Meditation and Business

Meditation is frequently considered an inwardly turned spiritual discipline.  How can it apply to a very people-centered business like design/build remodeling? John Happel, owner and operator of H&H Builders LLC, addresses this question in his article, “How to Use Meditation to Grow Your Business,” for the University of the Heart, Institute for Applied Meditation website.

The specific spiritual technique Happel refers to in his piece is Heart Rhythm Meditation.  You can read more about the mission and methods of the University of the Heart here, but Happel’s insights into the challenges faced by business owners are useful, especially for custom artisans who are involved in very people-centered livelihoods, regardless of the proposed meditation techniques.  How to face these obstacles remains an important question.

According to Happel, meditation can help your business on three levels: basic, applied, and advanced, which are summarized below.

Basic

Developing a “strong inner awareness” is critical for business owners who need the ability to remain focused on their products, services, and customers, especially when facing distractions and sometimes competing demands on their attention.  Nurturing the ability to “turn within” can help business owners prioritize their responses to demands based on their convictions and recharge their “emotional, mental, and spiritual energies.”

Applied

Business owners face questions such as: “What should I do? And how can I make it happen?”  Developing one’s intuition, the “voice of your heart” that links emotions with analytic abilities, can help to answer questions of the first type.  Developing the “power of your heart,” one’s courage and willpower, can help identify what must be done and muster the heart to see it through.

Advanced

We all belong to a greater “global system.”  At the advanced level, according to Happel, business owners learn to align their business’s purpose “with the greater purpose of humanity.” One’s business becomes “a vehicle for earthly transformation.”

Read Happel’s entire article here.

Good luck with that last step.

Custom makers, how do you maintain your focus in the face of competing demands?  How do you develop your intuition and willpower? What is your “global system?”  Is it an environmental “green” awareness or something more “mini-global” like supporting your local economy?  Whatever it is, how do you keep that greater community in mind through your work?  Please share your comments.