Business Benefits of Vedic Meditation
If you’ve ever held a leadership role in business, you know that performance at work makes all the difference. Some of the busiest CEOs and thought leaders in the world rely on meditation to stay centered amidst their many demands, and for good reason: meditation is a powerful tool to benefit our work.
There are 6 main benefits you can expect from a Vedic Meditation practice when it comes to excelling (and enjoying!) your work.
1. Improving Performance
Vedic Meditation can improve your problem-solving and management skills. The ability to make accurate decisions quickly when under pressure is essential for high-performers. Decision-making at work isn’t a sprint, though. Business leaders need to stay calm under pressure no matter what problems come their way.
Calm, accurate decision-making under pressure is a set of job skills that can take years of practice to develop.
Unless you have a regular meditation practice.
With a twice daily Vedic Meditation practice, we can clear the stressors taking up mental and emotional space. Instead of letting stress compound and keep us from thinking clearly, we’re able to be decisive. Turning inward regularly builds a greater sense of self-trust, so we don’t waste time waffling back and forth or making a rash decision to check the box.
In the Vedic Worldview, we refer to our stress resilience as adaptation energy. When we have enough adaptation energy, we can meet the demands of our day easily and without a sense of overwhelm. When we don’t have enough adaptation energy, we’ll find any changes in expectation create stress.
The secret to making an accurate decision under pressure while remaining calm is all about adaptation energy. When you have a method to replenish your adaptation energy twice each day, you can count on your ability to make decisions like a high performer.
2. Increased Productivity and Efficiency
With more adaptation energy, we can be more productive. A mind that is overwhelmed with stress will want to do ten things at once, unable to distinguish what is important, what is urgent, and what is inessential. With the mental clarity to order priorities and stay on task, our days become more efficient.
Founder of Cooper Investors Peter Cooper shared with the Harvard Business Review:
“Being an investor requires the distillation of large volumes of information into a few relevant insights. Meditation has helped me discard interesting but unnecessary information and focus on the few things that make a difference to long run investment performance.”
– Founder of Cooper Investors Peter CooperAccording to the Vedic Worldview, the mind only seeks distraction when it feels unhappy. The mind is constantly searching for greater happiness, and the more dissatisfied it feels, the more it will be easily distractible or fixate on things that won’t ultimately help us thrive. The longer we meditate and turn the mind inward twice each day, the easier it will be for the mind to slow down its search for happiness and attend to the task at hand.
This level of presence is the secret to productivity: You don’t have to force yourself to focus if your mind is calm enough to be present with the task at hand.
3. Greater Empathy and Kindness
We often hear workplace skills described in terms of productivity alone: Is the leader effective? Do the managers make the right decisions? Do the employees help the company make more money?
Although those working skills are important, even more important is the ability to work with people and motivate them. Everyone is in the people business… and leading people roughly or insensitively will either make success more difficult or make it unattainable altogether.
A leader who can show empathy to their team and listen well will be able to solve problems more accurately and motivate higher performance from their team. In fact, any leader or employee, freelancer or founder, will have a much smoother work experience if they can relate to people well. This makes empathy a key skill for any business leader.
Meditation turns our attention inward and helps us to face our own inner state. Our level of sensitivity to what is going on inside ourselves grows. We can sense our own emotions and needs with more ease.
This increasing empathy for ourselves translates outward into our relationships. Our reactivity decreases, and our level of presence with others grows. One serial entrepreneur shares:
“I didn’t tend to understand what my team was going through. I would just get angry if they did not perform according to my expectations.
Thanks to meditation I have developed patience. I have a better relationship with my team. Best of all, I maintain my peace of mind.”
– Archana Patchirajan, Founder of Sattva
4. More Adaptable to Changes
We’ve discussed adaptation energy and meditation, but what are the benefits of being more adaptable to change? The most obvious is that we experience less immediate stress. But the ability to adapt to change well goes beyond having a nicer day.
