Discussion Facilitator: Jocelyn Furbush. October 19, 2019.
Post-meditation discussion will draw from book "Mindful Work: How Meditation is Changing Business from the Inside Out", by David Gelles. For those who were part of the conversation in July about "McMindfulness" (https://www.leaven.org/waking-up-community-updates/2019/7/7/the-shadow-side-of-mindfulness) there may be some threads to follow from that. Gelles is a NY Times business reporter and also a regular meditator. We'll continue reflecting on the shift in mindfulness practices from the religious to the secular, including what happened when a mindfulness instructor (with a background in sustainable agriculture) led meditation retreats for executives at Monsanto in the 1990s.
Excerpt:
In the early 1990s, Monsanto, the world’s largest agricultural company, was already controversial. Its “terminator” seeds, which produced plants that could not reproduce on their own, made it public enemy number one for environmentalists. And Monsanto had a famously staid corporate culture, making it an unlikely laboratory for an experiment in mindfulness.
Yet Monsanto also had a new CEO at this time. Bob Shapiro had risen through the ranks to assume one of the most coveted jobs in corporate America. And though he was conventional enough to get the top job at Monsanto, Shapiro also had a long-standing interest in contemplative traditions. So when his friend Charlie Halpern, a lawyer and experienced mindfulness practitioner, suggested Shapiro try out mindfulness practice in the office, the new CEO decided to give it a shot. Halpern had an idea of who might be a good teacher, and in 1996, a mindfulness instructor named Mirabai Bush led Shapiro and fifteen top employees through a three-day workshop on “Deep Thinking Skills” at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It was the first of what would be a series of meditation retreats that brought mindfulness practice to Monsanto.
Teaching Monsanto executives was a difficult charge for Bush. Before she came to work with Halpern, she had lived in Guatemala for ten years, working on sustainable agriculture projects. “Monsanto was a villain in that world,” she said. “I didn’t want to do it in the beginning, but I was finally convinced that it was a great opportunity to see if mindfulness would work in a corporate setting.” Before the retreat began, Bush went to Monsanto headquarters and interviewed each of the participants, trying to prepare them for what would be a demanding experience—three days and four nights in silence, with instruction on sitting and walking meditation, and loving-kindness practice. She asked them if they had ever spent time in silence and was met with blank stares. “I’m quiet while I read the newspaper in the morning,” one man told her. She laughed to herself. A true quieting of the mind was a foreign concept to this crowd.
On the first day of the retreat, the Monsanto employees showed up at the Fetzer Institute wearing suits and carrying briefcases. “People had no idea what they were getting into,” Bush said. She led them into the room that would serve as a meditation hall, told them to take off their shoes and lie down, and began a series of relaxation exercises. It was awkward at first, but eventually the students went along with it, proving to be remarkably compliant. “That’s the positive side of a traditional corporation,” Bush said. “I could tell them what to do, and they did it. They were great. These guys had really great concentration. And when they put their energy toward something, it moved very quickly.”
Over the next few days, Bush led the Monsanto employees through rigorous instruction in meditation—long periods of silence punctuated by talks on self-awareness and compassion. It was akin to the monastic retreats practiced at meditation centers like Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society. “People were having breakthrough experiences,” she recalled. “There was an incredible openness to learning. All the basic awakenings were happening.”
Bush had some healing work of her own to do as she sat with executives from the company she loathed. “The stuff I went through was huge,” she told me. “I thought I was so compassionate, and I was comfortable no matter who I was with. But when I went to Monsanto, I realized, Oh, my God, I had this whole category of people qualified as the ‘other.’”
On the final day of the retreat, the group did loving-kindness practice, wishing for the peace and happiness of all sentient beings. They meditated on the value of all species, including the bugs Monsanto’s products were designed to kill. “I opened my eyes toward the end of this practice and saw tears on every face,” Bush said. She was surprised to see these Monsanto executives opening up and displaying empathy. “I realized in that moment that I had been holding a lot of judgment too.”
