Spokane Buddhist entrepreneur builds meditation business while employing refugees

Spokane Buddhist entrepreneur builds meditation business while employing refugees

News Story by Erika Rasmussen | FāVS News

In Spokane, there is a meditator who sits and does his practice on a cushion. If you saw him meditating on this cushion, you might see him shift to adjust his posture. When he adjusts that posture, you might hear a tiny crunch as he moves. 

That little crunch is buckwheat. 

For the case of Spokane company Waterglider International, it’s organic buckwheat, sourced in the U.S., and manufactured by refugees and new immigrants in the local community. This Spokane company sends 1,500 meditation cushions a month to customers far and wide beyond Spokane. 

The company sells several shapes and sizes, including a meditation bench and a neck pillow. Made for proper posture, comfort and stability, all cushions come overstuffed for individual adjustment.

Who’s behind it? 

From Catholic roots to finding faith and love

“I was kind of raised in two different streams of thought,” said Sean McLaughlin, Waterglider’s founder and CEO.

He grew up Catholic in Brookfield, Connecticut, and during his childhood his mother also converted to a Christian born-again evangelical path. McLaughlin says that he struggled with the traditions of his upbringing.

“It was rough for me,” he said. “I was without a faith for quite some time.”

While on his path of seeking, McLaughlin decided to hitchhike across Canada from the east. In Montreal, he could not seem to find a ride, so he got on a bus. He sat next to a woman from Birmingham, Great Britain. This woman would become his wife. 

Jayne McLaughlin co-owns Waterglider with Sean McLaughlin today, keeping its books, and running domestic purchasing and the Refugee Bath Company brand that’s part of their portfolio. Sean McLaughlin said his wife’s been supportive of his path, which, today, is Buddhist. 

From teaching to trading

Sean McLaughlin began doing meditations from books. The family ended up in the area because Sean McLaughlin was assigned to a school in Spokane to do his student teaching.

He was a school teacher in District 81 of Spokane public schools, and in 2002, he created Waterglider (arising from the desire to create freedom for his passion, the kayak) and started reselling books, which expanded into other retail products.

First, it was from home; the white-label method of self-branding goods manufactured with a third party. Then, by 2006, he got into his first warehouse. When the market got more competitive, he knew that Waterglider would have to set itself apart. 

In the meantime, Sean McLaughlin had been going to meditation and yoga retreats down in California. Next, he started to research locally for meditation, asking the question, “Are there any communities of people that I could connect with?”

In 2012, he found Sravasti Abbey in Newport at one of their “Dharma Days.” This would be the start of a long-term relationship with the monastic at the Abbey. There were only a few nuns there back then, he said, and he began going up to help the nuns and learn meditation with them. 

Sudanese refugees help build a made-in-USA meditation brand

And he noticed that there was a gap in the market for U.S.A.-manufactured meditation products made with natural fiber and filling. 

Sean McLaughlin put out an ad looking to hire people to make such cushions. A woman from World Relief Spokane brought in two men to try for the job. Mubarak and Gamar spoke broken English. They had been farmers in Sudan, and they’d spent a decade in refugee camps after the war broke out there.

“What I realized at that point was: I’m going to give these guys a chance here to get started — their first employer. I felt the need to be like a host; when someone comes to your house, you want them to get a good impression of your home, right? I felt that responsibility to have one of their first experiences in this country to be a positive one,” he said.

They ended up staying with Waterglider for years. 

How a meditation company challenged post-9/11 prejudices

Sean McLaughlin made it a cornerstone of Waterglider to hire refugees and new immigrants in Spokane to make their products, which facilitate other people’s spiritual practices.

Today you’ll find employees at Waterglider from Sudan, Ukraine, Burma and Burundi, some highly educated, even with a Ph.D. There have been others from Zambia, Tanzania and Eritrea.

The diversity forms a great environment, he said, though the company’s journey with this openness and support of newcomers has proved its own unique odyssey.

“In the post-9/11 world, hiring employees from Muslim countries was a little controversial. It’s not now, but back then, people would ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’,” he recalled.

His reply? “I think you just gotta meet these guys.”

Building opportunity

As Sean McLaughlin needed more employees, he asked if Mubarak and Gamar had friends — and ended up with seven or eight men from Sudan at Waterglider. All but one knew each other from the same refugee camp overseas.

Then, come 2016, the U.S. elected Donald Trump as president. In the beginning of 2017, Trump banned immigration from a variety of countries with majority Muslim populations, including Sudan, with Executive Order 13769 — named “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” and known by Trump himself as the “Muslim ban,” which Trump intends to expand if re-elected. 

