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Why It's Dangerous to See Meditation as a 'Productivity Hack'

6/19/2017

Mindfulness meditation is having a Moment.

According to Fidelity Investments, 22% of employers offered mindfulness training progarms last year. That number is expected to double in 2017.

Harvard scientists have found that meditation conclusively and positively changes brain structure. And the Harvard Business Review reports that mindfulness meditation reduces stress and helps practitioners rely more on executive functioning over impulses.

Aetna, the health insurance company, calculated that it gained $3,000 in productivity per employee that went through a mindfulness program. That constituted a eleven to one return on investment!

As the research builds, apps that promise increased productivity, decreased stress, and deeper connection proliferate on mobile platforms: HeadSpace, Insight Timer, Simple Habit and others make expertly guided recorded meditations available anywhere and anytime.

This is all great. I’m a meditation and breathwork facilitator. I’m not going to say that more people meditating is a bad thing.

However.

An Invitation to Trust: A Story of Slavery and Freedom by Hafiz

6/4/2017

In Hafiz’s poem "Bring the Man to Me,” a Great Teacher has a vision of a slave who has fled a cruel master.

In the vision, the man runs through the desert, feet still bound and hands still shackled.

The teacher sends one of his disciples to find the man and bring him to the teacher for help, healing, and support.

With instructions not to speak to the man, the disciple sets out to find him. Less than two hours later, he arrives at the cave where the teacher had seen the man in his vision. The slave huddles inside, trembling.

Remembering that he has been commanded not to speak, the disciple tries to communicate that he has come to help the slave. It doesn’t work. Probably because the slave is terrified, still tied up, and hiding in a cave.

The slave tries to run and trips. The disciple is ‘forced to subdue’ him. I imagine that the slave is slung over the back of a horse like a very scared bag of grain.

At this point, the poem becomes so beautiful that I’ll just quote it (or at least Daniel Ladinsky’s rendering of it):

The Flag: A Story of Art & Healing

5/25/2017

I’m sitting at a long wooden table in a firehouse that has been temporarily repurposed as an artist studio and maker space. All around me, people are engaged in acts of creative sorcery.

One person alchemizes cardboard into a hat shaped like a boat.
Another glues gills onto a fish sculpture.
A third cuts, slices, and hot glues pieces of cloth to make an intricate flag.

These people are not kids; they’re adults. Extremely accomplished, talented adults. I’ve been invited to join them on a 5 day adventure of creativity and community off the coast of Newfoundland. Over the past two days, I’ve told stories around a campfire, lead the group in an opening circle, and seen some of the most stunning landscape I’ve ever encountered.

So far, it’s been great. Until this detour into art-making.

Off the Mat: Why I prefer to facilitate breathwork in non-traditional spaces

3/24/2017

A few years ago, I read a story about a guy who was diagnosed with hypertension, high blood pressure, and early stage heart disease. When the doctor shared the diagnosis with him, the guy protested: ‘But I do yoga every day! How can my body be so out of whack?!’

The doctor was also puzzled and, curious, he decided to do a small experiment.

He hooked the patient up to a monitor and followed him to a yoga class. Here’s what he found:

Breathwork: Four Levels of Healing

3/21/2017

There’s a bit of a mystique around breathwork meditation that is not entirely necessary. The intention of this post is to share a bit of what you can expect during a breathwork session.

For folks who have practiced breathwork a few times, this might help create some context for your experience. For those who haven’t, it may answer some questions. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Here we go. Breathwork works on four levels:

Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

Every time we do the practice, it’s working on these levels in different degrees.

Sometimes it works to physically retrain the breathing mechanism of our body. Or we may be overwhelmed by the physical sensations it provokes. Tingling, constriction, expansiveness, temperature changing. The experience may be all about the body.

5 quick ways to destress and reconnect with your humanity in challenging times

2/20/2017

According to Psychology Today, Americans just broke a new record for anxiety and stress. If you’re into breaking records, that’s very exciting. For the rest of us, it may just be a confirmation that we’re not alone in dealing with that near constant tightness in the chest and knot in the stomach.

When the world goes topsy turvy and a swirling atmosphere of division, outrage and chaos becomes more pervasive, it deepens our stress and can affect us at at every level of our lives.

It can disturb our sleep, eating habits, and behaviors. We can start to define ourselves by our relationship to unfolding events. We’re protesters! We’re victims of a rigged system! We’re builders of a new, more just society!

It’s exhausting, numbing, and overwhelming. And, frankly, it’s dehumanizing.

While it’s true that adopting a daily meditation or yoga practice and exercising several times a week and watching your diet and drinking 10 glasses of water per day and cutting down on coffee and starting a garden will all help reduce stress. . .sometimes there’s just not space in the day for all of that. So:

Two Alternatives to The Hero's Journey

2/10/2017

If you’ve seen Star Wars or just about any Disney animated film, you’re familiar with the Hero’s Journey: An unlikely hero is thrust into an adventure by an Inciting Incident and must confront Challenges, usually three of them, to find the Holy Grail. In the process, the hero undergoes an initiation and comes of age, bringing wisdom and power back to his or her home. Along the way, the hero meets mentors and friends who provide crucial guidance.

The ‘Hero’s Journey’ sprang from the writings of Joseph Campbell, a mythologist who examined thousands of myths and stories from all over the world. He believed that the journey was a ‘monomyth,’ a deeply ingrained structure expressed across cultures and languages. You can learn much more about it here.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Campbell’s structure. What has happened, however, is that a slavish adherence to the Hero’s Journey has resulted in the proliferation of entrepreneurial, social impact, nonprofit stories that, essentially, all sound the same:

An Open Letter to Nonprofits and Social Impact Organizations: Here How to Present Your Cause

1/13/2017

Last night I attended a lovely event that honored a few local nonprofit organizations. The audience was fairly diverse. There were more than a few well-heeled folks in attendance.

In other words: the event presented a fantastic opportunity for these organizations to get in front of potential contributors and expand their community of support or at the very least raise their visibility.

All three organizations, two of which have decent sized budgets, whiffed. And all three representatives followed the same outline. It went a bit like this:

Listening & Transformation: Which level of listening are you at?

11/21/2016

Any time I lead an organizational or leadership storytelling workshop, I split folks into pairs and ask them to share a story with each other. Person ‘A’ goes first and Person ‘B’ is asked to simply listen without interjection. After the exercise, I ask everyone what they noticed about sharing and listening to the stories.

Based on what I’ve heard after facilitating this exercise hundreds of times, one of the most challenging parts is not telling the story, but listening without speaking. This makes a fair bit of sense: most of us have been culturally training to treat conversation like a tennis match. We listen primarily for an opening, a chance to return the volley, to share our own point of view.

What happens when we’re challenged to simply listen, to take in another person’s story without any agenda of our own other than being present?

Finding Epic Stories in Small Moments

11/13/2016

There’s a crippling misconception floating out there in the world that tells us that the only good stories are based on Big, Dramatic Events. A major humanitarian crisis. Or a story of individual tragedy that, through heroic action, becomes a tale of almost superhuman triumph. While it’s true that those stories have power, sometimes the stories that resonate most strongly occur in small moments of reflection or realization.

What makes an event or moment story-worthy?