What It Means to Do the Work

Everyone is saying “do the work” 

or “I’m doing the work”… but what does that really mean?

It isn’t referring to the job you spend eight or nine hours a day doing. In this context, I’m talking about the work of being and becoming — the kind that is with you everywhere you go.

Looking back on my journey, it appears I’ve been intentionally “doing the work” for about a decade now. 

But what about all the time before that, when I was simply curious about things I heard were good for me? And what about the moments during that decade when I thought I had fallen off the path… or believed there was no path at all?

Your partner is saying it. Your friends are saying it. Your dog even looks at you sometimes with a face that says, “Dude… do the work.”

But what the hell does that actually mean?

Can we be doing the work while unaware we are doing it? Does life require us to constantly operate from “doing the work”? Is the work and our path essentially the same thing? 

If I go to a yoga class twice a week, does that qualify?

I’m here to offer my perspective on what I believe it means to be “doing the work.” It is simple but complex. Easy but hard.

The essential components include becoming conscious and self-aware of your patterns, behaviors, and conditioning; feeling and processing emotions;; and developing the capacity to make choices that align more deeply with your values and your truth.

My intention for this article is for you to move some energy around this phrase and to offer my perspectives. This comes from my own work and supporting others in theirs. Let’s dive in!

There is no such thing as the work being done.

I’m sorry to burst the bubble of those whose narratives include, “but I’ve done so much work…” The work is always beginning again as new life circumstances arise — often bringing things you could not have imagined or planned for, let alone been fully prepared to meet.

So my first point is this: going to one powerful weekend retreat, having one heart-connecting conversation with your parents, or finally getting the relationship you desired is not necessarily doing the work. These may be by-products or expressions of work you’ve done, but they are not the end by a long shot.

The second point is that “doing the work” is not just about talking about doing the work. There is action that must be taken and inaction that must be honored for someone to be truly engaged in it and to make it a living practice.

A third point I want to make is that “doing the work” can begin to imply rank or status. In many ways — especially here in the West — it is a profound privilege to engage in inner work. And when that privilege is embodied unconsciously, it can create a façade of superiority that separates those overtly “doing the work” from those perceived not to be.

One way I see this manifest is when spiritual leaders and personal growth coaches omit much of their humanness with students, peers, or even family members. That omission creates distance.

It can leave you wondering… do they even poop?

Personally, I gravitate toward teachers and people who are willing to speak about the messier parts of their human experience. It helps me feel less alone — and less screwed up myself..

What a relief.

Why do we even have to do the work?

Aren’t we perfect in the eyes of God, the Mother, or the Tao?

Yes. We most certainly are. Always.

And we can return to that.

That sense of connection lives at our center, waiting to be remembered — waiting to envelop our entire being.

But do most people truly believe that in their whole being, most of the time?

If I’m being honest — as I hope you are as well — hell no.

And it is not entirely my fault.

This is how my brain and nervous system developed.

For example, there is a place in my nervous system that gets activated when I feel I’ve “done something wrong.” It often arrives with toxic shame, self-deprecation, or aggression directed toward myself.

The thoughts might sound like:

you idiot

wow, you did it again

you’re a bad person… 

or a bad partner

It took me a long time to bring enough awareness to these moments to notice the thought loops auto-populating my mind and body each time the “I’m in trouble” response was triggered.

Most of the time, these reactions are blowing things out of proportion. However, my nervous system doesn’t know that. And it remains a mystery why one situation triggers this response while another similar one does not.

Maybe it’s a testament to the work I’ve done.

I can attest to being more regulated at times — receiving information that, in the past, would have wrecked me, yet in that moment does not. And I can also look at times when my needs were deeply unmet and I was under-resourced, where receiving feedback or criticism sent me instantly into total turmoil.

Regulated or not, I’ve noticed the thoughts can still arise.

I share this because, in my experience — and in supporting others — these reactions are so automatic and shadowy that consciousness often doesn’t register them in our day-to-day moments. They are like second nature.

Do you have to think about driving, assuming you’ve been doing it for years? Do you have to think about tying your shoes? You can likely do both (hopefully not at the same time) while thinking about a hundred other things.

That is how automatic and unconscious our reactions and triggers can be.

