11.03.2023 Transforming Work Through Mindfulness In today's fast-paced world, stress and anxiety have become common companions. At the same time, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness has emerged in the mainstream as a popular tool to reduce stress and enhance productivity — even at work. In a conversation on The Lions Roar Podcast, Stacy McClendon, a teacher at the Common Ground Meditation Center in Minneapolis with a background in social work, discusses the profound impact of mindfulness on transforming our approach to work. As she shares in the episode, the pandemic caused many people to change the way they think about work, with remote work prompting many to wonder if their jobs were really “worth it.” Are we spending the majority of our lives on emails and worrying about arbitrary quotas? Is there a way to make a living and enjoy life at same time? Will it always be a trade off of one for the other? "Now with this integration of home life and work life, there's a sensitivity to what’s actually nourishing,” says McClendon. “There’s no longer eight hours at work. It's 10, 12, 15 hours. It's all at home. It's all blended together. So is this work — maybe that I've trained for, or that I dreamed about — truly nourishing?” It’s a tough question, but one worth asking. One way to transform our work is to explore the difference between what we do for a living and how we do it. Right livelihood, as traditionally defined in the Buddha’s eightfold path, means engaging in work that doesn’t create harm, a challenging task in an era where a number of large corporations rely on underpaid labor, yet also offer employee benefits that you and your family may need. Below, in Tami Simon’s exploration of the eightfold path, she suggests that we each have an inner drive to contribute generously for the benefit of others. However, this doesn't necessarily mean we have to engage in world-changing endeavors like developing cures for disease; even small contributions, she writes, can be profoundly impactful. And too, right livelihood doesn’t necessarily mean your hobby or passion should be your job, or that your job isn’t the “right” calling. In “How Our Work Can Help Us Find Freedom,” Lion’s Roar contributor Naomi Matlow shares how you can practice the dharma while also making a living. “Your life is a full expression of your personal calling,” she writes, “and freedom is even available when paying off the mortgage.” —Sandra Hannebohm, AV Producer, Lion’s Roar   The Lion’s Roar Podcast: Mindfulness in Your Workplace with Stacy McClendon Stacy McClendon, a teacher at Common Ground Meditation Center in Minneapolis, has been a student of Insight Meditation for more than 15 years. Informed by her practice and her background in social work, she talks with Lion’s Roar’s Pamela Ayo Yetunde about how mindfulness can transform the way we think about work. Stacy McClendon: People are stressed. We just want to fix it. We want it to go away. We'll say “Bring in some mindfulness person,” or “Let’s have a couple of mindfulness sessions and that should make everyone happy. That should help everyone settle down.” But there actually is no quick and easy fix. It's a difficult path to be with yourself, to be with ourselves and our tenderness, and our deluded-ness, and the discomfort of seeing all of the ways that we have acted that haven't been skillful, that haven't been mindful. So the core of what I often share is around slowing down, and this willingness to stay close, and really observe what's moving in the heart, what's moving in the mind, long before we can start talking about what we're going to do to transform, or fix.   ADVERTISEMENT The Eightfold Path: Right Livelihood   Work can be a path to changing the world, personal growth, and even spiritual discovery. Tami Simon explains.   Traditionally, within the eightfold path, right livelihood is defined as engaging in work that doesn’t create harm. And yes, that’s an important baseline (like a physician who takes the Hippocratic oath). But beyond not creating harm, I believe we each have an inner drive to bring forth our gifts, to pour ourselves out lavishly and generously for the benefit of others.   Throughout the course of our days, we have the opportunity to do this in many ways — paid and unpaid. When we can link the pouring out of our gifts to the paid work that we do, we discover a huge source of fulfillment. I believe that fulfillment is available to each of us.   How Our Work Can Help Us Find Freedom Naomi Matlow shares three ways to practice right livelihood at work.   When describing the path’s factor of “right” or “wise” livelihood, the Buddha instructed his practitioners to not support their lives through unethical and harmful means toward unethical or harmful ends. Our work should not only refrain from strengthening our shackles of endless suffering, but also help in opening the gates to greater freedom. Like everything along the Middle Way, the individual at work is not separate from their vocation’s means or ends. A key to the pursuit of freedom in livelihood may lie in the root of the word vocation itself.   LION’S ROAR PROMOTION