Table of Contents
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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of
Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe
SECRET
MATTER: updated, revised & expanded edtion from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
Books on Gay Spirituality:
Articles
and Excerpts:
Read
Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San
Francisco"
The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
Why gay people should NOT Marry
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
The
cause of homosexuality
What is homosexuality?
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
The purpose of homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The Joseph Campbell Connection
Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The Nature of Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me Tell You a Secret
Religious Articulations of the
Secret
The Collective Unconscious
Driving as Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is in the Blood
Gay
retirement and the "freelance monastery"
Seeing with Different Eyes
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The
mystical
experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding Your
Tiger Face
How Gay
Souls Get Reincarnated
Bonobos,
Family Values,
and Gay Reincarnation
About Alien Abduction
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
|
 Pay
Me What I’m Worth: A Guide to Help You Say It, Mean It, Get It
By Souldancer
Souldancer Network,
198 pages, paperback, $19.95
Reviewed by Toby Johnson
When I was first putting up
the White Crane Journal website nearly a decade ago now, and
discovering that creating links with other websites was the key to
carving out a space for oneself on the worldwide web, I found a site
called Gay Evolution. The goal of this website was an online community
of lesbian and gay people committed to personal growth and the general
principles of the human potential movement. Gay Evolution proved—not
surprisingly, I suppose—a little ahead of its time. Online communities,
like MySpace, hadn’t really evolved yet. And Gay Evolution was
idealistic, not just social. It came to function primarily as a
referral site for career and personal coaches. It certainly assisted me
as editor back then of White Crane in learning of gay professionals
across the country. But then in the notorious shakeup of the dot coms
and retrenching of the Internet, the Gay Evolution site got left behind.
I’ve stayed friends
and occasional correspondent with Souldancer, one of the founders of
Gay Evolution. He has evolved himself, staying on that cutting edge,
now offering, as he says, “a unique blend of multicultural ancient
wisdom with the best of global business practices.” Souldancing: The
Path of the Masters engages a set of ancient spiritual techniques
to help clients improve their lives on many levels, including body,
mind, spirit, social and economical.
He has now produced a
workbook-like text presentation summarizing one of the central themes
from his coaching practice. And he has titled it with one of the great
complaints career coaches must deal with all the time: “Pay Me What I’m
Worth.” From a practical perspective—and that is what coaches
specialize in, being practical and realistic—this is one of the most
common sources of dissatisfaction with work people have: their job
doesn’t pay them what they’re worth, which is to say, what they need to
be happy and fulfilled as human beings.
The title might
sound like simply instructions in asking for a raise. And it is
that, but that is only a small part of the book. For to ask for a
raise, Souldancer says, you need to believe you’re worth more to your
employer because you believe in your own worth. So while there’s a
little advice about how to properly and effectively word a request for
a raise, that business practice offers the occasion for a much broader
and richer quest for understanding what you really want (and need at
the karmic/soul level) from the work you do. That is to say that the
preparation for asking for a raise is really a quest to understand what
your life is for.
The book offers a
series of 33 exercises, all of them aimed at producing a so-called
“Worth Passport.” The techniques are all pretty simple—like making
post-it notes identifying your positive traits or your personal
possessions, skills, and talents, then sorting them in various ways.
You need to be able to assess your “worth” if you’re going to ask
somebody else to pay you for it. And in the process, you discover there
is so much more to you than just what you do in a job or what they pay
you for. Producing your “Worth Passport” results in a major
investigation of patterns in your whole life. And so the technique for
determining occupational worth opens out into a practice for increasing
self-esteem, confidence and sense of well-being.
Remember Souldancer
says he is blending good business practice with multicultural ancient
wisdom. So it’s not surprising that the mercenary question about salary
requirements turns into a spiritual inventory. As the exercises
continue, they demonstrate that giving is the way to get and that
integrity and ethical living is the best success and the way to get
paid by life with happiness and fulfillment.
So the thing about
asking for a raise is really a hook to pull you toward enightenment and
wisdom.
If you really are
wanting help to ask for a raise, this book could be very useful.
There’s good practical advice. BUT it is likely to transform you way
beyond just getting a better salary.
For the purpose of
writing a review, I read the book fast without actually doing the
exercises. I’m sure I’d had benefited more fully if I had done them.
But I want to attest that the book was interesting, occasionally
eye-opening, and beneficial just read as a presentation on how people’s
self-image and self-worth manifests itself in the details of their real
lives.
So just like my
finding Gay Evolution in the early days of the Internet, I suppose,
Souldancer’s gimmick is to link all the various hungers we have for
“more” in our lives into the great hunger for personal fulfillment and
love. It’s the links that count. This is a useful book on many levels!
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