Meditation, in ancient and present India, is a tool for spiritual development, contemplation on the true nature of self and an aide to allow for detachment from worldly matters.
Its not meant to be a method to calm down workers so that they will produce more profit for a corporation.
I hate this trend where things that exist to help us grow as humans (meditation, arts and humanities, exercise) are repurposed by corporate HR to make us into better (i.e., more efficient) workers.
IMO - Any corporate policy or program aimed at changing employees themselves, rather than the work environment and corporate ethos is doomed to failure. I'm all for incentives, but what you really want are engaged employees in the right seat.
That takes a lot of work on the part of management. If your employees know what's expected of them, have the right tools, have a job that fits their skills, knows their employer cares for them and is invested in their professional development, THAT is what makes productive employees. You won't get that from retreats, meditation programs, etc. As a manager, you get this by changing yourself, not those you manage.
I just don't see how spiritual awakening suddenly makes a person working 9-5 in a cubicle more happy. For all it is, it probably makes him wonder if living in a forest outside civilization is actually a way more reasonable choice.
Correct, but if the goal is to make workers more productive, motivated, etc, then meditation may not be the right tool to use. There are other, more effective methods.
They are. Not all forms of living are equally valid according to (and compatible with) any religion/spiritual tradition one choses.
The trend is to take a practice completely out of context, and completely out of the spirit of what it was introduced and intended for, and use it a cheap prop to be more efficient in an ill world.
As someone who grew up in a western Buddhist community (and skimmed the article), this rings true to me.
I largely credit my success at work to the tools for working with my mind imparted by my upbringing and continued practice. However, mindfulness is just one of those tools.
There are forms of meditation that build upon mindfulness that I would argue can be very helpful to motivation. To put it another way, once you are able to focus your mind on the present moment, there are other things you can focus it on.
For instance, if I've got a meeting coming up where I need to partner with people with whom I know I usually have a combative relationship, engaging in a compassion meditation, such as Tonglen, motivates me to see their problems and want to help solve them.
Mindfulness itself is wonderful, but it is among the most basic of techniques for training your mind. It is remarkably comparable to physical exercise, where a basic level of activity yields amazing results for your overall health, but must be accompanied by specific training if you want to dramatically change your physical capabilities.
Where could you learn it though? Grown up typically Dutch, I learned Tonglen by reading search inside yourself. Other than your comment, I never came across it.
Tonglen is a popular practice in Tibetan Buddhist Schools.
There are several other practices like, Eight Verses of Mind Training, Generating Bodhichitta with Equalizing self and others.
One won't find such methods in general meditation books, as these are practices specific to Mahayana Buddhism.
On a meaningless task under laboratory conditions. Maybe mindfulness just gave them some perspective on how pointless it was.
I don't see how this is relevant to the real workplace where stress can be paralyzing and burnout is a greater threat to productivity and motivation than being chill is.
Oh, better: under uncontrolled conditions where it was impossible to tell whether anyone actually meditated and there's likely to be some self-selection bias.
The very meaning of mindfulness is to detach from the self, and to do each and every task no matter how mundane it is as if brand new at each and every moment. Kind of like to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour --so to say. So though the mundaneness of everything is quite real, the absolute newness of every moment is just as apparent. It's as if nothing has changed, yet everything has -jus all at once. At least w/o sounding too new age-y about it.
Which sounds great to CEOs but there’s one problem:
When you use mindfulness while the CEO is talking and realize his or her problems are their own making and why should you kill yourself to make a lie true?
I don't see why this is a problem. However, sometimes you can't escape your situation and sometimes you have to do things you don't like to support yourself and others. This is not incompatible with mindfulness.
No, you don't want to detach from the self. The point of mindfulness is to see that concept of an independent, separate self, separate from everything else is an illusion and we are interconnected. You are still you, but part of a bigger system.
What if it's the other way around: what if the feeling of everything being interconnected is an illusion?
When Cartesius said his famous "Cogito ergo sum" that's pretty much what it meant - you can be sure that your mind exists, but not much else beyond that.
And, if you think about it, why would everything in the world be interconnected in some meaningfull way? For what we know universe is just a big bag of energy and particles interacting with each other in the random way. "It's all connected" is a cry from the human mind desperately trying to make sense out of chaos.
My experience is that concentration directed meditation is more like a tool. You can use concentrative skills to advance towards direction you want in the life. You are in control.
If you do awareness oriented practice long enough, it starts to work on you. You are on the ride 'to the unknown'. Motivations change and unless you make nessesary changes in your life, you lose motivation and have life chrisis. Usual solution is to quit meditation or do so little that you don't change. Many people have romantic notion of transcendence and enlightement, but when meditation starts to really work they realize that's not what they actually want. Change is scary.
>Many people have romantic notion of transcendence and enlightement, but when meditation starts to really work they realize that's not what they actually want. Change is scary.
Interesting. Would you care to share an example of this?
I see it like being aware of impulse timings in you, for example, I now and then feel the waves of both happiness and sadness, when they come and leave and I understand it's temporary, I realize the mood it leaves and that it will end and as I'm focusing on the effect of it on the body I don't quite take so much place on happiness/depression, more like observe and let it be. This state of acceptance is strange for me when it comes to searching for success/praise at work, it is stranger when remembering new/better job/car/app/travel is needed and it's strangest when searching for a significant other.
