Hi again Rose Lynn,

Thank you for your kind words. Yes. Of course it is possible to learn and even to practice wisdom teachings without labeling yourself as anything. Just go for it. There are many wonderful study tools available on the net, including right here on this web site.

Many of the teachings you are very likely already aware of. It is just hard these days to reconcile any wisdom teachings with the “rat race” that our work environments have become due to extreme greed at the top end of the economic gestalt. I have found for myself that in fact, there just is not a way to reconcile them at all. That means that I must either stop working for companies that hurt others or the environment for their own profit (which is what I have done) or somehow compartmentalize my work life as something that I only do under pressure for my survival (to buy my room and board and such) but that my real life is actually against what I believe has become bad for myself and others.

Until we change the intentions of our workplaces out of the profit above all else mentality, I am afraid we must learn to live in an uncomfortable kind of hypocrisy. To spend the majority of our waking lives doing something that is counter to what all wisdom teachings point to is the reality that we are living today.

You are not your job. You are something much bigger than that. Farmers are not the weeds that strangle their crops, and you are not the regulations that strangle creativity in your work.

What if you used each of the instances of incompetence to remind you of a wisdom teaching? So, when some know-it-all makes a particularly obnoxious remark, you could use it to remind yourself of this conversation and how very different real life is than whatever he/she is pushing. It might just take some of the sting of it out.

Many blessings,

Smigs