I have known Ed and Deb Shapiro for over twenty years. Deb is the author of the ST book Your Body Speaks Your Mind and Ed (whom I call “Swami Eddy”) is a true Boulder character and one of the most active networkers I know. Together they have written a new book called “Be the Change: How Meditation Can Transform You and the World.” The book looks at how meditation can positively affect every aspect of our life including our relationships, our environment, and the greater world. For the chapter on “Silence in the Boardroom” (about meditation in the workplace), Ed and Deb asked me to contribute a short, practice-oriented piece on meditating at work. Here is my contribution:

Meditating in the workplace requires that we learn to meditate “on the spot,” in the midst of challenging circumstances and difficult conversations. Three techniques I’ve found useful for interrupting identification with discursive thinking and introducing a quality of spaciousness at work—and in any situation—are attending to physical sensations, bringing attention to the back of the body, and beginning meetings with silence.

Attend to the sensations of physical tension, and let go

By paying close attention in meditation we discover the following equation: if our mind is agitated, our body is tense; if our body is tense, our mind is agitated. By letting go of physical tension in the body, we create space in our mind to listen to others and act creatively.

In the midst of a meeting, a phone conversation, or any interaction in which you feel yourself becoming impatient or agitated, bring your attention to the part of your body that is holding tension. You can do this on the spot by internally scanning your body from your toes to the top of your head, zeroing in on any part that seems tight, clenched, or contracted. Perhaps you will discover that your lower belly is in a knot, or your shoulders are up by your ears. Maybe your hands feel like they are gripping something, or the bottoms of your feet are recoiling from the ground. When you discover an area of physical tension, use your in-breath to connect with that sensation. Then, on the out-breath, simply release, relax and let go. You can actually “ride the out-breath” and let it carry your physical (and mental!) holding into space.

Bring your attention to the back of the body, and make space for others

Different physical and energetic postures carry different modes of being. If we want to exert and express ourselves and move forward into action, we can bring our energy into the front of our body. If we want to make space for other people, listen deeply, and avail ourselves of new creative ideas, we can benefit from leaning slightly back and bringing our attention to the back of the body. Have you ever been in a meeting in which everyone was interrupting one another and it felt like no one was really being heard? If even one person in the group brings their attention to the back of the body, a quality of space and receptivity is introduced that can change the tone and course of the meeting.

Allow time for renewal by beginning meetings with silence

Often a busy day can feel like being on a non-stop train with one action item following the next without a break. Creating moments of silence, moments of getting off the train, interrupts our tendency to fall into habitual reactivity and drops us back into the depth and generativity of our being.

A simple way to introduce silence into the workplace is to begin meetings with a few moments of being quiet together, what I sometimes like to call “taking a good minute.” People use this shared silence in different ways – to breathe and relax, to appreciate a few moments during the day that are calm and spacious, to let go of previous work concerns, or to connect in a silent, energetic way with everyone else at the meeting. When we introduce “a good minute” at the beginning of a meeting, we are introducing a practice that is totally secular and fitting for a working environment, where people regenerate and renew themselves in different ways. What we are saying is that we value that renewal and that we want people to bring their full presence to the task at hand.

When we use these and other practices to bring meditative awareness to the workplace what we are doing is creating space – space for our own feelings, space for other people, space for brilliance and originality to shine through. Of course, the more we practice meditating in a formal setting, creating space for ourselves in a relaxed way outside of the work setting, the more depth and precision we can bring to meditating on-the-spot in the pressure-filled environment of the workplace.

Featured in Be the Change, How Meditation can Transform You and the World by Ed and Deb Shapiro, to be published Nov 3. Pre-order the book now.

A couple of years ago, I was driving Reggie Ray from one retreat center to another in the New York/Boston area. Reggie is a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with whom I have been studying closely for the past 7 years. When I heard he needed a driver, I thought it would be a good chance to spend some one-on-one time with him, in a closed situation—a vehicle—and to pummel him with questions.

As we were leaving the Garrison Institute to drive to a E-Vam, a small retreat center devoted to the work of Traleg Rinpoche, I asked a receptionist at Garrison for directions. Much to my relief, they were incredibly simple and straightforward. (The truth is that even though I volunteered to be Reggie’s driver, I actually have very little confidence behind the wheel; you might say driving is one of my “inferior functions”.) As we got into the car, I exclaimed to Reggie that this drive was going to be easy: just one turn and we would be on the expressway to our destination.

