professional opportunity

[Zoe Girl]

I just got invited to speak on mindfulness to a business group! whew, I need to find ways to cover my job that day but I am super excited.

[razz]

That is good but it may be a challenging audience. It would be fun to do to get the minds distracted with details to slow down enough to really think things through. Let us know how it goes please.

[Zoe Girl]

I got work covered and it is actually closer to home than I originally thought. It is about 20 people who don't already know about mindfulness. My typical audience is either kids or my meditation group. just 30 minutes, I will have to think about how I want to do this. Probably not the 'puppy dog mind' lesson :)

[Williamsmith]

Can mindfulness be explained as a prayer or meditation?

[Zoe Girl]

Yes, mindfulness is the secular word for meditation or prayer (listening prayer as compared to talking prayer IMHO). When Job Kabat-Zinn started working with mindfulness based stress reduction there was a word needed that was not Buddhist. One basic definition is the practice of non-judgmental present time awareness.

[bae]

Can mindfulness be explained as a prayer or meditation?

I think of it as "Condition Yellow" :-)

[catherine]

Can mindfulness be explained as a prayer or meditation?

Mindfulness is maybe a kind of meditation, but it's not the same thing, and it has specific objectives and benefits.

For the business crowd, it's probably important to stress it in terms of "actionability" and results in terms of increased focus and productivity, better communication skills, and especially stress reduction. Maybe read up on Congressman Tim Ryan and how he explains it to his colleagues.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/08/tim-ryan-mindfulness_n_4241264.html

Sounds great, Zoe! Good luck with it.

[Williamsmith]

I would always express mindfulness in terms of quiet meditation or prayer because of my background of group prayer meetings as a child and teenager. Later as I matured when faced with adversity, I would seek out solitude, be quiet and listen for guidance. I might whisper a challenge or a question or even a complaint but I would remain open and responsive to solutions as they entered my conciousness. I used this as not only a method for stress reduction and debriefing after particularly dangerous events but as a way to get prepared for facing challenging circumstances so that I could remain calm in the heat of the moment. I also believe this mindfulness allowed me to be caring and sympathetic to persons that were not pleasing to be working with. And when mindfulness failed, force met equal or greater force and lost. There was no option for failure.

[Zoe Girl]

Tim Ryan is great, I will read his article again since it has been a long time this is a group of millennial entrepreneurs. So I was going to do some mindfulness practice with them, a short time. Then bring in some of the science behind it, emphasizing the benefits of practice.

So what do you think is important as I introduce myself and present my credentials? I am choosing from my years of practice, my work with children, some stories about how mindfulness has been helpful in my work (like the uncertainty of entrepreneur life), my facilitator work in our buddhist meditation group, ,...

[Zoe Girl]

I would always express mindfulness in terms of quiet meditation or prayer because of my background of group prayer meetings as a child and teenager. Later as I matured when faced with adversity, I would seek out solitude, be quiet and listen for guidance. I might whisper a challenge or a question or even a complaint but I would remain open and responsive to solutions as they entered my conciousness. I used this as not only a method for stress reduction and debriefing after particularly dangerous events but as a way to get prepared for facing challenging circumstances so that I could remain calm in the heat of the moment. I also believe this mindfulness allowed me to be caring and sympathetic to persons that were not pleasing to be working with. And when mindfulness failed, force met equal or greater force and lost. There was no option for failure.

I like that description. I teach that practicing working with distractions while meditating helps us create space between a stimulus of some type and our response. This reduces the times we automatically react and creates more space for response. So sitting and letting that itch or thought sit for one breath, then another breath, and just seeing how many breaths we can put in that space builds the stamina for when we deal with challenges when we are off the cushion. We have more choices in our behavior when we create that space. It sounds like that is what you are doing here with your practice as well.

[Williamsmith]

I believe that near the end of my career, say the last five years and probably since my retirement which has been another five years......I went from substituting chemicals and outside stimuli for mindfulness to a realization that I needed to get back to that model of solitude and patient waiting that I previously enjoyed. I will blame the years of self medication with alcohol on over exposure to fearful challenges that overwhelmed my capacity to be mindful.

Business people don't you think should be able to relate. What threw me out of my orbit was really painful experiences in my life and in others. Proper mindfulness can make one resistant to Being knocked out of balance. I picture a spinning top, spinning perfectly in balance remaining on one spot almost an imperceptible violence contained within but just a bump will knock it out of balance and it will wobble and roam around almost at random until it loses all its energy and falls over completely exhausted.

Mindfulness......meditation or prayer if you would ......is a choice just like self medication only with capacities to do good and harm respectively. They are both habits that can develop over time.

I feel like I might be over analyzing the whole situation but I am not trained in anything but problem solving and crisis management through years of trial and error or observation of what works and what does not. My apology for that.

[razz]

ZG, I love WS's approach that you are offering a choice of and techniques on how to deal with life and its challenges.