After that first retreat, one executive came to Bush and described a minor breakthrough. Part of his job was listening to complaints about the environmental impact of Monsanto products. But he said that when people came into his office to voice their concerns, he couldn’t even hear what they were saying, because he was already rehearsing the script he had prepared on behalf of Monsanto. He had to keep those canned responses top of mind, so that whenever someone began airing a grievance he would have the perfect retort to shut them down. But after a few days of practicing mindfulness, he could already feel that facade falling away. He was retraining himself to pay attention, fully, to what was happening around him. And if that included people who were genuinely upset, he was going to have to listen deeply to them, too. It was a small epiphany, but a promising start.
Bush continued to teach Monsanto managers for another few years. In 1997 a retreat for twenty-five executives took place at the Wilderness Lodge in Missouri, and by 1999 Monsanto employees had some momentum of their own, organizing weekly sittings, daylong sessions, and three-day residential retreats. That year Bush gave a talk on “Mindfulness and Business” and expanded her teaching to other Monsanto offices around the country. “We thought we’d plant some seeds and see what would grow,” she said. “And it was amazing. Everything we did, people wanted more.” Bush saw some signs that mindfulness was making a mark on the company during her work there. Monsanto didn’t abandon GMOs. But it was more responsive to its critics for a time, ultimately phasing out the terminator technology. “Monsanto became more open to listening to opposing arguments and different perspectives,” she remembers. “I saw a movement toward that while I was working with them.”
All things are impermanent, however, including Monsanto’s experiment with mindfulness. Shapiro was ousted as CEO of Monsanto in 2000. His replacement sought to eradicate any hint of the former boss’s management style and brought a swift end to the most ambitious corporate mindfulness program at the time, at a company that needed it badly. Had Monsanto’s mindfulness program taken root today, perhaps it would have survived a changing of the guard. But fifteen years ago, there was hardly any research that demonstrated the power of mindfulness, and virtually no public recognition of, or appetite for, the practice. Nonetheless, the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society continued to work with businesses and other organizations. Bush became its executive director and worked with new clients, including Hoffmann-LaRoche, National Grid, and Hearst. The center also expanded its work to include lawyers and educators and now hosts an annual conference for contemplative practices in higher education. Bush, meanwhile, has had a hand in developing mindfulness training programs at Google and in the halls of Congress.
Arnold Toynbee, the celebrated British historian, is reported to have said that “the coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the twentieth century.” The statement may be apocryphal, but the sentiment has particular resonance today as secular mindfulness, an outgrowth of Buddhism, begins to exert its influence on Western business. As religious scholar David Loy remarked, “Toynbee may have noticed something the rest of us need to see: that the interaction between Buddhism and the West is crucial today, because each emphasizes something the other is missing. Whether or not Toynbee actually made this observation, the significance of the encounter may be nearly as great as his statement suggests.”
Though mindfulness can’t be considered Buddhist any more than the law of gravity can be considered English because it was discovered by Newton, the spread of Buddhism is an important part of the history here. For it was only through exposure to the dharma that a new generation of thinkers, tinkerers, and cultural leaders could home in on some of the tradition’s essential teachings, strip them of their religious trappings, and offer them up in a purely secular fashion. Kabat-Zinn’s work developing MBSR made mindfulness accessible to the medical profession and provided a framework for clinical experiments. Mirabai Bush, working with Monsanto, provided the first glimpses of how mindfulness and corporate America might mix. But in this empirical world we live in, it would take more than the enthusiasm of these pioneers to make mindfulness a mainstream pursuit, especially in corporate America. It would take evidence, largely in the form of clinical and academic studies, to win over a broader audience. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, that has only started to happen in recent years, as hard scientific data has suggested that mindfulness meditation not only changes our behavior. It also changes our bodies and brains.
Gelles, David. Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out (Eamon Dolan) (pp. 47-52). HMH Books. Kindle Edition.