What meditation can do for productivity and efficiency in the office
Imagine that the place where you work was a solace where your personal balance and wellbeing was the most important element of the company’s ethos. Sounds radical doesn’t it? Yet to some companies, this philosophy has become a cornerstone of their success.
An article in the Harvard Business Review states, “Research has shown that our minds have a tendency to wander about 50% of the time. Add in work interruptions, text messages, phone calls and emails, and it’s no surprise that employees have a hard time staying focused. But studies show that meditation training can help curb our tendency for distraction, strengthening our ability to stay focused and even boosting memory.”
Günther Martens, a Namibian who travels the world teaching the process of journeying through meditation, qigong, t’ai chi, communication facilitation and conscious-living seminars, says that he has seen great improvements in the companies that introduce meditation in their offices as a practice of relaxation.
“The more relaxed we are, the more creative and receptive we are; this in turn helps us to focus. Our concentration has been trained to function in a certain way and we can train ourselves to find balance. This is so important because life happens in the movement between a space of thinking and a space that I term ‘the soft space’ or ‘space of intuition’. We can only reach this place when we are not in a constant stream of thoughts.”
To quiet our minds and find a balance between logic and awareness, Günther explains. He adds that the world is full of stressed and burnt out people who don’t realize that true relaxation doesn’t come from socializing, for example, but that true relaxation comes from meditation, peace and stillness.
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