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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"."
This is ridiculous. Employers would find that their employess were productive and content by treating them with respect and dignity, managing them properly, having proper time-scales, fair working hours, etc. Enforced yoga, meditation and feng-shui is childish, silly and new-age clap-trap put about my a bunch of charlatans looking to make a quick buck out of the naieve, impressionable and those with more money than sense.
Stick Men
I misread 'Meditation' as 'Medication', which might be relaxing in the workplace.
if 'fruits de mer' = seafood
does 'fruits de merde' = mushrooms?
You may as well just create a 1-2pm "Execute Powernap."
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
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.
:)
Of course such suggestions will no go down with programmers
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...
*****
I did Bikram Yoga at Funky Door in Berkeley. Any recommendations?
Seriously, I recommend it. It's _the_ geek religion* as far as I'm concerned; no contradictions with physics or cosmology, no ridiculous mumbo-jumbo from some 3000 year old oral histories of nomadic shepherds, no all powerful elephant-god floating in the sky somewhere... and Zen will teach you more about programming and network administration than any number of certifications and courses.
*well, apart from Discordianism, or the Church of the SubGenius... which both have a lot of zen in them anyway - the jokes, mainly
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
..along with the web, email, trips to the coffee machine, phone calls, scratching my bollocks and leaving early this means i might never need to do anything in the office ever again!
... that now my firm approves it when I sleep off at my desk? Well, its a sort of meditation too, isn't it?
It's not the Yoga thats helping, it's the attention. People love to feel needed!
Make money with Real Estate Investing
Personally, I derive the same benefits from my Scotch-and-Cigar breaks, without the added mystic baggage. Fortunately, I work from home.
But, hey, whatever floats your boat. If sitting in the Lotus Position and intoning chants from the Vedas is what we have to do to keep jobs from going to India, I'm all for it.
...appreciating the irony it, but all for it, nonetheless.
News from the future -- 'ResistorCorp has Employees Chanting "Ohm" '
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
To: employees@company.com
From: management@company.com
Subject: Note Yoga team members
Dear ${team_member},
It has recently come to our attention that some corridors have a very strong smell of incense, patchouli and other unidentified substances.
As much as we value the quality of your working environment, we would like to remind you that marijuana is not yet allowed within the united states.
Sincerely,
${manager}
ps: What's with all those Pink Floyds mp3 ?
We have a guy that comes and gives shiatsu to whoever feel like being massaged.
But most of the time, instead of mediting, we prefer doing some sport (not on the screen, I mean perspiring, running around, etc.)
It is also *forbidden* to speak about work-related issues during lunch.
The guy that came 2 days ago about his weight problem is not alone and I guess there's nothing as relaxing as re-oxygenation ; SPORT.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Here each week's lowest producer has to have the goatse.cx guy as his desktop wallpaper the following week.
Trolling is a art,
Frankly, that kind of thing makes me completely mad. What about paying people a decent salary?
What about not over-working them (ie: decent work hours, not permanent overtime)? This way, perhaps your employees won't need frivolous yoga classes to be productive and motivated!
What about managing companies responsibly, not in an Enronesque way?
What about day-care benefits for employees with children? You know, like having in-house day-care center for toddlers, so that moms and dads can see their kids during lunch hour, and not grow apart from their offspring?
Etc... etc... In short: decent and sensible policies? Noooo.... instead, you get these moronic "benefits".
Nothing against yoga, mind you, which I am really interested in, by the way. It's just that replacing sound management policies by yoga classes just doesn't cut it for me.
If I want yoga classes, I'll pay for them out of my own pocket, thank you very much...
(Sorry for the rant, this is the kind of Dilbert-esque "benefits" that just push me over the edge...)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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.
Insert Signature Here
I've nothing against this meditation idea, but I can't help wondering. Would a company support employee prayer breaks? Not that I advocate such a practice--I can pray anytime I want, without company authorization. I'm just curious, is all...
Hiawatha Bray
Tech Reporter
Boston Globe
Yoga and meditation are not inherently New Age and certainly aren't clap-trap. That doesn't mean that New Agers don't mess up the field something fierce. I was once considering selling T-Shirts that said, "Blow the New Age out your ass."
That being said you are absolutely correct. Giving people the opportunity to take a relax and stretch without harassing them about their "productivity" would certainly be one thing they could do to treat employees with respect.
This isn't what typically happens though. It gets applied just like any other buzz word compliant band-aid program that makes them feel like they're respecting their employees while actually treating them with disdain and just as much like mere productivity machines as they ever did.
Thus meditation becomes demeaning for many.
On the whole they could do more good by letting people listen to music of their choice while they work and not having a coniption fit if they walk to the watercooler a time or two.
