Business and meditation appear to be worlds apart, the one demanding activity, the other, stillness. But as workplace stress becomes more of an issue, companies are looking further afield to buy-in stress-relief tools for their employees.
Organisations offering meditation courses are responding by proposing to move their workshops into the office environment. Late last year, for example, Meditation For Business was set up by the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order.
‘Meditation is still considered an eccentric thing to do, but at the same time, it is gaining more credibility,’ says John Stubbs of Meditation for Business, whose clients so far have included corporate law firm Freshfield.
Meditation workshops are also being incorporated into management training courses at the London Business School and health care charity the King’s Fund.
Meditation for Business claims meditation creates greater concentration and clarity, higher energy levels, relaxation and the ability to ‘respond creatively to tension’.
The organisation places emphasis on an individual’s ability to change his or her attitude to the work environment: ‘Stress does not generally come from having too much to do,’ says the literature, ‘but rather it is a product of not having the mental space or the communication skills to cope with what life throws up’.
So because meditation ‘helps people to define what they are’ – given that ‘you can lose a sense of yourself when you’re sitting in front of a VDU playing with money all day’ – it ‘requires that people really look at themselves and what they’re doing’. The upshot might be that they ‘may find they’re in the wrong job’, says Stubbs.
Courses in transcendental meditation have been taken up by about 30 UK companies in the past few years. One client, Max Rosen, MD of Securitised Endowment Contracts, says he can now ‘relax more efficiently and deal with pressure more effectively’ for practising TM, and about 40% of his staff have followed his example.
‘Stresses of various kinds depress the function of the immune system,’ says Dr William Weir, consultant of infectious diseases at the Royal Free Hospital. ‘Any technique like TM will reduce levels of stress with regular practice.’