Over time, these patterns can move through the body like toxins — slowly and subtly shaping our overall well-being, disrupting our immune system and inner peace, and contributing to a wide range of health issues and disease.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

But what is the way?

What does it mean to be doing the work?

Becoming conscious and self-aware of your patterns, behaviors, and conditioning

Doing the work is a lifestyle. It is challenging — yet astoundingly liberating and rewarding.

And I have to start by saying: doing the work actually sucks. 

From my experience, it can be excruciating, but hear me out.

There is a constant awareness of the mirror, reflecting back to you exactly who and what you are. And for me, at times, what I’ve seen has felt disgusting, annoying, and utterly frustrating.

Once again, it isn’t entirely my fault. I realize that much of what i am working with is inherited from my family and shaped by culture. But because I am doing the work, it is my responsibility to look at myself — to be radically honest about what I see, and to be willing to go deeper and explore what I am not seeing.

This can bring discomfort, shame, guilt, rage, shutdown, and general dysregulation.

Because the unseen does not necessarily want to be seen.

And the ego does not want to admit that what you are seeing or feeling is real.

This is what it means to be doing the work. It means creating and engaging with conditions, practices, and relationships that not only stimulate your default patterns, behaviors, and conditioning, but also provide the mirror needed to show you where you are and how you are showing up in the moment.

The ways you show up and feel in relationships, in certain environments, or when you are by yourself are not uncommon. They are deeply familiar and often rooted in your past — usually in your family line.

Doing the work means turning toward these experiences with courageous and compassionate curiosity and presence — something you learn as you continue doing the work.

It doesn’t necessarily change the feelings. Feelings are still feelings.

But understanding where those feelings come from and why they are being triggered in the present moment cultivates compassion. It creates space — and in that space, you gain the ability to make a different choice.

That is where the reward and sense of liberation happens.

Choice is the doorway to freedom. Something I’ll come back to.

Feeling feelings 

We actually have a pretty good understanding that emotions are felt in remarkably similar ways across cultures throughout the world.

Sadness feels heavy.Fear feels tight.Anger burns.Joy feels bubbly and light.

We all have feelings in the body, and they make us undeniably sentient — connecting us to one another… if we have connected our conscious awareness to what we feel in the body.

That is the caveat.

I have a sense that many people have disowned their feelings and adopted a more nihilistic acceptance, numbness, or detached approach to life — for highly intelligent reasons deemed necessary by the nervous system. And this disconnection can make it difficult to access compassion and empathy for the immense suffering other beings are experiencing.

For example, I know how sadness feels. I describe it as internally heavy, dark, and rainy. I know how uncomfortable that state can be because I have given it a great deal of awareness.

If someone tells me they are sad, my heart and body can connect to that almost immediately because I know what that means.

I may not know why they are sad — that belongs to the nearly infinite aspects within the context unique to their perceived emotion — but I can feel the shape of their experience. And from that place, I can respond with care, preferably without losing myself.

Hey, there’s an idea for the next blog!

Anyways, feelings are feelings and part of doing the work, in my opinion, is learning to feel, learning to be totally present with those feelings, and connecting that feeling to the emotional context related to the feelings.

Processing emotions

Emotions, as I’ve come to understand them, are feelings plus meaning, interpretation, and context.

They are shaped by personal history, influenced by culture, and filtered through our belief systems.

This is what people mean when they say one hundred people can watch the same movie and there will be one hundred different experiences of it.

Each person may feel something similar in their body — tension, warmth, grief, excitement — but the meaning layered onto those sensations is entirely unique to their life.

Emotions can be a lot to parse and process.

But truly, this is where the richness of doing the work begins — especially when the process is approached skillfully.

I’ll write more about emotions another time. For now, I simply want to highlight the importance of processing them as part of doing the work.

There are many, many methods and modalities for processing emotions. If you’ve been doing the work long enough, you begin to discover what works best for you. Maybe it’s talking things through and looking at them from every angle. Maybe it’s movement — walking, dancing, or exercising. Maybe it’s journaling. Maybe it’s working with plant medicine. Maybe it’s sitting quietly and letting things unfold in thought.

One of the most supportive approaches I can recommend is finding people you trust to help you process both repressed and present emotions — therapists, healing practitioners, intentional groups, trusted friends, or a partner, to some extent.