“Having had the experience I had with these wonderful people, to hear that, if you remember — excuse my language — but he [Trump] called them ‘shithole countries,’ I said to myself, this is wrong,” he said. “These folks are assets to this country. They’re great people. These are the people who we want to have in this country.”

The McLaughlins started a new brand then: the Refugee Bath Co.

“You know, the fizzy stuff that goes in the bathtub,” Sean McLaughlin said. 

How refugees and unexpected allies shaped the Refugee Bath Co.

A company in Coeur d’Alene called Mountain Madness Soap Company believed in Waterglider’s mission and partnered up with the McLaughlins’ team. Together they train Waterglider refugee employees Zuwena and Rose, from Tanzania and Burundi respectively, to make bath bombs.

Today, a refugee named To runs the bath bomb operation. Born in Burma, he spent the following years in refugee camps in Thailand from his infancy. Sean McLaughlin now calls him their star employee.

“The whole mission was the belief that refugees are a benefit to the economy, and basically a counter to everything that people were hearing from the Trump administration. In my mind, this is where it gets interesting for me,” Sean McLaughlin said. “I was still polarized with politics. Anybody who had any kind of right-wing or even religious-right tendencies, I had lumped together in the enemy category. And what I found out was that it’s so much more complicated.” 

“We had some amazing folks who are from some Christian evangelical groups who supported our mission. I’m sure they still voted for Trump, but they supported our mission. It really softened my anger toward that group. It was a great practice for me, and it made the brand better, because it wasn’t rooted in just being pissed off,” he said.

From business to Buddhism

The spiritual practice that Sean McLaughlin speaks of holds a central place in his life. It took Sean some years to officially identify as a Buddhist, as he says he had a lot of baggage to sort through in meditation — and a lot of conversations to have with the nuns at the Abbey — but he decided to take the Buddhist precepts just before the COVID pandemic.

Ven. Thubten Samten, the Abbey’s sixth ordained bhikshuni, or nun, has witnessed Sean McLaughlin’s journey with the Abbey since he made his way there. He has, she shared, offered a helping hand to the Abbey in rather unique ways over the last decade.

He’s given rides to and from the airport for their Abbess the Ven. Thubten Chodron in his truck, he’s supplied the Abbey with meditation cushions from Waterglider and he’s even housed four of the nuns and their two cats in shelter from a local fire here in Spokane.

As someone who had become an expert in imports from Asia, this Spokanite was the nuns’ go-to guy in getting commissioned holy objects through a complicated customs process from Kathmandu.

They’d commissioned three ganjiras, two deer and a Dharma Wheel for the roof of their Buddha Hall, and Sean McLaughlin walked them through the process and offered them his warehouse space in Spokane to store them while they prepared for the installation.

A refuge in times of crisis

Then, in August of 2023, a few days before these items were due to arrive, the complicated customs process became even more complicated for the nuns.

Sean McLaughlin called the Abbey — he’d heard of a wildfire spreading nearby. He offered for the nuns to come stay at his family’s home in Spokane if need be.

The fire hadn’t reached them yet. When the orders for evacuation came, his home would be ready for them within the hour. They joined the McLaughlins — all of whom knew each other from past “little adventures” at the abbey, Samten said.

He then coached the monastics from his own home on how to get the holy items released from Seattle customs. They got the items to the Waterglider warehouse, and the staff helped the nuns with loading and unpacking. When the time would come to transport the goods, Sean McLaughlin was the one securing packages to the roof of a vehicle, so the precious items wouldn’t fly off on the drive.

“He’s been a helping friend all the way along,” Samten says. “He’ll be a lifelong friend of ours.” 

Aspiring to compassion

For Sean McLaughlin, his highest value is a particular kind of aspiration.

“I would say I’m a good capitalist. I’m competitive enough that way — but that’s not what I’m aspiring to be. I’d rather work on my mind more in resolving some of that. Compassion is probably what I’m aspiring to. In Mahayana practice, they talk about the Bodhisattva. That idea of working to help others — I can’t say that’s always in my mind, but I try,” he said. “I meditate. I focus on the Buddha. I work on my meditation practices around compassion. The basics.”

Sean McLaughlin loves to practice in community, which he discovered at Sravasti Abbey. He would prefer to share with others regularly, but he hasn’t yet found a meditation community in Spokane.

He continues to do his meditation practice at home on his own.

He has also supported spiritual centers by donating Waterglider cushions. These include Sravasti Abbey and the Spokane Buddhist Institute of Universal Compassion. He even supported a center in California.

He said that donating cushions across the border to Clear Sky Meditation Center in Fort Steele, B.C., Canada, could be next.