Working Meditation

Observations on Human Connection & Contribution

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#60: Pauses and cycles

In addition to filters, pauses and cycles are two other concepts that bubble up for me when I start digging my wells. The notion of a pause within a recurring cycle appears repeatedly across cultural, philosophical and faith traditions. We are guided to pause and reflect for a few minutes every day, for a day every week, for a week in a season and for a month in a year; and the smaller pauses seem to nest into the larger ones, creating a throughline of intention and focus.

For instance:

  • Daily: The value of daily meditation or prayer appears across traditions and is present even in non-religious practices like Stoicism where we’re guided to bookend our days with morning and evening journaling and reflection.
  • Weekly: The concept of resting fully, reflecting  and disconnecting from work at least one day a week appears across all faiths and is made familiar to many of us in western culture through the portrayals of Jewish Sabbath.
  • Seasonally: Most societies have seasonal celebrations that remind us that there a time to plant, a time to nurture, a time to reap and a time to rest. The Indian calendar is peppered with festivals that remind us to tune into and work with the changing seasons.
  • Annually: And finally, Ramadan and Lent are the more prominent examples of the annual pauses we take.

Even if we bypass the faith-based traditions momentarily, there is increasing evidence that working with our circadian rhythms to create cycles of activity and rest is more efficient than trying to brute-force productivity. Ayurveda, one the world’s oldest holistic healing systems, offers in-depth guidance for the 24-hour circadian cycle and seasonal living (called Dinacharya and Ritucharya respectively) as cornerstones of preventive health care.

Our life is a hugely psychological and solitary journey where we manage powerful desires, dislikes, judgments and stories on a daily basis. Technically, we are also animals and have instincts that ask for speedy reactions to every event in our lives. But what seems to differentiate us from other animals is the awareness of our awareness. Recurring pauses in our schedules reduce our reactionary tendencies and train us to live in that meta-awareness so we are more thoughtful as we go about living our lives and digging our wells.

Pauses help us regenerate, refocus, and recommit to what’s here with enthusiasm and energy. Over the longer term, pauses, solitude and temporary retreats can also help us become more uniquely us by becoming less comparative, less competitive, and less fearful.

“Human beings left to their own devices—a very rare event—seem to work according to the quality of a given season and learn similarly in cycles. Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance, and disappearance. Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both ourselves and the subject stale and uninteresting.” ― David Whyte, Poet 

#59: External stimulus and the need for better filters

In the last note I considered the need to dig a few high quality “wells” that are aligned with who we are and what we choose to become. Today I’d like to discuss external stimulus, my key stumbling block when I try to dig my wells with the focus I’d like.

Stimulus is the “detectable change, physical or chemical, in the environment of an organism that results in some functional activity”. We are designed to detect and respond to changes and stimulus in our environment because our survival depends on it. Our receptors detect stimuli (light, heat, sound etc.) and send timely messages to the nervous system, which then guides the appropriate effector (muscles, glands etc.) to take specific action. We are designed to take action when we meet stimuli; this occurs within us at a cellular level and is often outside our control.

No surprises that we live in a world of escalating stimulus; words, products, ideas, notifications all coming at us with the quantity and intensity we weren’t designed to handle. Our nervous system allows for fast-acting but short-lived responses but if it’s constantly in a state of response, when does it get to rest, reconstitute and regenerate? You can buy the best engineered car but if you habitually over-rev the engine, it will end in junkyard faster. That is what’s happening to our nervous systems. That is what’s happening to each of us individually. To our ability to grapple with complex ideas, create something of long-term value with patience, navigate life’s turbulence with resilience, and show up in the world as whole as possible.

Here is what I’ve found helpful:
While external stimulus gets in the way of digging my wells, paradoxically, defining the wells I want to dig with more precision has helped me create effective personal filters.

