What is spiritual about work? Isn’t work essentially not spiritual, because of its worldly, materialistic nature? What may productivity and procrastination have to do with spirituality? These assumptions or prejudices may have determined your outlook to a variety of choices or situations in the past. But now, lets leave that all behind to explore something with a fresh perspective. Shall we?

The dilemma is not whether to take action or leave it to the universe to manifest it for you. The dilemma is not about what’s real or illusory. The question is just this – how willing and open you are to solve a problem or create a solution. As Sadhguru puts it, ‘You must find what is it that you really want to do. Then you will always pre-pone everything’. Here, the dilemma is no longer about being productive or procrastinating. It is about investigating and cultivating clarity about what is it that you really care to do, are open to seek, and willing to strive for.

What you do does not define who you are. Who are you, really? Because this may not have been a question that may have occurred to most people with the intensity it requires, an alternative is to distract the mind with chores to do, goals to achieve, or things to obtain. Whether to be productive, or to procrastinate, is a natural consequence of approaching life this way because your mind may convince itself about fulfilling an ascertained objective, but your heart can tell the inadequacy or injustice from that artificial narrative. So, you end up feeling like not doing something, but you are thinking you must be productive. Logical thought wants to fix an approach, but emotions swing because it doesn’t align with whatever is the truth of life. The dilemma starts there – stress, anxiety, insecurity, pride, guilt, fear are effects of the mind from what you may have innocently caused by the mind, as your own mind.

Who you are must define what you do though. This is another approach, which some may even call spiritual. Let’s assume that you do not know who you are. You are honest enough to admit within your self that whatever you know is only limited – ignorance, however, is always unlimited. You are at least in sync now with what you know and the boundless and infinite range of what you do not know. Seeking will naturally evolve out of that condition, allowing one to be conscious and not resisting their body, mind, emotions, and energies. Not resisting does not entail succumbing to temptations and unconscious activity, but results in deepening awareness and creating an inner stability. Awareness will bring clarity, and stability matures into fostering the discipline to do what is needed, not just what one may fancy. Now, there is no question of habitually being productive or yielding to procrastination, but about becoming perceptive and sensitive to a point where action is incisive.

Sure, there are a variety of factors that are determining success or failure in the world. We may call it fate, luck, god, or effort. But even among these four, if it is only the effort that is in our control, spirituality is focused on making that effort more successful by optimizing its quality, and not just maximizing quantity. Now you are not only productive but also looking to pre-pone when you can, and equally wait when you must. These are the fall-outs of clarity and stability, which truly spirituality is.

There is neither a need to be productive or to procrastinate when you perceive there is nothing to be gained or to lose. It is in this living moment that everything has ever existed. The idea with spirituality is to be truly successful within your self first, and then the rest is very much a play.