Side note: try not to make your partner the sole container for your emotional processing. Make a concerted effort to work through things significantly elsewhere first, and then come to them with clarity and groundedness. They will Love that.

I know I am well supported when it comes to processing emotions and life experiences. I have a therapist, a life coach, mentors, teachers, a massage therapist, multiple men’s groups, friends, and an incredibly loving and supportive partner who helps me process emotions when she is available and explicit consent has been granted.

Let me also name the support I receive from my practices — meditation, breathwork, shadow work, reading, writing, brain games, and more.

It may be worth repeating that there is significant privilege and social rank that afford people the opportunity to do this work. I have built my life in a way that helps me stay aware of the support and privilege I have, and it inspires me to use it in service of bringing more harmony into the world.

Processing emotions is essential to being human. If we don’t — in whatever way is most aligned for us — we tend to bypass them or metabolize them in ways that become embedded in our tissues, organs, and nervous system.

This is not a trivial matter.

Developing the capacity to make choices

This is both the fruit of the work and a core practice within it.

Our capacity to make meaningful choices is deeply dependent on our willingness to be truthful with ourselves and with others.

It is one thing to become aware of something we are doing that contributes to an undesirable outcome. It is another thing entirely to take actions that counteract those previous behaviors.

For example, we are such a sorry culture. We say sorry all the time. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is often a lot of “sorry” and very little change.

To me, sorry means very little if it isn’t followed by a plan — how someone intends not to repeat the behavior, or how they will better prevent it from happening again.

This is a simple example of where awareness meets choice.

I had been trying to make plans with a friend for weeks. The first time we almost hung out, something came up last second — that happens. We kept trying. But on the next attempt, the conversation and intention slipped out of my awareness, and I ended up leaving him hanging for a couple of weeks.

When I finally realized this and listened to his messages reaching out to schedule something, I felt my insides thicken with a familiar heaviness. I was experiencing disgust, guilt, frustration — essentially shame. I knew I had missed the mark.

I chose to own it and speak my truth.

I spoke clearly about what I was feeling, how I perceived I had dropped the ball, apologized, and offered a clear, actionable plan to make our time together happen — putting it into my calendar immediately.

We hung out the next day. It was great.

In that situation, I exercised choices I have learned through doing the work. Within every moment there are multiple possible responses, but over time I have learned to choose in ways that align with the outcomes and relationships I value — as well as my Truth.

Truth is important to practice. It can take years to develop, and I am still learning.

In that situation, my truth was that I genuinely wanted to spend time with that person.

If I had not wanted to spend time with him, the same sequence of events would call for a different kind of honesty. In order to make choices that support our freedom, we must learn what truth feels like in our bodies.

If my truth had been that I didn’t want to hang out, honoring it might have led to choices that felt uncomfortable in a different way — yet ultimately liberating.

Either way, there is freedom in knowing what is true for you and making choices from that place.

Making a concerted effort to do this is what I mean when I say you are doing the work.

Some people might think, “That’s crazy — how can you not act truthfully at all times?” And what I would say is that this question overlooks how many humans are actually operating.

There is a great deal of privilege and rank in the world, yet even people in positions of power are not always operating from choices that arise from what is true in their bodies in the present moment.

A lot of people may have no idea what that actually means.

Develop a sense for your truth and make decisions from there. Sounds easy, right? Ha. Good luck. 

In closing

I’m going to keep the closing brief, because the rest of the article was not. Haha.

This is what I believe it means to do the work.

This is what I think people mean when they say it.

Like I said earlier, it is hard. At first, it’s not intuitive, and it takes effort.

Every lifestyle, habit, discipline, practice, and art requires effort in the beginning. You are learning something new. You are reorganizing your brain’s map — unlearning and learning at the same time.

You are rewiring neural circuitry and giving your nervous system a new way of experiencing the world.

It is radical.

And if you need help with any of this, find help.

I am here to support you through the powerful containers I create.

The work is relational, somatic, and deep. It brings unconscious behaviors into conscious awareness and integrates them into our understanding of Self, allowing us to live with greater clarity and connection and to make choices that create the life we truly want.

Send me a message and let’s get to it. If not me, then I wish that you either have the support system that feels great or you find the support you need. 

Blessings to all.

And so it is.