We all react to different stimulus, and have different points of reactivity and overconsumption— some over shop, some binge-watch TV, some overeat. I’ve done all of the above at different points in my life but my biggest point of overconsumption as I dig my current wells is information. My work leads me to an abundance of useful tools, information and knowledge. Any google search surfaces a multitude of options, making me wade through the noise to get the right signal. But since I have more clearly defined how I want to create what I want to create, I’ve been able to ignore 80% of that noise. I have a mental-model of the knowledge landscape I want to traverse, the ideas I want to explore now and those I might pick up later knowing full well that I may not be able to get to them. And that’s ok.

It has been clarifying and freeing because I’ve stopped poking myself with needless stimulus.

Above all else though, here is my most useful personal filter: I keep reminding myself that my days are limited and they become wastefully shorter when I chase every shiny object.

“Don’t go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all.”― Kenneth Boulding, Economist and Educator

#58: The wells we dig

I recently asked a Vipassana meditation teacher why students who aspire to serious practice are dissuaded from practicing other techniques since they seem quite compatible to me. For those that are unaware, Vipassana or insight meditation is the practice of paying close attention to bodily sensations through which one sees the ever changing nature of existence. It was a longer conversation that covered many ideas but one point struck me particularly hard—she said “if we dig one well, we can get to the water faster as opposed to digging four wells”. 

This makes practical sense. I’ve found that I learn best by toggling between intellectual learning and experiential doing. Each act of doing then brings up additional questions that I can take back to my intellectual digging. It’s a repeatable loop of learning >> doing >> observing and getting curious >> coming back to learn more >> taking deeper action and so on. And it’s not just me. This loop occurs for all of us when we hope to really get to the core of something. This level of commitment takes persistence and patience but most importantly, it takes time.

Then, once we have a certain amount of rooting in one practice, we can better understand other flavors of knowledge and practice within the same broad discipline. For instance someone trained in Tango might be able to better note the differences and similarities with Waltz, and perhaps learn a thing or two from them. An artist who favors water colors can still relate to and appreciate another who favors oil paints. Each practice can lead to a nourishing and generative experience, just the way different techniques of meditation can lead us to equanimity and different entrepreneurship journeys can lead to exponential self-awareness and growth. But it all begins with the discipline of putting on our dancing shoes, picking up the brush, sitting on the meditation cushion or pouring into our business idea day after day without self-judgment.

When we find ourselves spoilt for choice, it’s easy to jump to the next practice and the next, and then another when the going gets tricky. Every time we jump to the next thing, we get a temporary hit of optimism but over time all it does is sap our resilience and our ability to focus and commit. This is human wiring but the world we live in feeds these distractible parts of our nature. We jump from one thing to the next because we don’t want to miss life but that is precisely the recipe to missing life. Digging a few high quality wells helps us get to the water faster but also shapes our character. When we dig one well that is meaningful to us personally, we reclaim the ability to carve ourselevs in a way that we choose to be shaped. We then bring that awareness and commitment to the rest of our life and interactions.

It’s worth defining the wells we want to dig in our very limited time on earth. We owe it to ourselves—to our one precious life—and we owe it to the rest of humanity because when we dig our unique well, the rest of us get to drink that sweet water.

“Let me run
at break-neck speeds toward sceneries
of doubt. I have no more dress rehearsals
to attend.” — Major Jackson, Poet

#52: What kind of an X, Y or Z will I be?

What kind of a change-agent will I be? What kind of a parent might I be? Will I make a difference in the world through my writing, entrepreneurship, both, or something else? Can I create material impact? What kind of an athlete could I have been; and could I build parts of that potential despite long-term injuries, and decades later than typical? Do I have the ability to travel to a culturally rich hotspot in the middle-east on my own? How long will it take to become this new iteration of me?

None of these questions can be answered just by thinking. They require action. We will never know what kind of <insert dream here> we could be until we start walking and falling on that path. The key is knowing which path is ours and which isn’t. Not which we have decided is ours because of optics and others expectations of us.

