The Great Work of Your Life

December 10, 2012
Cope (Yoga and the Quest for the True Self), Director of the Institute for Extraordinary Living at the Kripalu Center in Lenox, Mass., layers biographical teaching stories between the lessons offered by what might be the greatest teaching story of all: the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna teaches Arjuna about finding and manifesting your life's divine purpose, or dharma. Cope, while examining the life struggles faced by such visionaries as Jane Goodall, Harriet Tubman, and Mohandas Gandhi, encourages readers to reject the modern idea that "we can be anyone we want to be" and instead to discover and fully pursue their inner self's calling. Cope's voice is gentle and understanding, but also urgent in expressing this idea from the Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you." The historical portraits make interesting reading in their own rightâCope is a skilled storytellerâbut in the service of illustrating a well-organized thesis about achieving true fulfillment, they offer a rich source of contemplation and inspiration.

July 15, 2012
The director of the Institute for Extraordinary Living at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health inquires into the dharma--vocation or calling--of a selection of both illustrious and ordinary individuals. "Yogis insist that every single human being has a unique vocation," writes Cope. Turning to the Bhagavad Gita for guidance, the author realized the difficulty in penetrating even the first piece of advice: "Discern, name, and then embrace your own dharma." For some, their dharma is a ready and apparent gift, but others struggle long and hard to hear that piece of inner music, that passion. So Cope illustrates this fact of life through example, drawing smooth portraits of important historical characters and twining them with glimpses into the lives of everyday people he knows. For example, he weds Henry David Thoreau's courage to follow his muse in front of an entire town's disapprobation with the story of a psychiatric nurse with a magical caregiving hand who needed help in recognizing and using her talent. Cope also tells the stories of Robert Frost finding a voice word by word, Walt Whitman's wartime nursing, "a calling for which he didn't even know he was searching," and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, breaking the rules to understand the connection between seeing and painting. With ringing clarity, Cope gets his main point across: that seeking is all and that dharma will allow you to bear life's suffering. "You only get yourself when you lose yourself to some great work," he writes. An engaging exploration into living fully.

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