How to Find Freedom and Fulfillment

One Woman’s Journey to Discovering Work That Matters

Zen Buddhism was the spark that ignited my spiritual journey with Taoism, opening my heart to the profound wisdom of stillness and presence. 

My quest to seek deeper understanding and integration of these practices into my life, led me to want to learn more about writer, speaker and consultant Maia Duerr. What I’ve discovered is that her unique blend of Zen practice, anthropology, and mindfulness  aligns with my own interest around meaning and direction. 

Inspired by her journey and teachings, I reached out to Maia, eager to hear her thoughts about creating a livelihood that aligns with our core intentions and spiritual growth.

In today’s frenetic pace of modern life, many of us find ourselves adrift, struggling to find meaning and direction amid the relentless demands of a capitalistic world. The pursuit of success, wealth, and recognition often leaves us feeling disconnected from our true selves, yearning for a deeper sense of purpose. 

For those navigating these turbulent waters, Maia Duerr’s journey offers a beacon of hope and a pathway to rediscovering what truly matters.

Duerr, who lives in New Mexico, often referred to as the Land of Enchantment, has dedicated her life to helping individuals and groups create the conditions for work that resonate with their deepest values and intentions. 

Drawing on decades of Zen practice and her background in anthropology, she has crafted powerful tools for integrating mindfulness into the workplace and everyday life. Her work is a testament to the possibility of transforming our relationship with work from one of mere survival to one of profound fulfillment.

Journeying Through Many Lives

Duerr’s own life is a mosaic woven from diverse experiences. Before finding her true calling, she wandered through myriad  professions, including alfalfa sprout packer and Buddhist chaplain. 

These varied roles provided her with rich material to explore the emotional, psychological, and cultural barriers to creating a livelihood that expresses one’s core intentions. 

In her book, "Work That Matters: Create a Livelihood That Reflects Your Core Intention," Duerr shares her insights and the framework she developed, known as the 6 Keys to Liberation-Based Livelihood.

The Promise of Liberation-Based Livelihood

If you are struggling to find your footing in a world that often feels unrelenting and unforgiving, Duerr’s work offers a compelling promise: the possibility of liberation and fulfillment through mindful, intentional work. 

Her approach encourages a profound shift in perspective, inviting us to see work not just as a means to an end, but as a primary vehicle for expressing our deepest selves.

Five Noble Truths for a Fulfilling Life

At the heart of Duerr’s philosophy are what she calls her Five Noble Truths:

1. Freedom is an Inside Job: True freedom comes from within. No matter our external circumstances, there is a wellspring of nourishment and resilience available to us at all times.

2. Relationship is Everything: We are interconnected beings. Our choices impact not just ourselves but those around us. Building meaningful relationships is crucial to our personal and collective liberation.

3. We’re One, but We’re Not the Same: Diversity enriches our lives. By embracing different perspectives, we can learn and grow in ways we never imagined.

4. Story is Powerful Medicine: Our stories shape our reality. By understanding and re-writing our own stories, we can heal and transform our lives.

5. Reflection: Taking time to reflect on our lives allows us to see hidden assumptions and discover creative solutions to our challenges. It is through reflection that we find our center and chart a path forward.

Creating Work That Matters

Through her workshops, online programs, coaching, and writing, Duerr supports people around the world in navigating career transitions, shifting their relationship to work, and creating healthier workplaces. Her work at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (CMind) and as the executive director for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship provided her with invaluable opportunities to experiment with integrating mindfulness and awareness practices into organizational settings.

Duerr’s creation of the Tree of Contemplative Practices, a tool used to support individuals and organizations in finding the reflective practices that work best for them, has had a lasting impact. This tool helps people explore and identify the practices that can support their journey towards a more mindful and fulfilling life.

Seeking Clarity and Direction

For those of us grappling with the challenges of finding meaning  and clarity in today’s forever evolving world, Maia Duerr’s profound insights offer a guiding light. Her work is a powerful reminder that it is never too late to re-imagine our relationship with work while creating a livelihood that reflects our deepest intentions.

By embracing the principles of Liberation-Based Livelihood, we can begin to see work not as a burden but as a sacred expression of our true selves. Through mindfulness and intentionality, we can transform our lives and the lives of those around us, creating a ripple effect of positive change.

Maia Duerr’s journey is a testament to the transformative power of mindful, intentional living. For those seeking meaning and direction in their lives, her insights offer a roadmap to a more fulfilling and liberated existence. Embrace the journey, and discover the profound joy of work that truly matters.

Feature Interview With Maia Duerr

Maia, your book emphasizes the concept of "Liberation-Based Livelihood." Can you share a pivotal moment in your own journey where you realized the importance of aligning your work with your core intentions? And how did this realization shape your subsequent career choices?