Meditation cannot be applied as a paliative for keyboard logging.
KFG
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
As someone who meditated on a daily basis too, I wholeheartedly agree with the first poster. While meditation is useful to relieve stress and calm your mind, it pales in comparison to just being treated well. You can calm yourself as much as you want, but if somebody else keeps punching you in the face, life still sucks.
I'd rather have lapdances.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Buddha taught us that the source of human misery is attachment. In order to be free from sorrow, we must be free from attachment - and from striving.
Many people who meditate - and I suspect most Americans who meditate - do so because they hope to get something out of it, anything from relaxation, to relief from stress, enlightment or spiritual growth. But if you are striving to better yourself through meditation, you are missing the whole point. What you must free yourself from is that very striving.
The Shambhala monk Chyogyam Trungpa was instrumental in bringing Tibetan buddhism to the US and Canada in a form that could be appreciated by westerners. May I recommend a couple of his books:
-
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
-
The Heart of the Buddha
Spiritual materialism was particularly rampant in the United States in the late 60's and early 70's. Trungpa worked hard to teach all the navel-gazers that that was a mistake.I can teach anyone to meditate in about two minutes:
Sit comfortably but with your back straight. Focus just part of your attention on your breath. Clear your mind of thoughts. Don't beat yourself up if a though crosses your mind, just let it go. Then sit for a while. Try ten minutes to start with, then a little longer each day as you get used to it.
The most important thing is to just sit. How many Slashdotters ever allow themselves to just sit? To just clear your mind without thinking of anything?
Trungpa said there was no way out but to apply your bottom to the meditation cushion. I can promise you'll enjoy his books - he was quite a colorful character.
I think that the day that release from attachment can be sold to American business will come when Bill Gates gives his money to the poor, shaves his head, dons saffron robes, and takes The Vows of Refuge.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Why is it people are comfortable with companies sponsoring Yoga, a religious practice? Meditation is one thing, but:
_ re li_hin.php
http://www.niharonline.com/culture/religion/cul
Bhagavat-Gita, a part of the epic Mahabharata, expounds the synthesis of three yogas or ways of attaining union with the Supreme Self, Gyana-yoga (union through knowledge), Bhakti-yoga (union through devotion) and Karma-yoga (union through action).
http://www.classicalyoga.org/Page18.html
There has been and continues to be much confusion over what is religion and/or spirituality. In actuality, these two words have an identical meaning. "Religion" comes from the Latin root "religio" which means "to link-back" to the spirit. This is the identical meaning of the word "Yoga" which comes from the Sanskrit "Yuj;" i.e., "to yoke" to the spirit. Even before the word "Yoga" was used, the Vedas (Hindu scripture) use the word "Yajna" which essentially means "sacrifice." The word "sacrifice" comes from the Latin translation "sacred doing." With this understanding, one becomes aware of the inseparable nature of Yoga/Religion/Spirituality.
Those newly hired Yoga experts better not get too comfy - major us corporations are trying to outsource meditation to India where Yoga expertiese is higher and average Yoga expert salary is 5 loafs of bread per month.
grisha.org
You should have been dropped to "troll", not the parent post.
How is Buddhism not a religion? What makes a religion? The suspension of rational thought?
There's nothing scientific about the Buddhist moral code in the Middle Path and this moral code is far stricter than any religion I've seen. You pay the price of your deeds in karma. That price can be pretty f'n heavy if you aren't careful. You might not get punished immediately or even in this life but you will pay. Conversely, karma rewards good deeds. You can foster your entire existence into generating good karma (/. has nothing to do with this.)
There is no eternity for your behavior. You will not suffer eternal damnation for evil nor will you enjoy eternal bliss for good. Everything can change.
Further, while the overall concepts square with science, once you start exploring the 31 states of existence, you may need to leave science at the door or at least not get upset when you hear various descriptions of these different realities.
You have to believe that the Middle Path is the right way of living and that creating excuses and rationalizations for why you deviated from it will hurt you more than just admitting that you like porn, gambling and other nonsense.
Now, what were you saying about Buddhism not being a religion? Maybe it was just your ignorance and cynicism shining through.
Laws are for people with no friends.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In any case, i've met a lot of geeks that will believe any old bullshit (atkins has really taken hold in the geek community for some reason, for example)
... who are arguably quacks of the highest order.
... certainly the theories that there are have yet to be rigorously tested. High-carb foods didn't become common until after the advent of modern agriculture, some 8-10 thousand years ago, so it really isn't unreasonable to find that our metabolisms aren't terribly well adapted to processing it. 10,000 years is nothing compared to 3,000,000, so we propbably have a while yet before our bodies evolve into more effecient processors of high-carb diets than low-carb diets.
