A few weeks ago, we had our Sacred Business “Wonder Questions” call — the connection call we do once a month for our Network.
I love these calls so much.
It’s where we have space to wonder, to mix two subjects that have been separated for too long and still rarely share the same room: business and spirituality.
We were talking about what it means to be truly free to choose in our business.
Often, we think we are making free choices, but what looks like a choice is often held by deeper energies, looking for safety, security, love, and approval.
One person shared that she doesn’t want to work again. She had been very successful in her career; she had it all. But now she just wants to chill and relax.
There is nothing wrong with that.
She said something like, “I don’t want to work hard again.”
And it made me think about how I don’t desire to just chill, how much I love being in service, and how what I’ve built for myself doesn’t feel like “working hard,” even though I do work a lot.
It became clear in our discussion how the energies of fun, lightness, and wonder have been drastically separated from the action of work.
Work has become rigid, heavy, serious.
I took this topic into our embodiment class the next morning and we went deeper.
I shared the origin of the word trabalho (work) in Portuguese — a direct descendant of tripalium. Tripalium was a Roman torture instrument with three stakes. From tri + palus (three stakes). It later evolved into tripaliare (to torture), which became travail (French), trabajo (Spanish), and trabalho in Portuguese.
In German, Arbeit comes from Old High German arabeit, meaning hardship and suffering.
In Slavic languages, robotnik relates to the word robot, which comes from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor.
This gave me the curiosity to explore more… and with the help of AI, I found even more insight into how heavy the historical energy of work really is.
No wonder we resist. Torture, robots, hardship, suffering…
So I asked: Are there cultures that don’t carry this heaviness around work?
That question opened such an interesting doorway.
In Hebrew, the word is Avodah, and it has a fascinating duality.
In modern Hebrew: עבודה (avodah) = work, job.
In biblical/Hebraic tradition: avodah = service, worship, sacred offering.
Work can be either servitude or sacred service depending on consciousness.
How powerful is that?
Depending on the level of awareness, the same act can feel like suffering and disconnection… or like service and worship.
It made me think of the Sanskrit word Seva, which means selfless service, offering from devotion, a participation in the whole.
And many Indigenous languages do not have a separate word for “work” at all, because activity is woven into ritual, community, reciprocity, land stewardship, belonging, seasonal cycles…
In Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), tasks are described as helping the land, offering, participating with spirit.
In Māori, Mahi means work, but more like “to make, to produce, to contribute” — closer to creation than toil.
In Quechua, Mink’a is communal work performed as mutual aid — not toil, not a chore, but an act of belonging.
Reflecting on all of this, it feels to me that at some point in history, we separated work from service.
Work became an exclusive activity for exchanging money or chasing power.
And in that external orientation, we lost the most important thing: the deep knowing that we are unity, we are one, we are nature itself.
We are this planet… we don’t just live here.
In our hunger to control, to be better than, to possess more, work became a category outside of self.
Something you do rather than something you are.
Something you exchange rather than something you offer.
This is embedded in the unconscious collective. When work comes from disconnection, it becomes depleting. It feels like obligation. It feeds the part of us that’s still in survival, instead of the creator, instead of the abundant one who serves from wholeness and from the understanding that we are all earth.
I believe a big awakening is already happening.
Work and service are evolving from:
“What can I get from this world?”
to
“How can I offer my best? How can I contribute to the bigger picture?”
And in this second way of being, work becomes nourishing. It has meaning. It feels like alignment, like contribution. It feels like devotion.
In the spirit of wonder and possibility, I keep asking myself:
What would be necessary for more and more people to re-establish a healthy and natural relationship with work and service?
To actually make work sacred again?
I don’t believe this is about entrepreneurship. I love entrepreneurship — it’s my path, but I don’t think it’s everyone’s path.
To make work sacred again, we need to go beyond roles.
It’s not about what we do — it’s about how we do whatever is right in front of us.
We may not live in the middle of the jungle or gather around a fire anymore, but we are not any less earth than Indigenous and First Nations peoples on this planet.
Sacred work should not be a role or a business… it is a way of being.
I don’t think Indigenous people “do” sacred work.
They live sacredly.
And I believe this is the answer if we want to restore the connection we feel is missing. Once we feel again that we are earth, that we are nature, the way we relate to work, to service, to one another will shift completely.
When we remember we are not visitors here, work becomes devotion…
and every act becomes a way of coming home.
With Love,
Carolina
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Work as worship. I love that! Thank you for this beautiful and inspiring piece.