MD: First of all — thanks for inviting me into this conversation, Diamond-Michael! I so much appreciate your consistently positive presence on Substack.

It’s hard to say there was just one moment. It feels like an evolution that took place over time, but I think the low point that spurred me on this path of finding alignment was early on in my career, when I was in my early 30s. 

I had been working in the mental health field for about 10 years, and by the end of that decade I was beyond burned out. I actually loved working with the clients, that wasn’t the source of burnout. What really frustrated me was working inside a system that was not actually designed to support their mental and emotional wellbeing (or that of the workers), and to see those clients in a perpetually revolving door between the state psych hospital and our community mental health clinics. This just ate away at me, and the longer I stayed in the field the worse that feeling got. 

I remember looking at information about graduate schools where I could go on to the next logical step on that career path, which would have been to get a Master’s of Social Work degree. I couldn’t even bring myself to fill out an application, which is when I knew I had to find a different pathway. This was the beginning of my inquiry: what am I actually here on the planet to do? What brings me joy? What conditions do I need to feel happier in a workplace?

Back then I didn’t have a meditation practice, I just had a deep desire to not suffer so much in my work — but that was enough to get me going! A bit later when I started to study Buddhism and began a meditation practice, I found that added a much richer dimension to this inquiry. I started making career decisions from a place of intention rather than reaction, and that made such a huge difference in my level of happiness with my work. 

Many people feel trapped in what you describe as "wage slavery" and are disconnected from their true talents and life's purpose. What do you believe are some common emotional and psychological barriers that prevent individuals from seeking more fulfilling work, and how can mindfulness practices help to overcome these obstacles?

MD: Oh gosh, there are so many! A big one for many of us is having a fear of the unknown, and a need that comes from that fear for some sense of predictability and “safety” in our work life. Often that is connected to money, and a belief that our financial situation will guarantee us peace of mind and happiness. 

I don’t mean to discount money as a factor in our capacity to live in this world. I’ve spent plenty of years struggling myself to pay the rent, to meet basic needs. So I really get that it’s an important part of life for most of us and we can’t always just walk away from a steady paycheck even if we are miserable in our job. 

But there are so many ways we limit our options because of that fear. Mindfulness practice, when engaged with over a period of time and when you have support from others who value reflection, can be a tool to help us unpack our relationship with money and make it a more conscious part of our lives. 

Rather than being driven by fears and insecurities, our growing awareness can help us understand when it’s worth it to take a risk in order to move closer to work that we will love. That risk can be large but it can also be small. It can be as simple as acknowledging we might not be in a position to leave our job right now, but we can take a risk by speaking to our boss and requesting a different kind of schedule that could make a difficult situation more bearable. 

That’s an example related to fear and money, but really mindfulness practice can be applied to any long standing belief or pattern in our life that may not be serving us. Without a mindfulness or awareness practice of some kind, it’s easy to dig ourselves into a rut and not see any way out. Mindful awareness opens up possibilities. 

Your book outlines the 6 Keys to Liberation-Based Livelihood. Could you briefly explain these keys and provide an example of how someone might practically apply one of them to transition from a deadening job to a more fulfilling career?

MD: Sure! As I was going through my own long and winding path to find work that I loved, I discovered there were six qualities or capacities I needed to strengthen in order to get closer to that ideal. It wasn't enough to escape one frustrating job only to find myself back in the same place of dis-satisfaction in a new job. I wanted to break that cycle. Once I began to focus diligently on these 6 Keys as I call them, I have made much better decisions around my work. 

These are the keys:

Become Intimate with Your Core Intention: The capacity, through contemplative practice, to know yourself and the gifts you are here to share with the world.

Value Your Gifts and Time: The capacity to understand these inherent gifts and to become fiercely protective of them.

Break Through Inertia and Take Action: The capacity to channel that clarity around your Core Intention and your gifts and use it to dissolve whatever might be blocking you from acting on them.

Get Comfortable with Uncertainty: The capacity to work productively with your fears so you can leverage the energy within them in a positive and proactive direction.

Think Big and Make the Most of Your Resources: The capacity to imagine great things for yourself and your work, even if you do them in humble ways; the capacity to redefine “resources” beyond the financial.

Build a Circle of Allies and Ask for Help: The capacity to grow your community in a heartfelt and reciprocal way, knowing without a doubt that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Let’s take one and I’ll walk you through a way it could be applied. Let’s do the first key, Become Intimate with Your Core Intention because it’s fundamental to the whole process. 

Many approaches to career development focus on the “what” element — what are your skills, what kinds of activities do you enjoy doing. This is important to understand, of course. But I found in my own journey toward right livelihood that if I focused too much on the “what” at the expense of the “why,” I wasn’t finding that sweet spot where I loved what I was doing for work. 

