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Meditation in the Workplace?
prostoalex writes "Nortel, Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Google, Apple and many others are apparently finding meditation and yoga to be a very efficient way to motivate and energize the employees. BusinessWeek finds that the reasons companies are suddenly hiring the yoga experts and conducting regular classes are easily justified to the management: "increased brain-wave activity, enhanced intuition, better concentration, and the alleviation of the kinds of aches and pains that plague employees most"."
I find this article interesting. Perhaps some workers are wanting peace and harmony and are having trouble getting those needs met in a work environment that I see as increasingly fast-paced, stressful, and unstable. Personally I've been able to meet my needs for peace and even energy through yoga (after being dragged by my girlfriend there).
Observations....
William H. Gross, of Newport Beach (Calif.)'s Pacific Investment Management Co., who often meditates with yoga before a day of trading at his $349 billion money-management firm.
Has anyone ever listened to Bill Gross's bond recommendations? They always seem to do much worse than his actual holdings...
So employees can breathe easy: This is one perk that isn't likely to get axed.
I've heard this one before...
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I did Bikram Yoga at Funky Door in Berkeley. Any recommendations?
An added bonus is that you don't just spend your weekend recovering from the working week. You feel more inclined to go back to work on monday when you feel you have a life beyond work.
Q.
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You're probably right to a large degree, but the work place isn't the only place where meditation or even just sitting quietly for fifteen minutes has yielded improvements -- I saw a piece on an urban school in chicago or something that was a complete disaster. The school had rowdy kids, poor attendance, and poor grades, and horrible test scores. A new principal there instituted a mandatory meditation period of fifteen minutes for all students. Within months attendance had increased, grades and test scores had increased, and attitude was significantly improved. Yoga in the workplace sounds like a stretch to me, but I see nothing wrong with a few minutes of peaceful meditation each day.
Meditation is valuable but there are a lot of different kinds of meditation. For example, breathing meditation can be done 24 hours a day. Our breath rate has a huge impact on what emotions control us in a given moment. Control the breath and you have another avenue for seeking mental equilibrium.
Then there's the "kindness" meditation which can be done at all hours while you're awake. Basically, you decide that you wish everyone well no matter what they think of you and you don't let situations beyond your control get the best of you.
I don't find value in yoga or sitting in one place humming crazy chants. Neither do most educated Buddhists. The charlatans like yoga and incense and other nonsense because it sells. The naive like yoga and incense and other nonsense because these people haven't detached themselves from the myth that you can *buy* happiness.
Corporate adoption of meditation practices seems like yet another idiotic idea from marketing. I'm sure most employees are perfectly capable of taking care of their spiritual needs without the Corporate Big Brother getting involved.
If corporations really want to help, they can focus on providing money in exchange for hours worked instead of always trying to ace full-timers out of their labor.
Laws are for people with no friends.
I agree. Caffeine has never kept me awake, but when I come off the high from it I get really tired. Now that I have quit caffeine I actually have more energy consistenly through the day instead of the highs and lows that came with drinking caffeine.
Hey, that's absolutely wonderful for YOU. For it to be forced upon me as another way to bring up morale and productivity in the workplace?
Swimming, hiking, camping, and listening to music are my ways to relieve stress and bring up my productivity.
I hate sitting in one place basically doing nothing for more than 5 mins.
I wish management would learn that people are individuals and need to be treated as such. Blanket policy always pisses someone off.
Remember that.
If you want to relax then stop drinking caffeine and sugary drinks. You'll sleep better at night and thus will feel better at work, no need to take caffeine to wake you up due to lack of sleep the night before.
Very true. I used to drink coffee and soda, now I have completely quit. I have plenty of energy, I am active all day long, and I have no problems getting 7-9 hours of sleep at night. I don't find myself nodding off in the middle of the day anymore, either.
As for meditation, I have tried it on and off, and find the results to be very subtle. I'm trying to get back into it again, meditating in the morning before going to work, and in the evening at some point. A book I recommend is "Journey of Awakening" by Ram Dass. The way he presents his ideas makes it very accessible to most of us. Even if you don't end up doing any meditation, the first chapter of the book gives great insight into life in general.
Great quotes:
"Buddhism is a science, not a fanatic religion like football."
-- Lama Khyentse Norbu
"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion; the religion
which is based on experience, which refuses dogmatism. If there's any
religion that would cope with scientific needs it will be Buddhism.... "
-- Albert Einstein, 1954, [from Albert Einstein: The Human Side,
edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press]
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Most people seem to be unaware of the constant stream of internal dialog that accompanies us through the day. It affects how we process all the information we receive, and therefore how we act.
This internal dialog can become fixated on a single idea. When it becomes a more important determinant of our behavior than the informtaion we receive from our senses. Everybody's had the experience of working with a coworker who keeps coming back to the same issues over and over again. We tend to put it down to perversity -- that they are just use every event as an excuse to harp on their pet issue. But it's not really voluntary - it can become a pernicious habit like drug addiction.
It's an interesting comparison, because meditation is closely related to hypnotism, and many people have found hypnotism useful in breaking destructive habits. "Free your mind" has become a familiar catch phrase from The Matrix, but what the mind needs to be freed from is not an outside force, but its own overly ingrained habits of thought. In a sense, we all can become "addicted" to certain ways of thinking about things, to the extent that we become blinded to situations that would be obvious to somebody looking at them with fresh eyes.
Yoga is not just about physical flexibility -- it's about mental flexibility as well.
Of course, the benefits depends on what your job is. If your job involves processing information and making judgements, meditation could conceivably allow you to be a little more creative. I have a feeling that most people in these kinds of positions have at best a few hours a week in which most of their creativity is done. Much of the time spent during the week is duff. For some people, giving even an hour a day to meditation could conceivably be worthwhile if they could extend the number of highly creative hours from say two to two and a half over the course of a week.
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