Working from Source
By Peter Hawkins, March 2024

In October my new book “Beauty in Leadership and Coaching: and the Transformation of Human Consciousness” will be published by Routledge. In the final chapter I write about how we can work from ‘Source’ rather than from effort.  This will be once again one of the key themes and practices we will address on the Advanced Retreats I run each summer at Barrow Castle, on the outskirts of Bath, surrounded by gardens, woodlands and hills. To book for these click here.

Here is a passage from the final chapter of the book.

We need to learn how to live and work from source, rather than from effort and goal driven will.  On the advanced retreats I run each summer, we carryout collaborative inquiries into the different experiential phenomena of working from effort and working from source.  In pairs I ask one of the pair to adopt the position they are in when working from effort, and for two minutes, to report out to their partner:  “when I work from effort I……..” and to keep discovering new aspects of how this shows up within them.

When both partners have done this, we then invite them to find the physical bodily state they occupy when they work from source, and this time to continually repeat and complete the sentence: “When I work from source I…..”.  I have found that everyone who has taken part has a deep-felt sense of the difference between these two states and knows them from the inside.  Only when these have been deeply accessed, do the pair go on to explore how they can let go of ‘efforting’ and let source flow through their lives more fully.  

I have discovered that when I am working from source, I can work a week of long hours and end the week with more energy than I started it.  It is as if I am using renewable energy, rather than burning up stored fuel.  I am in-tune with my bio-rhythms, rather than working to the clock-time of forced labour.  Since the Industrial Revolution we have created this life versus work split, where we have to use the short time away from work to replenish all the spent energy from being a ‘wage-slave’ throughout the working week.  Even the concepts of ‘work – life balance’, has built into it the notions of work as draining energy and non-work life as replenishing it.

In the chapter on Grace we explored the whole notion of flow. How we can be in flow in our self, our head, heart, and body; our thoughts, feelings and actions.  How we can be in flow with others in our teams and families, our organizations and communities.  How we can be in flow with our work, our art and our craft, and the wider human and more-than-human world, with which we are inextricably entwined.

We are born out of Beauty, sustained by Beauty.  When we awake and become the beauty we love, we return home, to the home we have never left.