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Today’s Karmic Workout – The Art of U... Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue O...

Today’s Karmic Workout – The Virtue Of Mindfulness

Karmic Muscle Group: Awareness & Discpline
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Mindfulness

[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.

What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.

Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.

The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."

For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.

You may want to print out the post about the Virtue Mindfulness and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]

Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the second virtue, mindfulness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about mindfulness by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Mindfulness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day. This will be much harder than you think. Most of us are pretty oblivious much of the time. Daydreaming or thinking about what we are going to have for lunch is not mindfulness.
For the rest of the day, try to be aware of what you are actually doing and thinking. Do not wander off. If you do, pull yourself back into your actual experience rather than the mind cartoons that we normally watch most of the day. Keep bringing your mind back to your real-time experience as you work through your entire day including when you finally go to bed.hr]

Training Note:
In principle, the Virtue of Mindfulness is a simple thing. All there is too it is to pay attention to what you are doing and thinking in real time. If you are walking down the street, then your thought should be “I am walking down the street”. If you are eating an apple, then your thought should be “I am eating an apple”. What it is not is thinking “I wonder if I should buy a new television” while you are sitting traffic. Mindfulness is the awareness of what is going on right now. What you will notice as you wrestle with this exercise is that out of any given day, you are hardly actually engaged with it all. We meet a friend and instead of simply being with the experience of seeing her, we start having thoughts about what she is wearing, where she got that blouse, then leap to a random thought about whether or not our credit card can handle a shopping spree to buy a new shirt.

The point is that most of human consciousness in the Information Age is lived in abstraction. Even when we eat, we are thinking about something else. Even as you read this, you are being sucked into the abstraction of what is written here and not thinking “I a reading Karmic Workout”. Mindfulness is the discipline of paying attention to what is actually happening around you. If you do have a thought about something intangible, you actually think to yourself “I am thinking about shopping”. This accurately describes your experience and alerts you to the need to return to real life. With practice, you can be present in the moment almost continuously and this has a profound impact on your ability to interact with real people and real situations. For starters, you stop living in the clouds.

Karmic Benefits:

These Days, Everyone Has Attention Deficit Disorder: the human mind has a hard time staying focused as it is. We are creatures prone to distraction. There is the song that you heard in the grocery store that, despite disliking it, you cannot get out of your head. When we are under stress, we pay even less attention as we mull over in our mind our day dreams of telling our boss off even though we will most likely sit there and cop out – again. The point is that the drama between our ears is not what is playing out in real life. What would happen if you did not live in a fantasy world, but were tuned into what was really happening. Try it, you will like it.
Life Happens In The World, Not In Your Mind: the Latin name for human being is homo sapien sapien. This means “man that is aware that he is aware”. Well, sometimes. Human beings have a unique ability to watch their own thinking. They also have the ability to think abstractly, to speculate and fantasize. Abstract thinking is extremely useful, but not when you child is trying to talk to you. Being present to what is happening if far more important, especially when you are driving. And yet, most of us have had the experience of driving for miles without remembering a minute of the trip. This is not only dangerous, but separates you from the experience of actually living.
It Is Not Clairvoyance, It Is Called “Paying Attention”: when we tune into what is going on around us,it is like we have magical powers. We begin to notice the details of our world. We do not have accidents. We know where we put our car keys. We are in tune with the emotional state of the people around us because we actually took the time to notice. We also become aware of what goes through our mind and how or mind really works. This is the access point of clarity and a consciousness by design instead by accident.

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.