthermore, at a certain age it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s dream and eschewed our own: No one really cares except us. When you scratch the surface, you finally discover that it doesn’t really matter a whit who else you disappoint if you’re disappointing yourself. The only question that makes sense to ask is: Is your life working for you?
•With the name came a flood of regret. It was not the tidal wave of hope and relief he had counted on. Learning to embrace The Gift at midlife is complicated. Because naming The Gift and celebrating it also means grieving for lost opportunities. They mean facing squarely the suffering of self-betrayal.
•We in twenty-first-century American have strange dreams and fantasies about retirement. We imagine a life of leisure. The Golden Years. But what is this leisure in the service of?
•The fear of leaping is, of course, the fear of death. It is precisely the fear of being used up. And dharma does use us up, to be sure. But why not be used up giving everything we’ve got to the world? This is precisely what Krishna teaches Arjuna: You cannot hold on to your life. You don’t need to. You are immortal.
•”Like Henry James’ obscure hurt and Dostoevsky’s holy disease, even Beethoven’s loss of hearing was in some sense necessary or at least useful, to the fulfillment of his creative quest.” Mysteriously, The Gift issues forth out of The Wound. It does not quite heal The Wound, but it makes sense of it. It gives it meaning. And meaning is everything.
•He teaches that our decisions about our actions flow inexorably from our understanding of who we are. And if we do not know who we are, we will make poor choices.
•Ghandi was discovering the power of simplification and renunciation. He stumbled onto a truth widely known by yogis: Every time we discerningly renounce a possession, we free up energy that can be channeled into the pursuit of dharma.
•”If you don’t find your work in the world and throw yourself wholeheartedly into it, you will inevitably make your self your work. There’s no way around it: You will take your self as your primary project. You will, in the very best case, dedicate your life to the perfection of your self. To the perfection of your health, intelligence, beauty, home or even spiritual prowess. And the problem is simply this: This self-dedication is too small a work. It inevitably becomes a prison.”
Even before I started this book, I had already begun to pare my lifestyle down. I had the lifestyle of someone who could buy many Kate Spade handbags and lots of pretty toys. But I don’t want to do the work that brings that anymore. So, I have adopted a lifestyle that allows me to stay away from the corporate world (for now at least.) My goal is to live as simply yet comfortably as I can. And I no longer measure myself against other people’s definition of success. It’s okay if your definition of success means having a certain car, home, or lifestyle. It’s okay, too, for me to define success as being able to breathe in fresh air, to go to the Yoga classes I want to, and to not be chained to an office.
Highly recommend.
R Sharpe –
I’ve just read three of Stephen Cope’s books in succession and loved them all: The Great Work of Your Life, The Wisdom of Yoga and Deep Human Connection. They each offer a valuable distillation of more complex works enabling the lay reader, like me, to absorb truths that I otherwise may not have accessed. Stephen has a beautiful writing style and peppers his own thoughts and other quotes with stories that make his writing come alive. Each of the books I have is beginning to look rather battered as I have a tendency to keep referring back to them.
Henry –
Sometimes a book just finds you. In my case I just turned 50 and feel as if my calling has escaped me despite having been successful in business. With a somewhat heavy heart that dharma has escaped my every effort to catch it (there lies the paradox) I downloaded Cope’s book on my new Kindle and read it straight through. And how could I not read this book? My father did his dissertation on Walden’s Pond and Thoreau and HDT and I share the same first and middle name, “Henry David,” as I was named after the great writer. Thoreau is a central figure in Cope’s book.
I love spiritual non-fiction and have read well over 100 books on the soul, love, the shadow, spirit, and how to live an abundant and happy life. And while many are dog eared, underlined and highlighted, never before have I ever read a book that was just perfect. I dont purport to be qualified to edit such a great book but had I been put to the task, I wouldn’t have changed, added or subtracted one word. This is a brilliant work of art and although Cope is modest and even comically self-disparaging at times, I believe this book has no peers in uncovering one’s soul purpose in this incarnation–if that is of interest to you. And if you are quite pleased (and fortunate) to have found a meaningful calling, then still read about how some of the world’s most respected and gifted artists, abolitionists, mediators and statesman (Gandhi) and others lived their lives, sometimes crazed and painful, with purpose and with a gift so special that all of them knew that their work flowed through them with divine grace. In short, ego was pushed aside to make room for greatness to blossom.
As you go through this book and witness how those graced with a karmic, dharmic bedazzling gift (Thoreau, Whitman, Beethoven, Tubman, Gandhi, et al.,) either read and lived the wisdom from the Bhagavad Vita or if uneducated, like Harriet Tubman, still had the precious gift bestowed upon them, you may get the sense, as I did, that if you seek fame, fortune and ego gratification, dharma will look elsewhere. Yes, you may build skyscrapers and golf courses like Donald Trump, but if you are drawn to this book you will be far more interested by the personal journey of an enlightened monk in his little 10 x 10 room than by someone chasing and succeeding in finding a buck on Wall Street.
Maybe I was put on this earth to be good salesman and caring father. There is no crime in or to my life. Yet, I still believe that something has evaded me. Tonight in my meditation practice I asked for guidance from the divine, as Cope suggests in the book. I’ll be watching for the signs.
Please read this book and please share it with your friends. It’s a game changer. I once read a quote from the Dalai Lama that said “teach all eight years olds to meditate and war will be eliminated in one generation.” I wholeheartedly agree and will add that if you read this book and live it, you will be more fulfilled, and for the lucky few whose dharmas are finally jarred loose from reading “The Great Work of Your Life,” I imagine that it will be better than finding a gold ticket to Willy Wanka’s Chocolate Factory!
I am so happy that this book found me, even if that means that reading about the fulfilled dharma of others is as close as I will ever get to catching that elusive tiger by the tail. Perhaps when I give up the search, my dharma will find me. Perhaps I’ve had it all along.
David K. –
An unexpected purchase randomly searching thru kindle books. Came at the precise moment I needed inspiration for my new avenue of creative writing. I ingested the book in two days in the midday sunshine of an emerging spring. My gratitude to it’s author for sharing.