Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out
By David Gelles
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015
296 pp, $27
David Gelles is a business reporter for The New York Times who has developed a keen interest in the rapid spread of meditation and mindfulness in corporate America.
Gelles has excellent credentials. For starters he is a devoted practitioner, saying mindfulness has “profoundly transformed every aspect of my life.”
He describes the introduction of meditation at companies such as Aetna, Ford, General Mills and Patagonia. Aetna Chairman Mark Bertolini celebrates the results, noting that 13,000 of his employees have taken company-sponsored yoga or meditation classes, leading to reduced stress, better health and greater productivity.
Meditation [sitting in silence with eyes closed and following the breath] and mindfulness [living in the moment throughout the day] owe their lineage to ancient Buddhism, although today they have become largely secular practices. Gelles calls himself a “contented agnostic.”
There is abundant evidence of the spread of mindfulness – crowded retreats, new magazines and celebrity endorsements. U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio leads meditation sessions for members of Congress. In sports many have marveled at the success of professional basketball coach Phil Jackson, a longtime meditator who has won 11 National Basketball Association championships with the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers.
All of this has spawned studies to determine meditation’s impact on the brain. At the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson reports that extensive testing shows that meditation changes the physical structure of the brain in positive ways.
The author’s overly long description of brain studies is repetitious and distracting, but the book’s clear and persuasive message is that living consciously moment to moment leads to less stress and greater happiness.
“Mindful Work” includes some of the clearest writing I have encountered on the subject. “The practice,” Gelles says, “involves keen awareness of the sensations in our bodies, the thoughts in our minds and the emotions in our hearts. … Mindfulness can be quite magical.”
Mindfulness is not without critics, some of whom claim that introducing the practice in the workplace is a cynical way to increase productivity and boost the bottom line.
Gelles ends with the questionable suggestion that mindfulness would benefit from a national coordinating council to set uniform standards to discourage charlatans. But such a council could complicate the admirable simplicity of an ancient practice that has helped millions of people.