Not directly mindfulness related, but I've been doing EMDR to try to break some self destructive reactions / anxiety. The first major part of processing that got to the core of my panic reactions left me with a 'gaping hole in my brain' where my panic reactions were... I'm still working on what's refilling that void, but I'm not as weirded out as I was those first couple of days.
Felt like when something triggery came up, I knew how I was going to respond and then I didn't... and haven't always been sure what else was appropriate. Relearning who I want to be is interesting / challenging / confusing.
I'll add that normal people act mostly out of desire to have something or to not have or experience something. After completion of 1st "path" Self is seen to be an illusion, after 2nd path craving and aversion are greatly reduced. Saying that it affects motivation is a bit of understatement, since it completely changes frame of reference.
About people getting unwanted outcome, dissolution of self is known to be unpleasant (aka "Dark Night"), but it's a temporarily unpleasant stage. I've not heard of anyone regretting completing 1-st path after it's done.
As a former mindfulness case study, I'm sad to hear it was not helpful to this study. While the report does cover a number of experiments, the limitation to their research is the use of self-reports. While you can attempt to frame questions in a way to reduce priming, self-reporting is not a good metric because people can begin to respond with what they think you want to hear. Furthermore, the granularity of the timeframes for the experiments seems pretty small. In the case study I was involved in, we were tracked over months/years and showed higher "mindfulness scores" (granted, self-reported, so same limitation). A better approach (though time and cost expensive) would be to perform a longitudinal study on participants and measure their performance overtime. This removes the "answering with what you want to hear" issue while strengthening the study's validity.
As an aside, I like to look towards the Tao of Pooh (or I suppose general Taoism?). The idea is to not let things get you down, but to appreciate the here and now. Mundane activities exist and sometimes you have to do them, but if you can "get over" its mundanity, you can return to enjoying other things.
Mindfulness is (for me) very helpful for inter-personal tasks. Someone might say or write something that might normally provoke a task-devolving-reaction where I enumerate why they're wrong or maybe go with something snide or passive aggressive - which might make me feel better but predictably isn't very constructive. After practicing mindfulness I can usually catch myself and divert energies to more constructive routes.
This is probably one of the few cases where mindfulness truly applies.
That having been said it isn't solving the root problem. You can't fix stupid... you can fix a lack of knowledge, experience and practical understanding - but that has to come from culture not individuals.
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Its not meant to be a method to calm down workers so that they will produce more profit for a corporation.
That takes a lot of work on the part of management. If your employees know what's expected of them, have the right tools, have a job that fits their skills, knows their employer cares for them and is invested in their professional development, THAT is what makes productive employees. You won't get that from retreats, meditation programs, etc. As a manager, you get this by changing yourself, not those you manage.
The trend is to take a practice completely out of context, and completely out of the spirit of what it was introduced and intended for, and use it a cheap prop to be more efficient in an ill world.
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I largely credit my success at work to the tools for working with my mind imparted by my upbringing and continued practice. However, mindfulness is just one of those tools.
There are forms of meditation that build upon mindfulness that I would argue can be very helpful to motivation. To put it another way, once you are able to focus your mind on the present moment, there are other things you can focus it on.
For instance, if I've got a meeting coming up where I need to partner with people with whom I know I usually have a combative relationship, engaging in a compassion meditation, such as Tonglen, motivates me to see their problems and want to help solve them.
Mindfulness itself is wonderful, but it is among the most basic of techniques for training your mind. It is remarkably comparable to physical exercise, where a basic level of activity yields amazing results for your overall health, but must be accompanied by specific training if you want to dramatically change your physical capabilities.
I don't see how this is relevant to the real workplace where stress can be paralyzing and burnout is a greater threat to productivity and motivation than being chill is.
"One hundred and one Amazon Mechanical Turk workers whose location was set to the United States took part in exchange for $1.35 each."
When you use mindfulness while the CEO is talking and realize his or her problems are their own making and why should you kill yourself to make a lie true?
When Cartesius said his famous "Cogito ergo sum" that's pretty much what it meant - you can be sure that your mind exists, but not much else beyond that.
And, if you think about it, why would everything in the world be interconnected in some meaningfull way? For what we know universe is just a big bag of energy and particles interacting with each other in the random way. "It's all connected" is a cry from the human mind desperately trying to make sense out of chaos.
If you do awareness oriented practice long enough, it starts to work on you. You are on the ride 'to the unknown'. Motivations change and unless you make nessesary changes in your life, you lose motivation and have life chrisis. Usual solution is to quit meditation or do so little that you don't change. Many people have romantic notion of transcendence and enlightement, but when meditation starts to really work they realize that's not what they actually want. Change is scary.
Interesting. Would you care to share an example of this?
Felt like when something triggery came up, I knew how I was going to respond and then I didn't... and haven't always been sure what else was appropriate. Relearning who I want to be is interesting / challenging / confusing.
About people getting unwanted outcome, dissolution of self is known to be unpleasant (aka "Dark Night"), but it's a temporarily unpleasant stage. I've not heard of anyone regretting completing 1-st path after it's done.
As an aside, I like to look towards the Tao of Pooh (or I suppose general Taoism?). The idea is to not let things get you down, but to appreciate the here and now. Mundane activities exist and sometimes you have to do them, but if you can "get over" its mundanity, you can return to enjoying other things.
That having been said it isn't solving the root problem. You can't fix stupid... you can fix a lack of knowledge, experience and practical understanding - but that has to come from culture not individuals.