When we embrace change, we can be flexible and stay relevant to the needs of the moment. Business leaders who are not attached to their ideas and are more focused on the success of the business will be better able to quickly adapt to the fast-paced marketplace.
On the other hand, resisting change will stall our growth and self-improvement . Resistance makes the inevitable changes uncomfortable and more stressful.
The ability to approach new situations that scare us is what helps us grow and evolve. According to meditation authors Elizabeth and Sukey Novogratz, meditation greatly affects the fear center in our brain:
“The amygdala is the part of the brain that houses fear and tells us how to respond to anything we might think of as scary: our boss, asking for a raise, giving a talk, firing someone, or leading a group. The amygdala is also the fight or flight part of the brain. It has less grey matter in meditators than in non-meditators.
When the grey matter shrinks in the amygdala, it thickens in the prefrontal cortex – which controls awareness and decision-making. Long-term meditators are not only more courageous but also have much slower reaction time to emotional situations because they have time to respond to the situation and not react. They are better and more efficient decision makers.”
– Quoted in ForbesQuoted in Forbes
5. Avoid Burnout
If you’ve been in the business world at all in the past 5 years, you know about burnout. Burnout is the condition of over-working to the point of illness or exhaustion, and it affects an alarming number of executives and employees.
Our meditation practice helps us avoid burnout altogether by training us to prioritize ourselves. We practice self-care a little bit each day by effortlessly turning inward and transcending our thoughts, and in return, we become more in tune with our wants and needs. It’s not just another thing to do. Arianna Huffington said,
“I was under the impression that I had to ‘do’ meditation. And I didn’t have time for another burdensome thing to ‘do.’
Fortunately, a friend pointed out one day that we don’t ‘do’ meditation; meditation ‘does’ us. That opened the door for me. The only thing to ‘do’ in meditation is nothing.”
– quoted in the Harvard Business Reviewquoted in the Harvard Business Review
One of the keys to avoiding burnout is to sit for meditation twice each day.
When we sit and repeat our Vedic Meditation mantras, we release stress and build our stores of adaptation energy for the day. Then we go about our day and accumulate natural amounts of stress as demands arise. Then, we sit for our afternoon meditation.
We’re able to restore our adaptation energy and clear the stressors from the day in that meditation. We allow the body to rest deeply in each meditation, which allows for a deeper sleep at night as well. Each sitting is only for twenty minutes, and together they prevent the slow buildup of stress that leads to burnout.
See how meditation can help prevent employee burnout in Susan’s article, Three Ways to Enthusiastically Bring Employees Back to Work.
6. Find True Fulfillment
In a productivity-focused culture, it’s all too easy to displace our sense of personal value and fulfillment in our jobs. We busy ourselves with accomplishing work goals and turn those goals into the measure of our identity. When our fulfillment rests on anything outside of ourselves, like achieving our goals, we give away our power to be happy. We become susceptible to being enrolled in workplace drama, career hierarchies, comparison, and negative self-talk.
Vedic Meditation puts us in touch with the pure field of Being twice each day. The mind experiences thoughtlessness or bliss, and we slowly begin to orient our sense of self to be inwardly focused instead of outwardly focused. We discover fulfillment comes from within, and we can enjoy our work without relying on it for happiness or worth. In his book Principles, Ray Dalio shares his experience of re-discovering fulfillment:
“I came to meditation in my own life during a very stressful work period that then turned into a very stressful personal period. But it freed me from so much pain. It completely inverted my entire point of view on life.
I’ve been meditating consistently….and I’ve seen an exponential impact. In terms of scale, the more you do the greater the reward. More than linear.”
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Conclusion
There are many benefits of Vedic Meditation, and all of them contribute to running a business well or being effective in the workplace. Taking the time to sit for twenty minutes twice each day will slowly transform not only your experience of work but your entire experience of life.
Attend an Intro Talk to learn more.
