Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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Archives for April 2021

#27: The muscle-memory of showing up

The alarm went off before I felt ready to embrace the day. As if on cue, my mind started playing that familiar playlist: “this is optional, you’re dreadfully tired, you’ve had such disturbed sleep recently…sleep in for just 30-minutes”. My half-slumber was the perfect opportunity for my crafty mind to hypnotize me. It offered me a buffet with all possible flavors of mouth watering resistance. But then I got up to join my weekly meditation group.

My mind played the score week after week, and week after week I responded with the same physical movement of bringing my body to standing. I noticed that over time the voice had started sounding weaker and meeker. Less potent. As if I now had more energy to override it and cut it off mid-sentence rather than the other way round. I initially credited the success to my willpower but it was something else. While willpower was important in getting me off the mattress, the follow through for all the subsequent steps was actually being fed by the memory and impact of our last meditation practice. 

This was  the muscle-memory of showing up and it freed me to do the work instead of staying stuck at the threshold of action. 

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” ― Steven Pressfield

#26: Fixing the gaze while staying tuned-in

In the last post, I thought aloud why innovations often come hand-in-hand with unintended consequences. For the creators, it may feel overwhelming to tend to additional things when one is already struggling to create meaningful momentum in early-stage work. We might be able to take inspiration from standing balance poses in yoga.

Yoga teachers often invite students to fix their gaze on a single steady point while doing any pose that requires balancing on one leg. Doing this often stabilizes the body instantly. While fixing the gaze allows us to gain stability in difficult poses, we are also reminded to stay tuned in to the rest of the body.  Even while the gaze is fixed, we are nudged to keep a micro-bend in the standing knee, tone the muscles of the leg as if they are hugging the bones, and not jut the pelvis to the side so there is symmetry.  The macro goal for all physical postures (asanas) is to cultivate a sense of nonviolence (ahimsa) in body and mind. We are offered a vision for the pose and its benefits, but then we progress intentionally at our individual pace to ensure there is stability and ease at every step of the progression. Since the goal is to create no harm in the process of that progression, we stop to make adjustments at the first hint of pain.

What would it look like in business if we were to hold the steady gaze of ambition while also staying tuned-in to the downstream impact of that ambition; essentially zooming-in to seek the goal and zooming-out to feel the outcome simultaneously?

Customer feedback loops (where we tap into ideally a diverse customer set to get real-world pulse checks), are already a part of modern business ethos. How can we take this further to gather the uncomfortable feedback around the unforeseen negative effects of our work? Could we get comfortable creating pauses in our workflow to retract and recreate our steps vs. blindly blazing through milestones? It’s possible; but perhaps a different way of structuring the work, the organization and expectations.

Business, like standing poses, is an example of complex and compound movement and focusing the gaze of ambition while staying tuned-in to impact may create strength, stability and ease as we scale and grow. 

“We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.” ― Donella H. Meadows

#25: Move fast and break things

The legislative heat on large US-based tech companies has been ratcheting up in the last few years. Most recently, in March 2021, Facebook, Google and Twitter testified in a congressional hearing about how their platforms enable the spread of misinformation. We could spend a long time talking about the systemic forces that got us here: the funding ecosystem and business models that created the chase for endless scale; the algorithms that became increasingly opaque and got out of control; the feature-sets that appeared exciting and harmless in the short-run but irreversibly changed modern society. For this snippet though, I’d like to zoom-out even further to see how humans have fared across the arc of last century.

Below is a very simplistic assessment of the promises and pitfalls of innovations we’ve all benefitted from:

  • Automobiles: Pros – faster mobility, access to broader employment. Cons – use of non-renewable resources, air pollution, rise in obesity and cardiovascular diseases.
  • Mass produced clothes: Pros – affordability, ability to look suave. Cons – forced labor, use of non-renewable resources, greenhouse emissions, water-pollution from dyeing textiles, microplastics in oceans from laundering synthetics like polyester.
  • Ecommerce: Pros – access to a wide selection of goods at affordable prices. Cons – excessive consumerism, cardboard footprint of packaging, transportation emissions.
  • Satellites: Pros – communication and navigation; weather and climate monitoring; oceanography and astronomy.  Cons – space trash.

Are we noticing a thread yet? Every innovation has had a positive impact on some aspects of society and a pretty negative impact on some others (Side note: is anyone else observing that the environment takes a huge hit every time we innovate? Yikes!).

We think the “move fast and break things” motto is a tech mantra. And it is when we think of it as a way to engineer an MVP (minimum viable product) and iterate but when we zoom-out further, we see that humans create progress living by this motto. We tend to zoom-in on a goal and build as fast as possible knowing that we’ll break things in the process, and we tune out any breakages that occur outside the circumference of our ambition. Arguably this myopic view is necessary to make any real progress and not freeze in the face of massive goals. But when we see over and over again that these broken things eventually become the bane of our society and almost impossible to fix, expanding our vision to understand unintended consequences while we’re building isn’t just a nice to have; It’s a must have.

