This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Finding Real Happiness at Work: Mindfulness, A Misunderstood Quality, with Sharon Salzberg, Buddhist Meditation Teacher and Author, Real Happiness at Work: Meditations for Accomplishment, Achievement, and Peace
Mindfulness as a word is so utilized now. It’s very funny for me because I came back from India in 1974 and maybe, I joke and I say, maybe there were five people in the country who ever used the word mindfulness. And now you see it everywhere. And I think it is only a partially understood quality as, you know, the full scope of it is found in the Buddhist teaching which is where it’s been preserved all these years. It’s a very vital dynamic connection to what’s happening and my concern is twofold.
One is that we say things like mindfulness means accepting things the way that they are which sounds kind of dull, right. Like you just go, okay, I’ll just accept things the way that they are. Or it can sound passive or complacent. And so to say I’m going to be with things without judging them also sounds like you’re going to lose discernment. You’re going to lose your edge. You’re going to lose energetic application. And none of that is true at all.
I was once doing a meditation instruction somewhere and I started as we often do by saying, “Let’s just sit and listen to sound.” And somebody right away he raised his hands and he said, “Well what if it’s the sound of the smoke alarm I hear going off. Should I just sit here mindfully knowing that the smoke alarm is going off? Or should I get up?” And I said, “I’d get up.” So I think we have to look more deeply into what mindfulness actually.
My other concern is that classically mindfulness is considered to have several different kinds of benefits. Only one is pretty pronounced in the way it’s talked about now and that is a quality of fulfillment.
You know, if you’re drinking a cup of tea and checking your email and on a conference call and have the TV on mute reading the crawl, it’s not going to be a very fulfilling cup of tea. And so there’s a lot of emphasis on, well try maybe just to drink the cup of tea. Feel the warmth of the cup, smell the tea, taste the tea. It would be a whole lot better. And that’s true and that’s how mindfulness is mostly talked about. But classically, the most important benefit of mindfulness is said to be insight or wisdom.
We can see so much more clearly our own situation, the nature of our connection to others. We see so many more options that we might choose from if we’re going to take action if we’re mindful. And that’s kind of lost sometimes in the conversation. And yet you can see if we’re talking about insight, we’re talking about perspective, we’re talking about having a really big awareness so that we’re not caught in tunnel vision, we’re not lost in our own agenda. We can really listen. We can find new solutions. We can be creative. Then it also makes much more sense that mindfulness could be applicable in the corporate world.