How would you describe your job?
A stressful, joyless effort made only to pay the bills? A lengthy imprisonment in a spirit-killing environment that has to be endured to reach the blessed freedom of the weekend?
If so, there’s probably also a niggling awareness that all the time spent on work each week is your life flitting by, and it ought to be better.
Lewis Richmond, a software entrepreneur and musician who spent the first 15 years of his adult life as a Zen Buddhist priest, believes that when we disassociate ourselves from our jobs by saying that it’s not the part of our life that counts and that we’re just doing it for the money, we’re closing ourselves off from the opportunity to find spiritual rewards.
And he is quick to note that you don’t have to be a Buddhist to transform your experience of work.
In fact, when Richmond made the transition from monastery to the competitive, for-profit work world, he said he “noticed that the people I worked with seemed to me to be very similar to the people I meditated with.
“Fundamentally, what’s going is that there are a lot of human beings in the building all trying to accomplish something together.”
That realization, Richmond said, was the genesis of his notion that work can be a spiritual practice. He has been conducting workshops on spirituality in the workplace since 1996 and outlines his insights and techniques in a new book, “Work as a Spiritual Practice” (Broadway Books).
“I want to remind people that there’s one part of the workplace that nobody but you is the boss of and that’s your own state of mind, your own effort, where you’re putting your attention,” Richmond said during a visit to Chicago. “These things cannot be taken away from you.”
Spirituality can begin where discouragement starts, according to Richmond. “To work with discouragement and failure and all the things we’re scared of in our lives and try to avoid are really the starting place. Working with whatever is going on is the Buddhist attitude.”
Even worry, that form of fear so common in the age of downsizing, can be productive, according to Richmond.
“Worry comes from deep inside,” he said, “It has a lot of energy and it’s not really controllable.
“When we’re really worried about something, it really is the important thing. As I was starting my business and there were a lot of things to worry about, it reminded me a lot of periods in my spiritual training where I was, in a sense, `worrying’ about some spiritual issue.
“A lot of people want worry to go away, so they go out and have a couple of drinks or they do something to distract themselves.
“But if you stay with the worry, it can be fruitful because the worry is trying to make something happen. You can start out asking how realistic is this worry and then, as you flesh out possibilities, worry begins to turn into some kind of a plan. Planning is different from worrying. It’s constructive.”
When Richmond asks workshop participants if they have problems with anger on the job, he said that every single hand goes up.
“Anger is a special topic in the workplace,” he said. “A lot of anger is rather `justified’ — pettiness, injustices, abusive bosses — so it’s a little different than anger in your life in general. The situation that produces the anger very often involves the power imbalance in the workplace.”
When angry feelings arise, Richmond recommends techniques to “put some space around the anger,” such as breathing deeply. Anger typically is accompanied by tight, constricted breathing and when you change the physical process, it inevitably affects the mental part as well.
Or, he said, simply use “a kind of internal dialogue: `This is anger, this is an angry feeling.’ It’s a traditional Buddhist meditation technique and then once that’s been accomplished and we’re able to be with the anger, (we can) see where it’s taking us and what is the appropriate action to take.
“The appropriate action may simply be to sit down with a person and say that what you did or said really made me angry, but to say it in a non-angry way.
“Apologizing is one way to break through the nexus of anger, particularly when it’s not really your place to apologize. Using apology strategically can change the energy and work very effectively.”
Richmond, 52, grew up in Southern California and majored in music at Harvard University, intending to be a professional pianist and composer. But after graduation, he took a rebellious turn, entering a seminary with plans to become a Unitarian minister.
During his first year there, he became involved in the Vietnam War protest movement and soon gave up his divinity school deferment and began counseling conscientious objectors.
During the same time, Richmond began studying Buddhism with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, a Japanese Buddhist priest, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and author of the classic book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.”
In 1971, Richmond was ordained as a Buddhist priest and continued his studies at Zen Mountain Center, a Buddhist monastery at Tassajara Springs near the Big Sur. It was the first with facilities for long-term practice established in the U.S. He eventually took on responsibilities as a meditation instructor.
Meeting the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh in 1983 was a turning point for Richmond. Hanh asked Richmond to set some Buddhist chants to music. Upon hearing them, he suggested that Richmond should find his Buddhism in music.
Sensing it was time for a change, Richmond put aside his priest’s robes, bought a piano and took a job with Smith & Hawken, a large gardening supply catalog company based in Mill Valley, Calif., where he lives. He quickly rose to executive vice president, while composing music and writing essays on Buddhism on the side.
When Smith & Hawken floundered and was bought out, Richmond and his colleagues lost their jobs. He worked for a time as a business consultant and then started his own software company, Forerunner Systems Inc., to develop and market inventory management systems for catalog companies.
From that vantage point, Richmond notes that there is an entrepreneurial quality to meditation.
“Meditation is becoming less mysterious as people have experience with it,” he said. “It’s basically being quiet and not doing anything other than being.
“When you’re in that situation, there aren’t any rules. Whatever happens is pretty much what you make happen. And that’s the essence of entrepreneurship.”
For stressed-out, time-strapped workers, Richmond advocates a lot of one-minute, on-the-fly meditation sessions: Walking meditation on the way to the copying machine. Turning off the computer and sitting still for one minute, paying attention to the flow of one’s breath in and out.
“There are actually lots of transition spaces in the work day and the first task is to notice how many of them there are,” Richmond said.
As Richmond and other Westerners interpret and transform Buddhism, it seems to be taking on a utilitarian quality.
“That’s true,” Richmond said, “but I also think that in ancient times work was survival. There were really only two choices spiritually. You could either farm for 16 hours a day and hope that you survived or you could build a wall, be a monk and hope the farmers would support you.
“There had to be that division because the world wasn’t organized around the ability to do both. Monks kept Buddhism alive, and there wasn’t much opportunity for the ordinary non-monk to do it.
“Buddhism is primarily a method rather than a belief system. And the traditional methods are being defined more flexibly and are now being integrated into people’s daily lives in a way that there was never an opportunity for in former times.”
