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Todd Stein Patricia Galli may not be Mother Teresa, but she has at least one thing in common with the late Nobel Peace Prize winner: She believes caregiving is a spiritual practice. "Nurses are trained to be spiritual," said Galli, a San Mateo RN and Catholic nun. "They assess and reflect and make plans for the wholeness and good of the people they take care of." Galli laughs suddenly at her next thought. "Now if they could just learn to transfer those skills to their own lives." A popular quest To help in that effort, Galli leads workshops at Mercy Center in Burlingame for nurses and other professionals to guide them toward integrating their spiritual and work lives. Her 40-hour, six-session "Transformational Living" workshops operate on the simple premise that "all work has a spiritual element," she said. "Our task is to discover it and bring it to life." Galli isn't the only person-or even the latest-to tap into the popular resurgence of interest in blending work with the spiritual. The best-seller lists are filled with books like David Whyte's The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America that try to quench the seemingly endless thirst for spiritual answers in the workplace. According to an ABC-TV poll, the number of Americans who say spirituality is important to their lives jumped from 58 percent in 1993 to 75 percent last year. This "spiritual earthquake," as Psychology Today founding editor T. George Harris calls it, has sent shockwaves through the religious spectrum, forming offshoots of spirituality such as creation spirituality, feminist spirituality, and goddess spirituality that were undreamed of a generation ago. Whyte and others make a good living traveling from city to city and office to office leading workshops similar to Galli's. Rooted in nursing Where Galli's teaching pulls away from the pack is in her background and training. Besides her 30 years of experience as a nurse with Kaiser Permanente, Galli holds a master's in counseling and organizational development and a master's in theology. A nun for six years – "I wanted to talk openly about how God works in the healing process," she says of the career switch-Galli still refers constantly to her nursing training when talking about her workshops. "I essentially follow a nursing model in the workshop," she said. "We assess the situation, produce a diagnosis, and make a care plan. Only in this case it's a spiritual care plan." Galli's three-step approach resonates with the feeling common among her participants that their work lives and their spiritual lives are out of synch or unrelated. She maintains that this sense of spiritual alienation is simply the result of poor training: "The reason most of us feel our work life is disconnected from our spiritual life is because we haven't bothered to make a connection," she said. New ways of looking Connecting is first a matter of assessing the work situation: Galli says to focus on "who you work with, how you communicate with each other, and what the problem is." Second, Galli gives her students feedback to help them identify how they feel about their work situation. Finally, she helps them take their feelings "into a prayerful, reflective state, to be with that and sit with that for a while, and see what's revealed." Often, what's revealed is a new response to the work situation. A nurse, for example, might decide that her spiritual practice means taking better care of herself. "He or she might say, 'OK, I'm only going to work until 5 p.m., and then I'm going home', " Galli said. "Or they might decide to pray for a boss who's emotionally disturbed. Or they might quit their job. Either way, I encourage them to take what their reflection reveals and put it into practice. When they do that, when they attend to their business life and spiritual life in an integrated way, they begin to notice transformations happening in themselves and their workplace. And, suddenly, the mundane becomes spiritual," she said |