Business as a Spiritual Practice

Every spiritual tradition & lineage has its practices that are prescribed to those who follow it. This can be meditative , ritual, physical, artistic and more. Some are more known and find their way into society, others are more concealed and only for initiated practitioners.

Some obvious examples are the mandalas that Buddhist traditions became famous for, zen gardening out of Japan and physical yoga practices(Asanas) from India.

What all of these have in common is they are intended to train the attention, mind, discipline, and willpower of the individual. To better illustrate this I think a day in the life example helps.

Imagine you are in the 8th century, you are a monk at the local Tibetan Buddhist monastery. You rise before sunrise and have your morning meditations in the main hall with the other monks. You complete your morning spiritual practices and continue on to your chores around the grounds ensuring that everything is flowing smoothly and in its proper order. You have your afternoon practice and then begin your daily mandala studies & art. The head monk you study under has been practicing this for over 40 years and can create the most beautiful mandalas with nothing but a few bamboo tools. He tells you daily that, “Art is meditation.”

You arrive in the same room, at the same time, with your tools and begin to create from a place of no mind and absolute focus. At first your terrible at it, you get frustrated, unable to see how the master can create such a complex and colorful shape expression of beauty. Your emotions and mental narration distracts you from keeping your hands still and letting the sand form in such a perfect order that your mandala looks more like a childs arts and crafts project in the 1st grade.

Eventually, after several years, you are able to create geometrically perfect shapes using nothing but a still hand, a focused mind and an open heart.

After each project is completed, no matter how good or poor it is, you wipe it clean and start again. You gradually improve, piece by piece, year by year until one day you look at what you’ve made and are struck by the realization that you have just expressed the feeling that inspired you to start years ago when you first came to the monastery and put eyes on your teachers Mandala.

Now fast forward to the current day and the present incarnation. You live in a Western world, where trade and capitalism is the mainstream engine of society. You have traded in the walls of the monastery for a apartment or home in the suburbs. Your daily rituals have been exchanged for your career & skills that you use to provide a living for yourself. Yet still, you meditate and seek to find purpose in this life while becoming a better version of yourself.

The same foundations of discipline, mental development & focus still ring true whether you are in a monastery, a corporate executive in a major city, or an entrepreneur.

We have the opportunity to bring the energy & state of awareness from our spiritual practices and pour that into our personal art, business or career. This continues our spiritual practice as a whole rather than isolating it into a block of time that we reserve for what is sacred to us.

By shifting our perspective to see all of our life and day to day living as a continuation of our spiritual practice, it allows us to see where we are falling asleep into habit and unconscious action. With the same devotion we give to a higher power in our time of stillness, we can offer that into our own lives so that we continually grow, evolve, and truly create a life of purpose and meaning.

This small paradigm shift creates a continual flow of energy in our life and allows us to slowly tap into a more intuitive space in which our heart and mind are connected and we can act as one unified being.

Spirituality and these traditions from around the world all came to the same conclusion that to be one with God or a higher power we need to first be one with ourselves and reality around us.

For me, as someone who chooses to live in a large city immersed in the act of commerce & trade, I still see a monastery and my fellow seekers with just a slightly different form.

The essence of spiritual pursuits is the essence of life and creation. It is the unnamed impulse to expand, grow and evolve. The same impulse that those with dreams dare to act to impress their vision upon the world, that the pioneers carried when they ventured into unknown lands to seek something better than what they had.

We to hold that as individuals looking to explore the frontiers of consciousness.

The more we can unify with that presence and state of mind in our lives, the stronger it becomes until our entire existence and life because an expression of what we hold in the intimate abode of our hearts & minds.

Whether you have a 9-5, a thriving business, or just starting your entrepreneurial pursuits. Seeing your work as a spiritual practice to better yourself keeps us on a closed circuit of intent & focus rather than having to shift several times a day into different states of mind an leaves us open to further distraction.

Here are 5 ways to practice this for yourself

• Meditative - Meditate for 5-10 minutes (or longer) before you take your first call or task - carry that meditative focus into your activity and see how long you can hold that focus. Write it down and keep track of the time so you can gradually increase that focus. You may find that the flow state comes on rather quickly.

• Devotion - See the task or project you are working on as a living entity that you are giving your time and attention to in order for it to grow and expand. Envision all that come into contact with this task & project benefit from it and that it truly makes their life easier

• Compassion - When working on a project, say creating a piece of education or organizing something better for others to use, find the intention within yourself for how you want others to feel when they engage with this. How will it better their lives? How can you make their day a little bit easier when you have completed this?

• Vision - Before you start a new project, clearly define the vision & outcome you wish to manifest in physical form. It can be as simple as a team meeting or call where a decision is made or as complex as a massive launch or production release.

• Mindfulness - When you feel a reaction or emotion begin to swell within you as a response to something you engaged with, find where in your body that is coming from. Is it tension? Electrical? Anger? take note of it and breathe fresh breath into that space and detach just for a moment from it. This helps us put distance between our awareness and the physical world which allows for better problem-solving and less self-involvement

Did you enjoy this newsletter? I would love to hear from you and consider how to improve it for everyone.

See you next time

-Taylor