Contemplative Awareness and Business:
Excerpts from the Stanford Business School symposium
On May 7th, 2003, The Center collaborated with Spirit Rock Retreat Center in a program at Stanford Business School for students and professors. Speakers were Bob Shapiro, former Chairperson of Pharmacia; Rachel Remen, Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program; Charlie Halpern, Chairperson of the Center and former President of the Nathan Cummings Foundation; and Jack Kornfield of Spirit Rock, who facilitated the day and led meditation practice.
Excerpts from comments at the event:
Charlie Halpern: While I was in corporate practice, I had the good fortune of a life that invited me to spend some significant periods of time alone in reflective silence. Not the structured meditation that Jack Kornfield introduced this afternoon, which has become my practice since then, but just times when I would be alone, when I would clear my mind and reflect on what I was doing and why I was doing it. It started of as long walks in nature or paddling a canoe on a quiet river in West Virginia. Gradually that became the setting in which I could seek those values and qualities in myself that give me some distance from the pressures and drives in my work world. It was a way of figuring out what I did believe in and who I wanted to be in the world. So it wasn't reclaiming something I lost, but engaging in an internal dialog, in a reflective, silent way that permitted me to make the jump out of corporate practice into a public interest law firm that a few friends and I founded in Washington, DC, called The Center for Law and Social Policy. And that ability to reflect quietly is a central skill that, to my way of thinking, should be part of a professional education.
Bob Shapiro: After years of trying to change the status quo in business settings and feeling frustrated at the outcome, I came to the conclusion that there is no substantial radical institutional change without individual personal change. There needs to be a change in the mode of perception in the sense of possibilities before you can talk aobut any significant change in the way people interact in the workplace. I have come to believe that we carry our imprisonment in our minds, first of all.
If you really get down to the dominant emotion in most of our institutions, and I suspect that includes schools as well, fear would be a good first candidate. Where is that fear coming from? I think it starts very early in our lives, and we bring it with us into the workplace. I think it's fear about identity. It is fear about who I am, what I'm worth, what my status is. People who are unsure about themselves tend to look to symbols in their offices, in their clothes, in their title. And identify in a painful way with those externals: I am my job, I am that office, I am my salary. And anything that threatens to change or diminish those things threatens to change or diminish me. The identification with success or failure becomes another chain in that self-imprisonment. I would also note in passing that fear not only causes huge suffering, it also causes enormous inefficiency.
…Let me say that the most powerful tool I've seen that offers any promise at all of dealing with questions of fear, trust, and control in business in a healthy constructive way is simply awareness. The tool that we've all been talking about. It is first of all noticing what's happening, and I believe that starts with the process we have experimented with today of first noticing what is happening inside…what each of us is feeling, experiencing in our bodies, as we go about the process of doing our work. And as you start noticing these things, the possibility opens for noticing the truth, expressing the truth. But it only starts to open to the extent you reflect on it and start to be aware of what is actually going on…