The kicker is that sometimes it’s not that easy to parse out which hopes and dreams are intrinsically ours, which have been lovingly welcomed through osmosis with others, and which are not ours and should be gracefully set aside. That osmosis by the way isn’t a bad thing, it’s a natural offshoot of human bonding and can be healthy or unhealthy based on the situation. It takes a heavy dose of self-reflection and honesty to know oneself and acknowledge that while a path may speak to us, we may not be well-suited for it yet, or suited within a certain context, or ever.

Perhaps this question can help clarify if it’s even worth taking the first step: “Do I innately feel it is worthwhile to take a few exploratory steps on this path?”. If the answer from deep inside is no, then please listen. Life is too short to waste on unfulfilling endeavors. If the answer is a yes, take that step despite fear but know that anything worthwhile takes time. We don’t get results day one or even year one. Even if it’s worthwhile, it often is a process of discovery and change. We dream the questions, and then live them.

“One of the loneliest things you can find is somebody who is in the wrong kind of work.”― John O’Donohue

#50: The gears of attention

Over the last month, my attention has been diverted towards a talkative and high-energy addition to my household. As I adjust my routines and environment for my new cat, she seems to be on a mission to dismantle my concentration, sleep, and schedule. As a first time pet-friend, I didn’t realize how these early stages can present a new problem on a daily basis and as I solve my way through, I’ve been thinking about the role of attention in our lives.

The quality and makeup of our attention is often what determines the state of our mind, emotions, and actions. Over time, these everyday things color and define a life. Attention also determines our time-spent. Time-consumed. Time-felt. Time-lived. In this sense attention is really the essense of time. So, here are some musings around attention:

  • Can one be addicted to focus? I’ve figured out the routine that works with my rhythms and work demands. I find that writing is best done in the mornings, when I have access to my internal silence, and the business-related work requires deep and sustained focus to absorb and thread together new ideas. After trial and error, I arranged my life in a relatively effective schedule. The cat has made it clear that this precision is sometimes untenable. Ofcourse our rhythms crave structure but when circumstances toss that structure out the window, we’re better off responding and not reacting. Here is a sequential summary of my reaction: frantic problem solving, followed by frustration, then detonation; and finally curiosity, which made it easier to experiment (7 different wet foods, ~12 toys, 2 pet gates, 2 rugs, 3 different furniture-scratching repellants…I could go on). The point is that my concentration and focus can’t be dependent on library-level orchestration and I have to mold new structures and rituals that are more permeable. A small example: In the past, I would shut the office door to signal the start of my work day but the cat becomes overly needy and disruptive if I don’t leave it ajar for her to come and go as she pleases. My new ritual is to take a few breaths when I arrive at my desk. I also expect her unexpected arrival knowing that her interruptions are typically no longer than five-minutes. Part of cultivating presence is cultivating presence towards whatever comes up but it’s easier said than done. We create an illusion of control precisely because we don’t know what will come up. I read somewhere that “confidence is more bending, confidence doesn’t clutch control.” It rings true.
  • How can we intentionally switch attention? Mindfulness practices recommend that we put our minds where our hands are. Working parents are forced to do this–they switch gears towards work deliverables and have to keep the kids out of focus and then at home, they have to be present to whatever comes up, even when they are depleted. But their boundaries often need to be permeable, as we’ve seen even more clearly during the Covid-era. While caring for a pet is not the same as caring for a child, the desire to keep this creature safe and thriving, and the moments of disruption feel oddly similar. I’m going to actively apply the “put your mind where your hands are” philosophy as she settles in.
  • And most importantly…what deserves our attention? While this is a very personal question, when we get down to the fundamentals, anything that moves us towards more equanimity, love and connection deserves attention. Loving someone can be quite a growth oriented practice. We don’t control the object of our affection and their outcomes, we can’t always control how they impact us, yet we love them. That unconditionality of presence, the come what may. That is what giving attention to love teaches us. When we exchange love, care, affection and accompaniment with someone, we build their foundation and ours. Yes, even if that someone is a cat.

“Your task is to love what you don’t understand.”― Rainer Maria Rilke