the first Law Society and Bar Council
accredited provider
to deliver CPD via the telephone as well as courses by email
If you're a lawyer, chances are your external life - the talking, the
negotiating, the arguing, the writing, the earning - tends to capture nearly
all your attention. It's where you work and live. Or so it seems.
The truth is, you also live at a deeper, inner place, where each of these
activities also finds expression in a kind of knowing that you must stop
occasionally to tap into. This is where your sense of the meaning of
your work can be found, where your intuitions count, and where you can see the
beauty and elegance in each matter before you, as well as the wholeness of the
greater enterprize. This is the realm of non-doing.
Non-doing is simply letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their
own way. By allowing silence and simply watching whatever comes into awareness
and letting it go where it will, you tap into something deeper than the
ephemera of thought. You also learn to value non-knowing - well, it gets
tiring having to know everything all the time. It is also counterproductive
even to try. It's not that you should advertize the gaps in your knowledge to
colleagues or clients - that would certainly show mindlessness about
the realities of law practice. But you can, at times when it feels right for
you, allow yourself the benefit of not knowing, perhaps especially in the
early stages of developing a case, when too much certainly could inhibit
creative thinking and drastically reduce the number of approaches you might
explore.
Here's one way of looking at "inner life". Every outer reality has an inner
correlate. A law-office waiting room is an 'outer' reality; a client's
comfort level when he enters the space is an inner correlate. A deposition or
statutory declaration takes place in the external world of action, but a
lawyer's intuition that she's taking her client down the wrong road, one that
isn't good for his health or psychological well-being, is an inner correlate
(among countless other possibilities). In each case, the meaning comes from
within. The texture and depth of that meaning is a function of inner, or
spiritual, vitality.
In many cases, inner and outer imperatives conflict, such as when the outer
culture measures success by hours billed while the inner standard - although
widely ignored - by hours LIVED, deeply and with awareness. The problem is
that any number of factors have contributed to making lawyers feel painfully
unintegrated
- not least an almost complete turning away from inner experience. Instead of
integration - which you might also think of as balance - separate (imbalance)
is very often the hallmark of our experiences of the world.
