About
the Cards
It’s
one thing to feel positive and compassionate when you’re
home alone, meditating or getting a nice massage. We all know
it’s a lot more challenging to keep those constructive feelings
on the street or in the workplace, when others act rudely or unethically
around you. We all need guidance and practical strategies to deal
with the negativity that can confront us when we are working with
people in what is often a competitive arena. And, with the ever-growing
presence of women in the workforce, this is no longer primarily
a male concern. Alongside the desire to maintain a positive outlook
at work, women are increasingly faced with ethical and moral challenges,
whether they are in executive positions, running their own business
or just punching the clock and working several jobs to make ends
meet. The simple wisdom in these cards was distilled from my studies
in theology and world religions as well as from my day-to-day
life in the workplace. I have learned the hard way—through
experience—that whenever you go against your most intuitive
feelings of what is right and wrong, you dishonor your spirit
and always regret it. By the same token, when you hold true to
your instinctive moral vision and develop a way to stand up to
those who promote negative and unethical behavior, your soul sails.
You feel strengthened and uplifted. Sometimes, all you need is
a little inspiration and guidance to do the right thing and that’s
what I have tried to provide with these cards.
The initial idea for this deck
grew out of my years of working as a lawyer in the state of New
Jersey and my doctoral dissertation for a degree in Energy Medicine.
The paper was titled “The Conscious Choice of Law: Fighting
the Erosion of the Legal Spirit.” It outlined the ways in
which I believe the legal profession has lost touch with the moral
and ethical values that ought to inform all of us. Looking around
the nation as a whole, moreover, I could see that this phenomenon
wasn’t limited to lawyers. Corporate leaders and executives
at many levels have been caught up in a culture of success at
all costs. How they treat employees seems to mean nothing as long
as the company’s stock value rises and the shareholders
are happy. In the political arena, our national leaders haven’t
behaved any better. Presidents and congress people from both parties
have been caught in outrageous lies, deceptions and in some cases
outright fraud and corruption.
Unfortunately, all this dishonorable
behavior has a trickle-down effect. I feel that the public is
dismayed by the blatant lack of honor and accountability they
see, to the extent that many of us are no longer certain how we
are supposed to behave. In some ways, people in the workforce
are in danger of losing their own sense of purpose and as a result,
Spirit has taken a back seat to the stress of everyday life. Compassion
and responsibility have fallen victim to our need for power and
self-aggrandizement. In my own profession, I have seen a growing
lack of ethics and justice that is especially painful. Lawyers
are supposed to be capable of healing society and promoting the
resolution of injustice. But as I looked around me, I saw many
of them promoting material gain and power over any sense of balance
and fair play. I have also observed that in many divorce cases—which
ought to be carried out with spiritual principles to help the
two sides heal equitably—lawyers were urging both partners
to try to get everything they could. There was no sense of fairness
and proportion, not to mention compassion.
These realizations inspired me to create
this card deck. The rules of power and honor have become abased
and we need to redefine them. The spiritual truths I have formulated,
based on my personal experience and my readings in the great spiritual
and mystical traditions, go beyond mere legal ethics. They draw
on many of the core ethical and moral principles that are shared
by the world’s major religions. When I studied theology,
I learned that traditions as different on the surface as Hinduism,
Buddhism, and Taoism in the East and the Western monotheistic
traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all based on
the understanding that killing, stealing, lying, cruelty, and
sexual misconduct are inherently wrong. Of course, different religions
define and interpret those moral statutes differently and in many
instances have been guilty of great hypocrisy in how they enforce
their laws. But that doesn’t change the fact that the principles
themselves are valid and essential for our spiritual health as
individuals and as a society.
As I was enumerating these principles for
my card deck, I came to feel that they should apply to all occupations
and to all public and private workplaces. So, rather than rendering
them in some abstract way, I tried to bring them down to earth.
As a lawyer, I constantly have to check my inner compass and reorient
my actions accordingly. However, the same is true of artists and
writers, manual laborers, secretaries, engineers, janitors, schoolteachers,
and nurses. I have constructed the deck so that each card offers
at least one principle worth upholding, along with a direct suggestion
for acting on it. Taken as a whole, these principles form a credible,
congruent and hopeful code of personal honor and accountability.
Yet each card can stand alone as a guiding light for any given
day.
I originally composed the cards with the
idea of a conventional workplace in mind. But I’m also aware
that many of us have different experiences of work and deal with
a variety of work environments. People increasingly work in the
home and I include the invaluable work of parenting in that description.
Stay-at-home moms and dads and working parents alike face many
similar challenges as they interact with caregivers, teachers
and their own children. They can apply this guidance to those
relations as well as they would with coworkers, bosses, or employees.
Even independent contractors or people who run a cottage industry
and never go to an office outside their own home have to relate
to others by phone and e-mail. Whatever kind of work you do, ethical
and spiritual values always come into play. Indeed, I would argue
that we need them now more than ever before.
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