OK, now it is my turn to call bullshit.
As much as I have always despised 'diets de jour', Atkins was preaching his take on this for 30 odd years, much to his own personal and professional derision. However, in recent years scientific studies have finally been conducted to validate or refute his findings, and in every case have validated his approach.
Now there is plenty of innuendo suggesting 'long term health effects' that are bad, but no solid studies have been performed, and the claim that the atkins diet does in fact lead to dramatic weight loss has been demonstrated and is no longer disputed even by its detractors.
OTOH we do have emperical evidence of the ill health effects of the low fat, high carb diets that dieticians have been foisting upon us over the last two decades: America has never been as obese, or as unhealthy, as it is today. Specific causes are uncertain (correlation does not prove causation, it really can only suggest it, and even then not always), but it is clear that as the American diet has embraced and increased its consumption of low-fat, high-carb products the populace has grown vastly more obese and unhealthy.
So we have only three ways of losing weight in a reaonably healthy manner: burn more calories, consume less calories, or go into ketosis by dropping your carb intake dramatically. 'Low Fat' doesn't do shit for anyone except peddlers of 'low fat' foods and diets
In any event, calling atkins "any old bullshit" flies in the face of numerous studies and, most importantly, the very real and reproducable effect it has on people's weight.
I actually did the Atkins thing, not out of any personal interest (as I said, I've always despised 'diets de jour'), but to be supportive of my girlfriend who was doing it.
I did not expect it to work and had zero faith in the approach.
After losing 45 pounds and having my waiste size shring by 6 inches I had to eat a little crow and admit that, emperically, the damn thing worked, and worked dramatically. Having my blood pressure go from marginally high to marginally low, and my cholesterol go from Very High to Medium-Low in four short months made me a believer...whatever 'long term health effects' there might be (and who knows, even pseudo-scientific innuendo can be right on occasion), the immediate health effects were dramatic and extremely positive.
However, unlike religion, I buy into the Atkins approach (though I'm no longer on the diet) because of verifiable, reproducable results.
As I said, it is possible there may be health issues with eating low-carb diets over the long term, but that certainly isn't proven, and no real long term studies have yet been done (though plenty of allegations have been made, by the same people who were pushing the low-fat, high carb disaster upon us the last several decades).
Indeed, Given that we evolved for most of our 3 million years as primates eating exactly that kind of diet, it is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that there are no such health risks
In a way it is a pity Atkins has become popular (among geeks as well as anyone else), as I absolutely hate doing anything that smacks of 'trendy,' but the simple fact is that, unlike low-fat, high-carb diets that are supposed to make you healthy and don'
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Buddhism is not based in dogma. You should trust only your own _practice_ and experience. Buddhism is intrested of human mind. Cosmology and others are not so important. Many buddhist do belive in karma rebirth etc. like many people did in Buddhas time. Buddha himiself consistently refused to respond in many questions: is the world eternal, is the world infinite, is the soul same as body, does buddha (avakened person) exist after death, etc. If you are following buddhist path you are doing something not beliving.
Believe nothing merely because you have been told it, or because it is
tradition, or because you yourself have imagined it. Do not believe
what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for him. But
whatever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive
to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings, believe and cling
to that doctrine, and take it as your guide. -- Buddha
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Ah, like most Westerners, you seem to confuse meditation and yoga as originiating in Buddhism. Far from the truth. Buddhism is only about 2600 years old (Buddha was born as a Hindu prince in 623 B.C. in a town called Kapilavatsu on the modern Indo-Nepal border.)
On the other hand, the practice of Yogic poses and meditation in India is * real ancient". More than 3000 yrs old. In fact, Yoga is mentioned in the RigVeda, the oldest known Hindu text. RigVeda is currently estimated by historians as at least 3300 years old. However, the first authoritative treatise on Yoga was written by the Indian sage, Sri Patanjali Maharishi about 2000 years ago. Yoga derives from 'yuj', a Sanskrit word meaning 'to unite.' Yoga was therefore used to connote union of one's consciousness with a presumed universal consciousness. Yoga is just one of the 6 main Indian philosophical systems or Darshanas : ( Darshana literally means 'sight' or 'revelation' in different contexts in Sanskrit, Hindi, and many other Indian languages.)
1. Yoga - union of individual consciousness with universal consciousness
2. Vedanta - knowledge of self, universe and God.
3. Sankhya - philosophical classification of the universe
4. Vaishesika - analysis and characterization of the universe
5. Nyaya - logic
6. Purva-Mimamsa - laws of formal religion