What I tend to do when I talk about meditation is I I tend to talk about it in terms of my own experience and let people decide whether or not that experience is relevant to them. As we all know, meditation is an individual experience. Even though people talk about general benefits, I think it gives specific benefits to people based on their own needs. And I have found that I have my own needs, or let’s call them weaknesses. So today you’re gonna hear all about my weaknesses, and the fact that I’m able to talk about these is in itself one of the benefits of meditation because I realized that I have lots of weaknesses. But I am not my weaknesses, just as I have lots of thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.
And that that experience has been incredibly helpful for me. I worked at the IMF for 28 years, which is a long time and I’m making a transition to academic life, which I’m enjoying very much, and for 14 of those years. At the IMF I was the general counsel, so I was the chief legal adviser to the managing director of the board. I managed a department of about 130 people and I can’t tell you how central meditation was to my work at the fund.Â
People ask me, well, where did you find the time? And my response to that was, well that’s really not the issue. The issue is whether or not it’s important. If something is important to you, if picking up your child from school is important, you don’t say, well, I don’t have time to pick up my child from school, you know, you just give it the priority so it was a very central part of my life and it’s not so much that.
You know, I consciously experienced meditation being a big difference, but I surely noticed it when I didn’t do it, I really noticed it when I didn’t do it. The other thing I have become relatively comfortable talking about is that while meditation gave me a lot of professional benefits that’s not why I meditated. So I make a distinction between the benefits and the motivation. The motivation for me was that I had a spiritual dimension in my life that I wanted to develop and meditation was for me the most meaningful way of doing that.Â
I was reading this wonderful book by Simone Weil who I’m sure some of you have read ‘Wait Waiting for God‘, where she talks about the spiritual dimension of attention, of being in the present moment. And she talks about how she would say our father continuously until she could say it without any distractions whatsoever and I thought to myself, this sounds very familiar but for me this became very important because I realized that trying to cultivate that spirit of attention outside of my meditation help me deal with sort of the anxiety of my day and so now I’m revealing one of my weaknesses which is that I often found myself as the day progressed going from concern to serious, worry to panic about the number of things that were happening and the decisions that I would have to make and I found myself almost going into sort of a a you know locking up because of that.
Being in meetings with people where I was really not at the meeting, I was worrying about the next meeting or thinking about what happened in the previous meeting. And I was really never there, quite frankly, and I meditation helped me slow my day down by learning that I had more time than I thought that I could get it all done. And even if I didn’t get it all done, I would get it done tomorrow. But it’s OK. But that what was more important was to basically just be with that person at that meeting. Now I know that seems really basic but sometimes it was very difficult for me to do and I’ve read accounts of professionals in completely different context who have said the same thing in a way.Â
Â
This is a transcript from the first part of a talk recorded at Meditatio Centre in London on 20.02.19
Sean will be leading a retreat at Bonnevaux this summer titled The Spirit of Work: The Integrated Professional (3 – 6 July) to explore together how a contemplative practice can enable us to experience greater stability, strengthen our relationships and help us become more effective leaders.
