ST: How did you first become involved with your work in "career development?" Maybe I should call it "anti-career" development.

RJ: I fell into it synchronistically, which is the way I approach all work. I grew up in a household where my father hated his work. And then when I was age 15 or so, he changed jobs to something he really wanted to do. Immediately I noticed a change in our house; the atmosphere lightened up tremendously. So that's when I learned that all of our work - my own included- is deeply influenced by family history. This is something we must take into account when making plans for our work lives.

And I have to say, ironically, the other influence here is the fact that I did not start working until after I got out of college. I kept telling my father that I wanted to be like Siddhartha - just sit by the river. He'd yell at me and say, "No, you can't. You have to work for a living." I recall that when I first went to India at age 19, my girlfriend's father looked at me with a sneer, and said, "If everyone did what you did, who would run the gas stations?" But going to India awoke me to the issue of spirituality versus functionality. When I got to the East, I found, yes indeed it is spiritual, but nothing works.

When I returned to America and began what I would call my own life's work, I was acutely aware of our inability here to integrate contemplative practice into the Western style of economy I realized that if we were going to effect any type of spiritual transformation in our society, we had to re-vision the way we think about work and the way we do work.

ST: Which leads us to this peculiar term that you use, calling your own vocation "anti-career work." What do you mean by this term?

RJ: I've kept this term against the advice of countless people who tell me it's "negative." But I am adamant about the fact that what we are after here is not a career. Too many people are crucifying their lives on the cross of career. What we're after is holistic life alignment in which career is one aspect of the entirety - not the entire being. We are sacrificing quietude, inspiration, poetic heart relationship, everything, to this monolithic engine called career. Therefore, I am very emphatic that what we're after is not a career; it's an anti-career. Or to put it more positively, a holistic career, an organic outgrowth of your life alignment that does not feed on and consume your entire existence.

ST: So what you teach is about more than just getting a "good job."

RJ: Yes, because getting a good job won't solve the problem. That's the big illusion. Think about all the people you know who have good jobs and who are absolutely miserable. What I've been teaching for ten years is about aligning your life so that your work in the world reflects your true priorities, reflects your inner nature, reflects who you deeply sense you are. Your work should be supporting your human growth, not detracting from it.

ST: So let's say I want to learn how to create a job that I love. What steps do I take?

RJ: First of all, I'd really like to forget the phrase "how to," because I think that's where we start to get in trouble. We've become a "how to" culture; there's ten easy steps toward anything. But when you get there you find you haven't transformed.

What I teach is not based on the ego standpoint. It is about entering, deeply into the process or creation. My argument is, and my experience is, that when you enter deeply into the process of creation, the work, the job, the vocation emerges out of your alignment. And that is the real work. The premise of all my teaching is that we're here to do something. When you let go of all the false ideas about "good jobs" and so on, then what you are actually here to do becomes obvious.

ST: In your new audio learning course, you go deeply into the concept of working with the chakras. That's quite unusual for a former Columbia professor.

RJ: Some people think so.

ST: So, the obvious question is, how do the chakras relate to anyone's work life?

RJ: They don't. And that's why it's so exquisite, because the chakras is a model of human integration. They provide an age-old cross-cultural model of body/mind integration that is relatively easy to understand. And if you apply this holistic tool, then you don't get lost in the notion that your work is something separate from the rest of your life. So instead of asking what the chakras have to do with career, you might as well ask what they have to do with your life.

What I am really trying to teach is a way to clear a channel for the flow of creation that will allow our work in the world to emerge. The thing about the chakra model that's so important is that it is not a model based on the ego. It is not a model based exclusively on the outer world or the inner world. It is a model based on the entirety of your being. It allows you to revision your career in universal terms instead of the small terms that we're all accustomed to doing it with.

ST: Could you give me an example of how this might work?

RJ: Well, remember, what we're really working with here is moving through the process of creation. The chakras serve as anchoring devices. Through meditation, visualization, and various arts of focusing, you learn to actually move your attention to the particular chakra- and not simply intellectually, but through feeling and intuition, and through the full force of your being. You experience the issues that are located in each respective chakra, which are fundamental to your life. For example, the second chakra connects with the issue of feeling versus numbness. And here the idea is that any successful vocation must have strong concern and feeling as its fuel. When I first started doing this work many winters ago, I was still under the romantic delusion that careers could come only from jobs. But as I worked with more and more people, I came to realize that some of the strongest careers I have ever seen actually grew our of frustration, anger, and righteous indignation. No career has ever grown out of numbness. So what you explore in the second chakra issue are ways to contact your feelings and let those feelings flow. This makes you aware of what you really care about, which is a lot different than holding onto a cultural idea of what you should be caring about.

So that's a glimpse of ways your chakras can help you. They can help you get out of your head and into the heart of the matter of where your work is really coming from. And they allow you to touch the unconscious forces which are truly creating your vocation and align the force of your consciousness with them.

ST: How does meditation inform what you teach about finding right work?

RJ: This is very important because a lot of people think that if they just send out resumés or define their qualifications, it will move them into their life's work. But what about their entire inner world? What meditation can do is help you link your inner world with your outer world? I am not teaching how to use meditation to escape from reality. Meditation can help you to be more present in the world, and in your work. We're also using meditation to consciously move our dreams and ideals into action. Meditation helps you cross over the corpus callosssum - cross the two sides of the brain - the receptive and the active. Whatever you do, it is vitally important that you find ways to involve your inner world in the discussion of your outer life.

ST: There is a lot of information- books and seminars- on how to find the career of your dreams. How is your work different?

RJ: What I teach is not only different from corporate seminars, it's vastly different from conventional career counseling. Number one, we incorporate "altered states" into our work. We respect the entire dimension of the human. Number two, we see work as part of an unfolding; not as something that separates the inner and outer world. Three, traditional career counseling will have you list your talents and abilities and then try to match those with the market place. But they often forget to include all the rich mine of inside wealth and possibility that comes when you begin to incorporate your family history in your work; your deep family history- not just mom, dad, grandma auld grandpa- but your lineage, your ancestors, what I call the root chakras.

How else is my work different? My work is different because I do not just focus on product, I focus on the process. If the process has integrity and is genuine, then the product will flow out of it naturally. So this is literally a holistic approach to finding right work. It sees work as something that is part of our spiritual growth, nor as something that we grudgingly have to do. ST