I just had a great conversation with Robert Gass, who has come out with over 20 music albums, coached 100,000 folks at organizations like GE and MoveOn.org on leadership, and lived with shamans and healers worldwide. He just sent me a piece on Spiritual Activism:

The purpose of practice is to practice for real life. The test of our meditation, our reading of spiritual books, our retreats, and our yoga is: How do we live? How do we show up, moment to moment, in our work, in our families, in our communities? Rather than wondering about how our spiritual work can inform our activism, I suggest that we actually embrace our work itself as our spiritual path. Our work will present us all the opportunities we need to learn the spiritual lessons of attachment and nonattachment, love in action, and staying calm in the chaos. Spiritual activism is important not simply because it’s spiritual. We cultivate these qualities of spirit because they work. By staying connected to our purpose, by keeping our hearts open and minds clear, we are far more likely to actually play our part in creating a better world.

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