Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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Seeking: Observations related to pursuit of self and purpose

#29: The art of transitions

“The art of sequencing is the art of transitions.” ― Melina Meza, my “art of teaching” yoga teacher

Melina shared these wise words early on in my yoga training. Since then, I’ve put effort in building parts of myself that I consider fundamental to showing up fully in the world. I launched this website which required development and writing, two very different skills; started teaching a Sunday class to my loved ones; and switched gears back into my entrepreneurial venture. All this while still in active physical recovery from life events. I have a tendency to spin a lot of plates at the same time. This time however I’m not only spinning plates that are new to me, I’m asking myself to exercise varied skills and tend to a spectrum of practices within a compressed timeframe. So, I’ve been transitioning a lot. Constantly walking from one room of creation to another, each room requiring me to lead with a different part of myself.

Effective yoga sequences ensure one pose transitions to the next thoughtfully so there is a through-line, a semblance of continuity to help us plant ourselves into a practice and not get uprooted by jarring changes. For instance, one would rarely change focus and altitude abruptly by going directly from a very active standing pose to a challenging supine pose without any transitional poses in between. If we did that, it would feel more like a discrete set of poses and less like a seamless sequence where one pose contributes to the next.

This idea of transitions has helped me better structure my new practices. I’ve started viewing my writing as a warm-up for the day, the new business work as a collection of active poses, and the Sunday yoga classes as the cool down from the week where I integrate ideas and reconstitute myself with a trusted community. Viewing aspects of the work with a lens of sequencing makes it possible to align them with my natural rhythms and allocate appropriate focus to each practice without risking the whole sequence. I’m still learning and struggle some days to keep the plates spinning but the idea of transitions has been useful in shifting the gears and resourcing myself repeatedly with intention.

Transitions are hard because it’s far easier to stay moving in the same direction, but our lives and days are filled with them. Knowing that a transition has arrived helps us switch to a different pose with more skill and maybe even tap into micro moments of rest.

“Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.”  ― Isaac Newton (Newton’s first law of motion)

#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

#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

#14: The sparks of change

My experience of being me is notably different than what it was just a few years ago. Anyone looking from the outside may observe that I have switched homes, suffered intense loss, or moved on from my job.

What they may not see is how I now care for my intellect and spirit without apology: That I don’t think it’s frivolous to spend time pursuing my interests. That I allow my mind to float along to music or books as I weave dreams in ways I never allowed myself before. That when faced with injury or pain, I’m tender yet strong for myself rather than impatient and accusatory.

They may also not see that I better understand and trust my process of creation: That I allow myself to play with and rejig ideas in my mind, often creating a physical and organizational mess in the process, knowing that these loose streams will coagulate soon. That I need to dive deep into the mind’s dense and active ocean floor before I can come up with that pearl of crisp insight. That I have to allow neurons to fire a certain way while building new ideas. That I can march to the drumbeat of productivity but the sparks buried inside my mind, heart and gut get charged by this process of madly-expansive discovery that eventually allows clarity and precision to emerge.

These are the things that give me goose bumps when I immerse myself in a life and way of being that’s uniquely mine. They have completely altered the experience of being me inside my body. And I see parts of this evolving me spilling into my physical spaces through tell-tale signs and objects.

No, these things remained hidden from outside view. By the time anyone could see the change on the outside, the inside had been evolving for a long time. When we allow ourselves to change in ways our sparks invite, the work is initially for us but the ripples eventually touch every entity we encounter.

“There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.

You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences…

…So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife, that I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself, and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.” ― Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman