Mindfulness at Work: Creating Space for Honesty, Grief, and Better Leadership

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to Mindful Management, a podcast by Chefalo Consulting, where we share the knowledge, stories and resources you need to create a trauma informed culture that supports wellness, growth and resilience. I'm your host, Shenandoah Scheffalo. What if mindfulness at work wasn't another app or perk, but a way we actually speak, listen and make decisions, especially on the hardest days? I'm Shenandoah Schefflo and welcome back to Mindful Management, the show where we're building healing, centered human workplaces. And today, I can't wait to introduce you to our guest. I'm joined by Shawn Fargo, a mindfulness teacher, former Buddhist monk, and the founder of Mindfulness Exercises, one of the world's leading online platforms for mindfulness teacher training and resources, and, if I do say so myself, a great blog that he sends out to all of his subscribers. But Sean spent two years as a Buddhist monk before returning to help people bring mindfulness into real life and work. He has served as an instructor for the Search Inside Yourself mindfulness program at Google, worked on staff at Spirit Rock Meditation center, learning alongside some of the best known Western meditation teachers there are. In 2015, he founded Mindfulness Exercises, which now reaches millions of people with guided practices, scripts and an accredited mindfulness meditation teacher certification program that's used in workplaces, schools, clinics, and communities around the world. Sean, I am super grateful for your time and welcome to Mindful Management.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, Shannon doa. Uh, it's an honor to be here.

Speaker B: So, Sean, before we walk through and talk about programs and tools, the thing that I love to start with guests is really their story. And I've been excited to ask you this question, but what pulled you from a more conventional career into your monostatic training, and then back out again to teach mindfulness in a modern workplace?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I was, as you're right, doing more of a conventional business life. I was living in China and Thailand, exporting products from Asia to the US to be sold online. And I happened to come across some meditation teachers. A couple were Buddhist, one was Taoist. But I was invited to a, uh, meditation on a Friday night once, and I had nothing else planned. So I'm like, I guess I'll just go do that. And I had never meditated before, and a monk guided us through a very simple practice of sensing into the body. And it was so simple, but it was so difficult for me to do it. And I was like, how is this so challenging for me just to kind of do this meditation when it's so simple. And long story short, I was just fascinated by what meditation was and how I could get good at it. And then it bled over into, like, my heart. I saw the teachers live these lives of peace and care and groundedness. It's like, I want more of that because I was, quite frankly, like, burned out on just, you know, focusing on numbers and output and, you know, managing and building teams that I really needed to focus on my inner game and kind of realize, like, what is all this for? What's more important to me or what's most important to me? If I was to die in a year from now, I want to have done everything I could to cultivate those ways of being. And so it was kind of that question that brought me into the monastery. And at that time, the monastery was kind of the only place I knew where I could focus on that full time. And so I did that for two years. And then at the end of two years, I was like, you know, the world is needing these practices. The world needs more, uh, mindfulness and meditation teachers. It needs evidence based secular trainings to help them navigate this challenging world. I was also missing my parents and I was like, maybe I'll start a family one day. So I left the monastery and as you noted, got a job at Spirit Rock Meditation center where I could learn how to bring these practices to others.

Speaker B: I'm wondering, Sean, I love this story because there's this common thread between all of our guests which is like, you don't really know the next door is going to open. It just opens, right? Like you go to an event on one Friday evening and all of a sudden you find yourself in a monastery for two years. I'm wondering if there is a specific moment for you, either in business or in the monastery, that changed how you began to see stress and suffering.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was. I read a book by Joanna, uh, Macy, who just passed away last year. A lot of today's ecological distress is born out of humanity's confusion and greed and violence. And she went into great detail, like really talking about the distress of our rainforest, our ecosystems, our species collapse. And she painted a picture of if this continues on this trend, then we don't know if humanity is going to survive in a couple hundred years, much less there's nuclear war, all these things. And if we share these practices of mindfulness and self compassion and empathy and learning how to be content with very little and realize that's kind of the name of the game is just finding peace with what we have and being grateful for what we have and learning how to work with each other, then. Then the sky's the limit. I don't want to sound too Pollyanna ish, but we can certainly at least survive and find flourishing. And if we have these practices, and these practices don't cost anything, it's just a matter of inviting people to really sense into their moment to moment experience without too many shoulds or judging themselves or comparing, uh, themselves. So that's really kind of a big turning point for me. And I read that book on the heels of doing a lot of loving kindness work. I read the book Loving Kindness from Sharon Salzberg and it broke open my heart and I realized, like, oh, uh, I have all these practices to do around forgiveness and shame and uh, such a big self love. Yeah. And I think that that opened my heart so that it could receive Joanna Macy's book detailing the suffering and that the details of the suffering kind of went into the center of my heart because it was just so open at the time, like, oh, I have to do something about this.

Speaker B: So I'm wondering, Sean. And this is something that I just see when I'm consulting with clients quite often and we talk about using mindfulness as a practice and not just thinking about mindfulness as deep breathing, but in all the ways mindfulness can show up and appear in the pushback that I constantly get is we don't have time. There's so much we have to do. And it feels very much. Because I'm in line exactly with what you're saying, even when I hear you say it, uh, like Joanne says, this doesn't have to cost anything. I wonder if that is almost part of the issue of, like, somehow it doesn't cost anything, so it has no value or worth in modern society. And so we don't have time for it. How do you address that? Because it does seem to be the big pushback, like, oh, yeah, if I was on vacation, or yes, if I could spend two years in a monastery, I too could come out much different. But I have to produce food for my family every day. How do you respond to those who say there just isn't time in our ability to make time for mindfulness?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's a great question and I think it's a valid question in the. That we want to spend our time wisely and we're busy. And so it's a very valid point and I think it's, uh, very helpful to be open to that kind of skepticism and welcome that skepticism. I think if we're Already very happy. We're kind of doing good things for others. We're, um, not doing any harm. Then maybe you don't need mindfulness. And if there is distress and suffering and anxiety or maybe depression or a lot of rage or shame, then I would ask what would happen if you don't address that? If you don't cultivate a sense of self care and peacefulness and contentedness? Like what would happen five years from now if your trajectory was the same? So this is, uh, a practice I do with some of my clients. Some people call it the Dickens method from Charles Dickens, where there's the Ghost of Christmas Past who comes, Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Future. And just reflect on the moments of your past in which you were not mindful, you were not present and caring and gentle. What were the ramifications of that in different parts of your life? On your physical health, on your mental health, on your relationships and your career, did you make poor decisions? Look forward 5 years, 10 years, 20 years? What will happen if you don't practice mindfulness for one minute a day, five minutes a day, ten minutes a day? What would happen to your mental health if you continue declining, if you continue feeling isolated, or if you don't really care for yourself? Like, what are the habits or addictions that you're feeding and how is that impacting your family, your career, your spirituality? And you know, are you even going to make it 10 years on this trajectory? So sensing into the pain of the lack of mindfulness and then flipping it around, thinking, okay, well, in the past, I can give myself some credit. When I. When have I been present and gentle and caring and peaceful, mindful, and what were the positive impacts of that? These days now, when I do find a little bit of time, a little bit of spaciousness to really be with the experience, what are the positive aspects of my life, on my life now? And then if I do Invest the time, one minute a day, five minutes a day, 20 minutes a day, what might be possible for my mental health, physical health, relationships, spirituality, etc. You know, this question around death and mortality tends to wake up a lot of people because they realize that these moments are fleeting and that, uh, you know, mindfulness helps us to savor them and to cultivate what matters to us most.

Speaker B: I appreciate that so much. I know that many of our listeners, Sean, are in the, uh, public sector. They work in the justice, they work in child welfare, education, health care. And they're not only carrying their own past trauma, their own stuff. They're also carrying the works, trauma, and the suffering of many others with them. When you're working with folks and people who are under chronic stress, what kinds of practices do you emphasize? And are there things that you tend to avoid with people carrying so much?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really important question these days. I think more and more of us feel like we're carrying a burden of caring so much for others and it's so heavy and dark sometimes and confusing. Yeah, there's a few things that I work with people on. One I think is often overlooked, which is to grieve, to allow ourselves to grieve. That heaviness lives in our bodies and we need to allow it to move. And so purging is we tend to push it away. We tend to say, later, I'll grieve in a year from now, or when I'm over this, or when I have time. But that time never comes sort of voluntarily, at a magical moment. We have to reserve the time and the space that will allow us to feel the grief in the body. And in my opinion, we need a little bit of training, training to allow the grief to be however it is without us judging it to be good or bad, right or wrong. It's like natural energy. We all feel it and we all need to grieve, like, periodically, that it's a healthy thing for us. Another is to remember that compassion is not complete unless we include ourselves. A lot of us will talk about things like compassion fatigue, quote unquote, but a lot of us are forgetting to include ourselves in that. It's not just eating kale all day. It's having a feeling of care and remembering that care is a verb. And to remember our beauty and the positive things from our childhood and our essence and all the beautiful things we've done over our life. None of us are purely angelic, per se. I mean, it's fine to believe that, but usually we're a little bit of a mixed bag. We don't always do the things that we know are the best things to do per se. But that's fine. We're human. We can still love ourselves. So including ourselves in our compassion. And then you mentioned the word trauma. And so trauma sensitivity is super important both for ourselves and with others in the sense that gentleness is the name of the game. When we're doing this self improvement on ourselves or trying to help others, we want to be very gentle. We want to use languaging and vocal tones that are not too aggressive. Uh, we want to remember to empathize with actual, like, care rather than judgment. And to go in baby steps and sometimes just a little bit of a baby step followed by a little bit of space and kind eyes and gentle presence can be way more healing than a bunch of information being shared or, you know, a 12, uh, and a half step process that they need to do by Monday. So, you know, this gentleness is really the name of the game. And so there's a lot of wonderful work being done on trauma sensitivity these days that it's easy to Google. And I provide that too. But that's, as you said, so critical.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I wonder for folks, especially when we're talking about organizationally thinking about having mindfulness embedded into organizations and into work is in the west, it feels like we often equate grief to. To the death of someone or something. And people think of grief in that very concrete way. Often when I'm using the term, and I think, Shawn, when you're using the term, we're talking more about just loss in general and making space for all kinds of losses. The loss of sun for me today. Right. That it just happens to be a cloudy day for me where I am, and the loss of sun and creating space for that. Because in organizations, I see this constant need of maybe somebody leaves the organization, they get promoted, or they move on to something else. There's a loss. But we don't really spend time grieving that person from our team, or even grieving when policies or practices change, or that we get a new IT system or a new piece of software to use that we don't often talk about those accumulated griefs that kind of stack up over our career in time. And then it almost feels like an implosion of, I'm just tired of being here. And you can't even name why you're tired of the thing, because it's all of these small things. They seem relatively small, but over the years of a career have accumulated to a point where it's so heavy, there's just no place to put it any longer.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's where a daily practice comes in. Super useful so that things aren't accumulating so much where we can start each meeting, even with just a mindful minute. Or at lunch, maybe there's a, uh, mindfulness meditation in the rec room or break room at the end of each day. As you said, in the workplace, there can be lots of different kinds of losses and challenges or pivots. And so it's super helpful to take a minute or five Minutes and just kind of notice, like, what is this experience for me? Is it surprise? Is it grief? Is it disappointment? Like really sensing into the body what this emotion is and really naming it with as much nuance as we can. And to remember, yeah, it's okay to feel whatever we feel and to take it one step further. It's important to feel whatever we feel. And if we're able to spend some time with it with allowance, this sort of caring curiosity about how it's feeling in the body, what are the thoughts associated with this, uh, being gentle with the sensations, being gentle with the thoughts. Then we'll notice that that energy shifts over time. It'll usually morph into something else like peace or care, you know, may this person do well in their next chapter. May this new decision align with our mission. May this new business project align with my deepest values. And maybe we'll get a sense that, yeah, this is not aligning with who I am or what I want as I really sense into it more deeply. And that might inform us to say something or propose something new out of kindness or to remind people, oh, yeah, maybe we can also do it a little bit differently or incorporate this other thing that we lost along the way. Or maybe I can keep my ears open for other opportunities, whatever it is. But the more we spend time with the feelings, the less they'll keep accumulating and the less they will feel burdensome.

Speaker B: I appreciate that often when we pull it out in a room full of adults, they think we're a little kooky, but they eventually come to appreciate it. I've been on several calls this week where somebody's like, oh, shun's on the call. Let me find my feelings wheel. So it's really important for adults sometimes to have a list that they can look at. And I always say, try on a feeling right when it's hard to identify what is that thing I'm feeling to try it on. But the other thing I heard in there, Sean, was the need to have some kind of ritual or practice and being consistent with it. We talk about this in community meeting, like at the start of every meeting. This is the way we do it. Because it's in that practice that people come to rely on it and then can go deeper and deeper each time. So if I do it just one time, the impact or effect might be good for the moment. But long haul, we might not see progress. But if we can ritualize it in some way, systematize it in some way, then that's where the really Good stuff begins to happen.

Speaker A: Yes, that's absolutely correct. And there is also a power in retreats where we can do, um, a weekend retreat or a week long retreat, or even longer and go deeply. That can unlock a lot for us that sometimes a short daily practice sometimes doesn't quite touch. Or if we've been missing our daily practice or routines or rituals, sometimes a retreat can help us to find more growth or new momentum moving forward. So I think there's a power in both.

Speaker B: Is there something you could maybe walk through a leader who's listening that they could bring into a staff meeting or maybe even into a debrief conversation that helps everyone, including their, themselves, their nervous system, settle? I listened to your great podcast with Dr. Gabor Mati, and you guys spent a lot of time talking about this. But is there something that maybe only could take two or three minutes? You know, we arrive to a meeting physically, oftentimes or even ephysically in the modern world, but our brains are thinking about 400 other things that we should be doing as well. Is there something you might offer to our leaders about how they could get everybody engaged in the room and maybe just two or three minutes?

Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, first of all, it kind of starts with the leader or whoever's speaking to ask them to check in with themselves first and kind of notice what kind of energy they're bringing to the group to begin with. So to invite them to sense into their bodies and breathing and hearts and that this is about inviting everyone, including themselves, to simply notice their actual experience with gentleness, that it's not the leader telling everyone what to do or telling them they have to be a certain way or that they're better than the others. It's about inviting everyone, including ourselves, to simply notice what's here with gentleness. And so I think that kind of energy goes a long way. But to more, uh, explicitly, like, answer your question, I think speaking with a voice that is actually respectful, maybe not always gentle, but at least non aggressive, non harsh, and to speak with some form of spaciousness where we allow people the opportunity and the space to, um, sense into their body on the seat, like the, like their body touching the chair, what does that feel like? The feet on, um, the ground? Can we feel our bellies move as we breathe? Can we feel the air move in and out of the nostrils or the mouth? You know, what are the predominant sensations in the body right now? Is there a lot of energy in the body or some predominant energy? You know, not like judging the energy to be Good or bad, right or wrong? Just noticing the actual sensations and kind of inviting a sense of curiosity for the sensations. For are they heavy or uh, light, warm or cool? Is there like sense of stillness or movement? Does it feel pleasant or unpleasant? There's no right or wrong here and everyone's going to be different. So just noticing what's true for you. There's no quiz at the end, no test. Can we notice the rhythm of our breathing as we're just kind of being here now and then kind of sensing into intention, expectations, hopes, like what, what kind of thoughts are happening and you know, can we hold them gently and connect with each other with a sense of respect and kindness? Whether we agree or disagree, can we have this baseline of mutual support listening? So that's kind of multifaceted and leaders could just kind of choose one or two or all of those bullet points. Could be very simple just to uh, just notice your breathing. Uh, if you want to include all those different things, you can. But just inviting all of us to check in with ourselves, including me, and that could be 20 seconds, it could be three minutes. And to notice the shift of the energy before and after and you know, uh, during your first time doing that, there might be some skepticism, some doubt, some yawns, some eye rolls, and that's totally fine. We can invite that skepticism and welcome it. And once people sense that the intention is wholesome, that it's born out of respect, that we're not trying to like teach anything or convince someone of something or preach, you know, beliefs. Yeah, people will start to trust that, uh, okay, this is born out of care, that we're just sensing into our own experience. And sometimes I feel like it's helpful and sometimes I don't, but that's okay. But most people generally find it's helpful most of the time.