When I said this, Reggie looked at me and said, “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“Whatever,” I thought, “Reggie is just being negative.” Well, you guessed it—after driving for only 2 miles, we started hearing a strange thump, thump, thump. We had somehow developed a flat tire. I remembered his comment about “not being so sure” and asked him if he had had a premonition or something. He said, “No, you just sounded awfully confident.” Well, now I was panic-stricken and anxious. (Here I have the meditation master in a rental car with a flat tire and we are stuck on the side of the road!) But Reggie just looked at me, smiled, and said, “Don’t worry, I live for this kind of thing.”

Well, he might have enjoyed the unanticipated newness of the experience, but for me it was uncomfortable and stressful. And this is the same way I felt after I wrote my first (and only) “manifesto” a few weeks ago, on the topic of “manifestation” (see “Manifestation Manifesto”). After I confidently posted that entry, which extolls the virtues of listening to one’s inner voice and claims that following its directives is the key to creating, I was immediately plunged into a period in which I couldn’t hear any inner guidance at all. Nothing. Static. It was like a sudden flat tire inside.

Now, there were outer causes. In January and February, Sounds True had very disappointing top line sales due to the overall contraction in the retail marketplace, and we were having some issues with our line of credit (which, fortunately, have since been resolved). What I noticed was that my inner system was “jammed up” in a flight or fight response, and in that state, the last thing I could do was tune in and hear my inner voice clearly. And yet, I had just written a “Manifesto” that made it sound like listening to one’s inner voice and following its call is as simple as driving a few miles and making one turn onto an expressway.

During this period of hearing static inside, I asked myself two critical questions:

1. What works for me when I find that I need to “un-jam” my circuits so I can receive inner guidance?
2. How do I distinguish between what could be called “the voice of ego” and “the voice of the knowing self”?

Here is what I discovered:
When my “circuits are jammed” (which is what it feels like to me), I can conclude that I am terribly afraid of something or other (in this case, potential economic doom) and that the first thing I need to do is release the fight or flight response from my body. A friend of mine recently wrote a PhD thesis on a somatic approach to resolving conflict in couples and he called it “Fight, Flight, or Feel,” a title which I quite like. When I am in conflict with myself, let alone with another person, what I need to do is move beyond fight or flight and into feeling.

Okay, you may ask, but how do I approach “feeling” when I am terrified of feeling how terrified I feel? (Now that’s a mouthful of a question.) I found three things that worked for me: 1) Deep bodywork, 2) Loving and intelligent friends who truly know how to listen, receive and reflect, and 3) Intensive meditation practice.

What I found was that I could restore my sense of inner connectedness when my body relaxed, when I felt loved, and when I could connect with a vast sense of spaciousness. During this particular period, I participated in a 5-day meditation training program.  Being at this program , I felt that I regained the antenna that had been lost in the fight or flight attack; instead of hearing static inside, I once again had clear reception of what you could call a “grace field”—a sense of being informed as to what was being called for in each moment.

The second question I examined during this recent difficult period was “how do I distinguish between what might be called the voice of the ego and the voice of the knowing self?” For me, it is all about how my body feels. I have come to recognize the feeling of genuine guidance in a kind of somatic “rightness.”

And so I pose these two questions to you, the readers of this blog. When you are going through a challenging time, how do you “un-jam your circuits” so you can receive guidance in a clear way? And how do you distinguish between what could be called the voice of the ego and the voice of the knowing self?

I have been asking people these questions in an informal way and discovering that people have their own inner language and signaling system. What is this for you?

Finally, as you respond to this question, I offer one last thought.  I feel a bit strange writing a blog post that is as confessional as this one. (First a manifesto, now a confession.) And yet I know that vulnerability is real strength. I recently interviewed Terry Tempest Williams as part of a new Sounds True podcast series. (She was in our studio recording an audio adaptation of her new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, which will be available this Fall.)  In the interview she talks about how one of the reasons she writes is to create community—and how ironic it is to engage in a totally solitary act for the purpose of connecting with other people. The writer and the audience are, as they say, “alone, together.” As I connect with you, the Sounds True community, through this new experiment of a “Publisher’s Blog,” I want to do so in a way that is real and vulnerable and raw. I want the exchange to be genuine and at eye-level. I want to “manifest” something that leaves no residue of “half-said” but instead is a reflection of our collective wholeness—and in your responses, I invite you to do the same.

–Tami Simon
Publisher