“Like compost, our work is not linear in a static timeframe…
Our success can be measured in more than one way. How did we learn from our hiccups, errors, mistakes, fuckups, drama, and difficulty that goes into an action, our “shit”?
How can future generations learn from and build on what we do, our work and intentions now?” ― Sierra Pickett

#24: Holding Lightly. Hint: It may not be forever.

(Our Sanghas, part 3)

I know a sweet little girl Adriana. Last time I saw her, she was blowing bubbles in the sun standing next to a flower bed brimming with Tulips. Most of the bubbles were medium-sized and not very long lasting. Then quite unexpectedly, she made a massive bubble that kept on growing and seemed to have staying power. The four adults watching got instantly excited about the big bubble. We wanted to see how far it would travel and just as we all boarded the dream-train, little Adri popped the bubble with an audible glee. “Speak of nonattachment!”, I mused.

Ofcourse―to create any real impact―work, practices, relationships and Sanghas need to have a longer-shelf life than bubbles but given enough time, every single thing changes. That’s the inherent nature of life and growth. It may be that our Sangha-partners become life-long practice partners and that’s quite wonderful. Alternatively, they may “graduate out” of the Sangha over time and evolve in ways that make the partnership less of a mutual fit. Their goals, approaches, and needs may shift or they may need to tend to other aspects of their selves, lives and work.

Even as I say this, it would hurt to see any of my budding Sanghas dissolve but mutual growth only occurs with natural alignment and when practice spaces can exist without excessive corralling. I take heart in knowing that even if my Sangha-partnerships morph or dissolve, our relationships won’t necessarily. They might feel like plants whose roots now need larger planters to thrive in. And with time, the roots of these relationships may have the capacity to carry more depth outside of that one practice.

“Once a sangha-partner ≠ always a sangha-partner. Once a sangha-partner = always a soul friend.” ― Li’l ol’ me

#23: Naming our Sangha-partners. Hint: It’s a subset.

(Our Sanghas, part 2)

I wrote about “tribes, cohorts and sanghas” in my last note. I’m digging further today to explore how I actually partner with specific practitioners within a larger aligned-community. I’ve started thinking of this sub-cohort as my Sangha-partners: people who are equally commited to their craft, at the same time, and show up repeatedly alongside to help feed the flames of effort within me so I stay the course despite turbulence. In return, I do the same for them. There is complete mutuality towards a specific goal. 

But our Sangha-partners have a way of getting lost in the crowd. We might default to thinking that someone studying the same ideas as us or operating in the same professional space might be our partner practitioners; or that physical overlap and the ability to meet face to face are prerequisites for a strong partnership.

Over the last several months, I have consciously cultivated three aspects of myself that are important for the type of purposeful work I intend to do: 1) Exploring ideas that use technology and business in the service of human connection; 2) Writing publicly to get comfortable with putting my ideas out in the world, and; 3) Cultivating innate strength through yoga so I can better navigate currents of professional change while tending to personal trauma and grief. While it’s still early days of transformation, I am certain that my progress would have been slower and rougher without the presence of specific co-practitioners. They appeared with a resolve to build their own new world alongside me; to not only speak but act. While many practitioners within our larger tribes were weaving similar tapestries, my partners were threading similar needles as me at the same point in time and this overlap created a rich intellectual and emotional shorthand of mutuality and commitment. If they had been at this specific place in their journey say two years before me, they likely would have been mentors and if two years after me, they would have been mentees; both are valuable relationships but different than having a lockstep partner.

I’ll illustrate via specific examples from my life. My writing partner, Anna, lives in the Peruvian Amazon and writes her own version of Working Meditation. Our bi-weekly sessions help us exchange practical ideas and openhearted dreams while savoring the nuance and context in each other’s writing that others may miss. My meditation partner, Ava, practices her own flavor of Karma Yoga (a focus on selfless action) and her fire creates energy for a weekly meditation group that has become more cherished with every passing week. The momentum from our meditation sangha has shifted the timbre of my mornings even on days we don’t meet. My yoga-practice partner, Danielle, is a generous and joyful friend from business school who volunteered to be my test subject so I could learn how to teach yoga to others. She helped me create a practice space that beams with warmth, trust and happiness  so that every Sunday, I show up with the excitement of sharing vs. the nervousness of perfection. My “impact-through-work” partner, Sumit, is a dear old friend who is equally driven by the need to create positive change through technology and business. His willingness to engage with me in the muddy act of innovation is allowing us to blend the sparks of imagination with the realities of development, recharging both of us for our independent work.

I don’t overlap with my Sangha-partners for every aspect of my growth, and vice versa. We show up for a specific practice, bring in relevant parts of our lives, tend to each other and then refocus on our individual practices. We may think of fire as an analogy here—the outcome of any effort is the heat, the flames represent the effort itself and the Sangha-partners are those who offer logs at the right time to keep the fire burning bright.

“When you’re surrounded by respected peers, it’s more likely you’ll do the work you set out to do. And if you’re not, consider finding some.
Find this cohort with intent. Don’t wait for it to happen to you.” ― Seth Godin