Toward a Healing Workplace

1. Create meaningful personal relationship with co-workers.

2. Take short relaxation breaks, at least thrice a day.

3. Eat fresh, energy giving foods.

4. Take a walk outdoors during lunch break.

5. Stay away from politics and back-biting.

6. Bring your family to the office during lunch break or on a Saturday.

7. Cultivate a hobby.

8. If you have a toxic workplace, look for another job.

9. Celebrate achievements, even small ones.

10. Make your workspace clean and comfortable. Surround it with happy pictures.

11. Listen to music with headphones.

Learn to Deal with Others and their Feelings

A drug addict once explained the difference between sympathy and empathy. He said, ‘You can never feel anything but sympathy for me and what I need is empathy.’ The he said, ‘Empathy is the capacity to feel my pain in your heart.’ To be ‘socially tone deaf’ * can lead to a life littered with broken relationships. Develop the capacity to pick up subtle verbal, tonal and non-verbal signals from others. Learn also the ability to send out soothing, nurturing signals to others, thus creating a positive interpersonal field.

Unlike in a magnetic field, where positive attracts negative and vice versa, a positive, emotional and spiritual field, attracts positive people and events and, in addition, transforms even a normally negative person into a positive one.

‘How can I develop this skill?’ I ask. ‘Practice working with people and listening to them with the same attitude as you would a beloved child, or respected parent. Your word, tone, your very glance should be completely focused on the person. Don’t dilute the interaction by playing with your Blackberry, talking on your cellphone or fiddling with your laptop. When you are with someone, pay complete attention. Anything less will only elicit a lukewarm response. Those who can create positive fields around themselves attract and build lifetime relationships.’  

Nurturing work place

Many of us spend most of our time at work. If we do not enjoy our work, if we feel overwhelmed by it, it will surely damage us. The constant pressure of negative emotions causes inescapable damage to our arteries and other delicate tissues. It also slows down the body’s capacity to repair this damage.

To work at something you love, to be ‘self-actualized’ in Maslow’s terms, is to protect yourself against dying young. As Khalil Gibran wrote, ‘What is it to work with love?... It is to weave the cloth from the strings of your heart, as though your beloved were to wear it.’

Politics can make the blood boil with suppressed rage and unexpressed anxiety. ‘Fast tracking,’ being a corporate star, will extract the inevitable price of damage to arteries if you are not ‘mindful’, if you are not aware of the impact of everything you do on your system.

Reisman speaks of the ‘lonely crowd’. Loneliness, a sense of exclusion, is a poison that can cause illness as easily as a virus or bacteria. Loneliness is the most lethal of modern diseases. For example, newly widowed women have a higher rate of breast cancer than wives or single women.

Happy Professions

1.         To make a living causing least pain to living creatures.

2.         No mad deadline, no emergency.

3.         Self-dependent and can take their own decisions.

4.         Allows for innovation.

5.         Requires personal touch and get human responses, usually positive.

6.         Work with their hands and see their customers.

Healthy Home nurturing Positive mindspace

A healthy home would be a healing space, a nurturing positive mind field. It can be a place where all wounds are healed. Alvin Toffler wrote ‘The family is the giant shock absorber of the family to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world!’ If your home is not a sanctuary but a battle-field do something about it. Get help, maybe professional help. Reserve time for laughter and happiness—schedule time for it, like you do for your work.

Have a rule to avoid difficult topics during meal times or bed time. Music, if is soothing, can be a powerful force for peace. The very walls absorb the vibrations of the music. Mantras can do the same for your home. I sometimes feel that if music can be infused into the mindspace so that it plays quietly in your mind, as the background to your day, it can have a really soothing affect. Avoid violent, depressing programmes. Just as you would not allow a terrorist into your home, do not allow such movies into the sacred space of your home. You surely are the protector of the field that exists in your home. Make your home fragrant with incense. Clean and sparkling and beautiful. Respectful of the sacred forces that can animate your home.

Towards the Ardhanareeshwara Model

The new millennium is a time for growth and promise for women managers. It is a time when the ‘Complete Man’ is allowed to cuddle babies and shed tears. The sharp man/woman divide, the Mars/Venus chasm has been miraculously bridged by the challenge of the times. It is a time to build partnerships and collaboration.

The answers bridge the radical divide that separates the Indian heritage from the cyber world of the future. That unimaginable time had finally arrived on the doorstep of corporate history when the Mind is far move relevant than all the other Ms—materials, machine, market methods and money. All of them surrender before the implacable application of the Mind. The Mind is neither male nor female. To be ‘ardhanareeshwara’ is the challenge all human beings today. This is why the ratio of men to women in the IT industry begins to approach that magical figure of perfect collaboration, fifty-fifty.

Bill Gates, the richest man in the world and author of At the Speed of Thought, is a symbol of this crucial shift. It has enabled him to create unimaginable wealth by the sheer application of the Mind.

The Ideal Householder

The ideal householder leads on earth a consecrated life, not unmindful of any duty to the living, or to the departed. His wife, the glory of his house, is modest and frugal, adores her husband, guards herself, and is the guardian of his house’s fame. His children are his choicest treasures; their babbling voices are his music; he feasts with the Gods when he eats the rice their tiny fingers have played with; and his one aim is to make them worthier than himself. Affection is the very life of his soul, of all his virtues the first and greatest. The sum and source of them all is love.  His house is open to every guest whom he welcomes with a smiling face and a pleasant word, and with whom he shares his meal, courteous in speech grateful for every kindness, just in all his dealings, master of himself in perfect self-control, strict in the performance of every assigned duty, pure, patient and forbearing with a heart free from envy, moderate in desires, speaking no evil of others, refraining from unprofitable words, dreading the touch of evil, diligent in the discharge of all the duties of his position, and liberal in his benefaction, he is one whom all unite to praise. 

Happiness Creating Activities

It is up to each family to celebrate, to enjoy life on a regular basis. Maybe every day, with super celebrations on the weekend, like teenage kids do. A special movie on television can be celebrated with popcorn. One can dress up for dinner on Saturday night at home. We can make affirmations for the family, a way of life.

Singing together.

Thanking your gurus or teachers.

Being loving and giving affirmations to parents and elders. 

Forgiving those who harm you. Image the best events and people.

Call forth the highest from others.

Think of God, the source of all abundance.

Celebrate Abundance. Praise God.

The ancients tell us that Brahma the Creator has put in a certain predetermined number of breaths into every creature. If a person gives in to intemperate passions, the first system to be affected is his breathing. He uses up his designated number of breaths faster and succumbs to death. The blue-print of all life is the same. The structure of every atom in our bodies is reflected in all living and non-living things. The joy and pain of life flows through all animals, birds, fish and plants. It is not difficult to believe that the divine spark is in all beings. Imaging creates reality. We are surrounded by the field of all possibilities. The thought seeds we plant in the form of intentions, thoughts, dreams, actions today, grow into tomorrow’s realities.  ‘As you sow so do you reap’, says the Bible.