Is Meditation a Key Success Factor in Business?

It is much more than just a factor -not just in business but also in life.

I once had an amazing experience driving alone along the coastal highway in India. The summer sun was blazing and I had been driving for an hour or two. I was heading to Goa from Mangalore.

I was already into regular meditation practices for over ten years by then. Driving alone across a 200-mile stretch with the sea on one side and the river on the other is a super calming experience — even now. Some soft music was playing and I still remember the calming vibes of the distant waves as they lazily slapped the white sands on the shores.

About an hour or so after that stretch, this happened. I suddenly felt everything along the highway was buzzing with a sheath of surreality. The trees were alive like never before, they were no longer just trees but talking, living breathing entities superior to humans. I was shaken up and worried I might have dozed off. So I found a narrow mud track, slowed down, and pulled over.

I was parked next to a massive Peepal tree. As I got off the car to get some fresh air I felt the tree was calling out to embrace me. I felt a surge of energy pulling me up to the main stem — a massive structure indeed.

I could not even resist -haltingly I moved close to the stem. What happened next was mind-blowing. The tree trunk opened up and I saw a trillion cells inside, buzzing to life with a gazillion movements like a charged-up wafer of silicon. Life was throbbing in its entirety -and there was a sublime air of calmness, an affectionate and loving energy that felt like an extension of me.

There was not an ounce of separation — me and the tree were one and the whole universe with it. Nothing was outside of it and it was the most massive lifescape I have ever seen. I was so enthralled and afraid at the same time.

I looked around me with fear and embarrassment to see if I was doing something stupid. In the next few minutes, the whole thing just quietly returned to what we call normalcy.

I was sweating and nervous. It took some time for me to get over this incident and resume driving. The whole movie replayed in my head for months afterward.

But my meditations started getting deeper and more calming, soothing, and fulfilling after this incident. I became convinced that this life is much more than just growing up in mind and body, getting to college, making a career, raising a family, and grieving the death of a loved one.

It became crystal clear to me that we are divine beings on a spiritual journey on this planet in a human form just to experience our divinity. And so is this entire creation an incredible divine play — the idea is to experience everything to its fullest. There is no real purpose, nothing to accumulate, amass, hoard, or leave behind for another generation. The real magic is happening at this moment of creation — there is no future and there is no past.

Creativity is as boundless, spacious, and limitless as the sky. We are born with it. It cannot be lost and it cannot be destroyed. It can only be forgotten.” — Andy Puddicombe, co-founder Headspace

It is another dimension of life where time and distance do not exist. There is no separation, and hence no comparison or relative performance, no individuality, no fear or worry.

The tree experience never repeated itself but it left me with a far deeper appreciation of life and transformed me from within. It taught me that unless you soak into the present moment everything else you do is an utter waste of imagination.

The present moment is infinity and is the portal to reality. To enter this portal you need to shed your individuality, which is when you become a part of reality. There is no such thing as experiencing reality. You can only become it, since you have already dropped your individuality there is no you anymore. To experience something you need to exist. Only by dropping you, the reality becomes apparent.

Remember the blue sky? It may sometimes be obscured by clouds. But it is always there.

This is also the process of creation which is on as we speak. It is happening now and has been for eons. As sparks of creation, we shimmer like glow worms for an infinitesimal flash of time and vanish.

During that slim time slot of a human lifetime, we think we are creating a life, working at offices, raising kids, filing for divorces, and fighting with others.

Of course, we are working as a part of society to have an income and be respectable citizens, following law and order for everyone’s benefit. But it is a trivial aspect of our being — we have magnified that a zillion times and behave as if that is the only thing we are here for.

Learn to be calm and you will always be happy — Paramahamsa Yogananda

It is like sweating over a pizza where one of the toppings, say a single piece of olive was placed wrongly and losing sleep over it, complaining, bitching, and moaning over this for the next two hours. After all, the purpose of eating the pizza was to have a good time with friends (or alone), enjoy the snack, and move on. The olive would have anyway been crushed out of shape by the time it hit your esophagus forget about the southward journey in any case when it is reduced to indistinguishable pulp.

The point is the larger joys of experiencing creation at work are lost when we overthink our little world is the biggest there is.

This is where meditation helps:

Business has its challenges, and the journey is full of uncertainties. Success (that is a personal definition too) in business is usually referred to as the point where the brand is considered valuable, the entity is profitable, the team is happy and productive and market demand is high. Since the journey is such a roller coaster ride, it becomes hard for the founder, owner or management team to maintain sanity and maneuver the intricacies daily.

With a few minutes of meditation daily, over some time you will find that it takes you to a place of calm and rest, from where you return rejuvenated. This becomes useful for you to manage your daily challenges in life and business.

It is like a runner who gets a useful break with some water to recharge every few miles in a marathon. Then the marathon is an enjoyable experience where you are not stressed about time and exhaustion but recharged adequately to go about it. If this can be done, the target may not be a definitive marathon finish line — it could be longer than that and it may not even matter to the runner.

So, I firmly promote meditation in any form that works for you -silence, prayer-based, mantra-based, thought observation-based, breath observation-based, candlelight-based — do what works for you. Do it preferably at the same time, daily in the same location if possible (to eliminate variations, at least initially). Once it becomes a habit you could do it anywhere.

Meditation might change the biochemistry and structure of the brain if done consistently. I link the story of Dr Mehmet Yildiz explaining this to us with research done in the field.

I thought I would share this on a video and made a short video about this recently (in a cab, two days ago), which is linked below. Please check it out and see if it resonates with you. If you have any questions on this drop me a line. Or if you like to read more about this, do follow or add a comment so I can share more of these with you.

About me: I write about life, tech, societies, and startups. I help startup founders get clarity, grow, and scale. I write regularly here, and many thanks, ILLUMINATION editors, for creating a writer’s profile for me.

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