Speaker B: I appreciate it so much as we close. Just a few quick fire questions and really the idea, whatever comes to mind. Since we're talking about mindfulness, right. What's one word that you hope people feel after practicing mindfulness with you, that they feel safety. Is there a short practice that you personally rely on when your day goes sideways? I think it's a good reminder that. Right. Even, Even for monks, even for everybody stubs their toe in the morning sometimes.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, for me, when things go really sideways, and they definitely do go sideways, that practice of sensing into the body, sensing predominant sensations is helpful because there's a sense of curiosity for what I can feel. The thoughts may be scary, but the sensations for me are less Scary. And it's helpful for me. Okay, where's the energy? What does it feel like? And that usually helps me to sense into underlying emotions, which are usually fear based. You know, if the day goes sideways and I don't know which way is up, there's usually a sense of fear and sensing into the predominant sensations of the body usually end up there.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I'd say just sensing into the physical sensations with sort of this objectivity, like what are the actual sensations? And then I get into the thought world through the back door, if that makes sense.

Speaker B: Yeah. What's one phrase about mindfulness you wish that we would all retire?

Speaker A: That it's about being calm or that it's about being happy. Those are usually byproducts or outcomes. But mindfulness is the process of being with our experience or sensing into this moment to moment experience that. Mindfulness is the process, it's not the outcome.

Speaker B: Can you complete this sentence? Mindfulness at work is working when

Speaker A: there's a sense of honesty with ourselves and with each other.

Speaker B: Thank you so much. I don't know who maybe needed this call more, Sean, my listeners or me, But I appreciate it deeply and sincerely. If today's conversation has supported you, please share it with a, uh, leader or friend who's trying to care for their people. Maybe even in some really hard conditions. Mindful management exists, so nobody has to choose between well being and results. Sean, uh, I just want to thank you again for bringing both depth and practicality to this work, for helping so many people share mindfulness with integrity. If you're interested m more about Sean and his work with mindfulness exercises, check out the links in the show notes. They're personal favorites of mine. They're tools that I use. Sean, anything else you want to share with our listeners? Do you have anything coming up that you want to share with them?

Speaker A: I do, but I just invite your listeners to remember that, uh, life, yes, it's beautiful, and it's also deeply challenging. You're not alone. There's light at the end of the tunnel that it's okay to feel what we feel and that mindfulness is really about having the courage to be with our experience. So I just invite a sense of courage in yourself to invest the time to be with whatever you're feeling and sensing and to remember that that investment in you is one of the most important things you can do for not only yourself, but also the people you love.

Speaker B: On that note, and until next time, everybody, please take what you need, be kind to yourself, and we'll See you next time. Thanks everyone. Mindful Management Creating a Trauma Informed Work Environment is brought to you by Shuffalo Consulting. To learn more about Shuffalo Consulting and our Trauma informed change management and professional development Solutions, please visit shuffaloconsulting.com that's Chefalo C H E F A L O consulting.com make sure you don't miss these transformative conversations by subscribing to Mindful Management wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for listening listening. And remember, change happens one step at a time.