The First Circle

We came together, a group of participants who live somewhere in the overlap between spirituality & business (both words defined in their very broadest possible sense), in NYC last week for our inaugural Discussion Circle.

A documentary film maker/screen writer sat elbow to elbow with a Japanese shoji screen maker; a third world micro finance philanthropist next to a (very busy) hedge fund legal consultant; an advertising executive next to an executive meditation instructor…..more a zen salad than a melting pot.

The ‘shape’ that came to my mind all the way through the dialog was the shape of paradox…something like the poles of a magnet….opposite, but not in a binary sense. One needing and feeding the other in some organic, interpenetrated way.

The pairings of people had this yin/yang quality, but it could also be felt, for me at least, in the energy as a whole, and even the dialog.

Though I was gently moderating the session, and intended to blog about it here after the session, I deliberately took no notes. Normally an avid note-taker and draw-er of napkin sketches, I wanted to see what emerged for me in the half-life of the Circle’s afterglow.

What has come to me so far is this paradox shape. Conceptually, the paradox manifest for me in the tension between, on the one hand, wanting to get the spirituality/business dialog into a vernacular that can be heard and deeply assimilated by business. And on the other not wanting to ‘package’ spirituality as just the latest productivity tool, losing not just the subtly but also the step-change quality of its impact….In short, not letting ego’s game take over & re-creating the same old dynamics, but wit a bow rather than a handshake!

Let’s take the idea of teaching meditation to business executives and CEOs…something that was discussed in the session. Do we Trojan Horse it in there, give it an ROI, or whatever it takes to get the contemplative virus into the system as a whole? One might call this skillful means. Or do we have to resist ‘packaging’ and retain a certain purity of approach that will, by its counter-balancing nature, challenge the substructure of the current system?

A second flavor of this paradox, it seemed to me, was the distinction between impacting business-people versus impacting business-models. If we want capitalism to wake up, do we have to bring self-reflection to the individuals, who will in turn re-shape the system & models of their businesses. Or do we try to show that re-shaping the business models themselves along enlightened lines in will lead to greater abundance and success. “Bring the bottom line, and their hearts and minds will follow”, so to speak. Which has the greater chance of success, the greater speed to impact, the broadest radius of positive change?

The zen salad was food for thought, and I’m still chewing on it….more as it emerges from the field of the future.