Your Core Intention is your “why” — the urge that motivates you, your reason for being on the planet. It lives inside you at an emotional level and it’s where you feel the most alive to yourself and to the world around you. Understanding your Core Intention is essential to creating a Liberation-Based Livelihood. In fact, it can’t happen without it. When I’m teaching a course or working with someone individually, I begin by taking people through various exercises to help them discover their Core Intention. 

In contrast to “passion,” your Core Intention is not connected to an object or an activity — it’s the essential reason you’re inspired to do those things. For example, you might recognize that you love cooking. But when you start to uncover your Core Intention, you discover that the driving force underneath that passion is that you love to nourish people. 

That desire to offer nourishment can take many forms, cooking is simply one of them. Once you hone in on that, you realize you have many more possibilities to create work that matters than you first thought. Even if you’re in a job that may seem completely unrelated to your passion, you can amplify that Core Intention while you’re doing it, and you’ll probably find much more satisfaction and meaning in it.

In "Work That Matters," you discuss the cultural barriers that impact our career choices. How do societal expectations and cultural narratives shape our perceptions of work, and what steps can individuals take to break free from these influences to discover a livelihood that truly reflects their core intentions?

MD: Social expectations and cultural narratives are powerful and often invisible influences on how we perceive work. Throughout our lives, we’ve received lots of messages about what we are supposed to be good at and care about, as well as what “work” should look and feel like. Some of these messages come from our families, some from our culture, and some from a combination of both. 

This conditioning is based on gender, ethnicity, economic class, and many other factors. It is usually accompanied by the message (spoken or unspoken): “That’s just the way life is,” which makes it difficult to recognize. These beliefs become so ingrained that we often take them to be unquestionable truths.

These inherited beliefs and values may not line up with what is deeper in your heart. If you look closely, you may discover that you’ve based many of your decisions about work on ideas that belong to someone else. Often we don’t even have a clue what it is that we truly love to do. We haven’t yet asked ourselves the questions that could bring out our more authentic selves. 

For example, gender is a big source of these scripts and expectations. In many parts of the world, men (particularly heterosexual men) are conditioned to avoid any roles or situations in which they perceive themselves as “weak.” This may lead them to rule out certain occupations such as nursing or teaching, even if they feel an affinity toward those vocations.  

Women, on the other hand, are often conditioned to take on the “caring” narrative—a reason many of us organize our careers around responding to other people’s needs and go into the helping professions. That’s what I did for the first ten years of my working life until I realized something inside of me felt very out of balance. Your impulse to care may be a genuine calling, but it’s worthwhile to closely examine how fulfilling this path has actually been in your lived experience.

The most basic step you can take to start this process of liberating yourself from unconscious story lines is to identify them. Transformation is as much a process of unlearning old patterns and beliefs as it is of stepping into new ways of being. 

Here’s a starting point. Consider how many of the following phrases have played a part in determining how you’ve made choices related to work—including the jobs you’ve chosen to apply for and the choices you made while in those jobs. 

• Time is money.

• Being an adult means sucking it up and working even when   I hate my job.

• I need to work really hard until I retire so I have enough in my retirement account.

• There’s more security in working for someone else than working for myself.

• I have to mold myself to fit into the job description that is out there.

• Big gaps in my résumé make it harder for me to get a job.

• I really love to [fill in the blank] but I could never make money doing that.

What other beliefs have shaped your relationship to work?

Which two or three of those phrases resonate the most strongly in you? As you look again at those phrases, take a moment to do a basic mindfulness practice. Take three deep breaths and check in with your body, heart, and mind. How do you feel? How does it feel to know that you can choose a different way of understanding your reality?

By uncovering the hidden scripts that we grew up with, we give ourselves many more choices about how to respond to a situation as well as how to create work that is truly meaningful to us. 

As we conclude, I am curious as to where you are at present with your own journey relative to work that matters?

MD: In some ways, it feels like a lifetime ago when I wrote this book (it was published in 2017). Not long after Work That Matters came out, I stepped into another kind of journey: addressing some very serious concerns around health, safety, and finances with my aging parents. I had a lot of resistance to dealing with those issues with my mom and dad, as did they! And things had gotten to a pretty bad place for them.

With no other siblings in the picture, I had to put other kinds of work aside to deal with this. Ultimately I moved them from their home of 60 years in Los Angeles to an assisted living facility in Santa Fe, New Mexico, close to me. In the process, a lot of healing happened in our relationship. 

Then just a little over a year after that move, they both died from COVID, within two weeks of each other. Another beloved friend died of cancer that same year. So I’ve had an opportunity to become intimate with grief in these past few years, and in many ways that feels like the work that matters in my life right now. It’s also pointed me to giving much more time and energy to my practice of writing.

All of it is a reminder that the journey to work that matters is never ending, and always evolving. I’m 62 years old now and I continue to learn new things about myself and about the gift I have to offer the world. I hope to never stop being surprised!