(No) Time to Meditate?

This week, IWBI staff were trained in the IAM® meditation technique, or Integrated Amrita Meditation, which was developed by world-renowned spiritual leader and humanitarian Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (also known as Amma). IAM® 20 is a simple combination of yoga, breathing techniques and meditation that is specifically designed for working people and takes just 20 minutes a day. The technique, when practiced daily, is said to bring integration of body, mind, intellect and heart.

More than one-third of our workforce elected to join the IAM20 training, which is IWBI’s third meditation offering in 15 months. Interest has blossomed.

Staff kicked off 2020 reading Mindful Work: How Meditation is Changing Business from the Inside Out by David Gelles. He tells the stories of CEO’s at major, successful (and enduring) corporations (i.e. General Mills, Green Mountain Coffee, Aetna, Eileen Fisher, Patagonia, Google) that saw the need to bring meditation and mindfulness into the workplace to help employees lower stress levels and elevate their daily well-being.

IWBI is fortunate to have similarly thoughtful leaders at our helm. Leaders who know high-energy work weeks in which major milestones are reached, typically come after a string of many other long, intense weeks of strenuous work. And such stretches of intense work are unsustainable over time if we don’t regularly reach for a release valve.

But what leaders begin, the rest of us must carry out. While leaders can launch programs to care for their employees, it’s up to employees to GRANT. OURSELVES. PERMISSION. to engage in those opportunities.

So while IWBI took its cue from Gelles’ book and began offering two daily 10-minute group meditation sessions in its Wellness Room, staff were not exactly all in. We began as a trickle.

Carving 5, 10 or 15 minutes out of our workday to pause turned out to be hard to do. Even for a workforce that’s well steeped in the knowledge that restorative breaks during the workday pay dividends in work getting accomplished better and quicker after a break. It takes strong intention to step away from the swift current of competing work obligations, not to mention a powerful independence to step into the Wellness Room in front of the majority of your colleagues who remain pinned to their workstations.

When the pandemic hit a few months later and IWBI staff dispersed mid-March from its singular office to employees’ homes, our neatly partitioned workday routines became upended by the sudden juggle of work, home-schooling, family, and other domestic duties happening all at once under a single roof. We couldn’t maintain our joint meditation practice even once daily. So we gave Headspace subscriptions to whomever wanted them, and found buy-in to quadruple. A sign of the times for sure, but perhaps we are also more inclined to meditate privately instead of with colleagues.

The IAM20 meditation training this week steered many of us at IWBI toward an even more private space in which to practice meditation.

· It removed the voice of Headspace’s Andy Puddicombe, thus unhitching us from electronic devices and permitting us to dive deeper internally to connect with the quiet inside.

· Our IAM20 trainers encouraged us to practice this 20-minute meditation soon after waking up so that we would carry the benefits into everything we did throughout the day — those benefits being the newfound space within ourselves to respond intentionally to what life threw us, instead of reacting quickly and with strong emotion.

· The yoga movements and forceful breathing in the first half of the practice relaxed our muscles and minds to settle, so that we could more easily quiet our internal chatter and connect with a powerful stillness in a mere 20 minutes.

Amma believes so strongly in her meditation technique, that she has shared it with the world at no cost through a global network of volunteer trainers who are highly committed to the daily practice. What could be more accessible? More equitable? The trainees choose the amount they wish to donate to Amma’s foundation, Embracing the World®.

IAM20 is IWBI’s third iteration of company-wide meditation and more than one-third of our staff — from California to New York and London to the Philippines — elected to participate in the 3-hour training over two days after work. Third time is definitely the charm. Thank you, Amma, and her trainers who volunteered their time to us and formidable experience in the IAM20 technique.

“Meditation is the art of mastering the mind. The way we perceive the world around us completely depends upon our mind. In our search for happiness, we essentially have two options — modify the entire world so that everything turns out exactly the way we want it or modify our mind so that we are able to be happy, content and peaceful. The former is impossible as we have very little control over our external world. The only hope for happiness lies in controlling the inner world. Meditation is a key element in this process.” -Amma