Integrating Your
Heart and Mind
The search for meaning does not
require us to throw out analytic reasoning, but it does suggest
embodying logic with heart and passion. -- Alan
Briskin, The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace
BY STEVEN KEEVA
The five-year-old said it. He had been in the courtroom for the
entire trial, three days in the front row of the visitors' gallery
with his older brothers and sisters. All five were orphans now that
a car accident had taken their mother away. Wounded into silence,
the youngest sat through it all--through the lawyers' openings,
through detailed expert testimony and accident reconstructions--never
saying a word. Only waiting.
When the lawyers finally made their closing remarks, he sensed
that maybe the wait would end soon. All their talk of "wrongful
death," "liability," and "preponderance of evidence"
meant nothing. He needed an answer.
So did Irwin Stolz. The lawyer for the mother's estate, Stolz wanted
to do right by the kids. Regardless of what they got--assuming the
jury found in the estate's favor--their road through life was not
going to be easy. The best he could hope for was to provide some
damage control. Money could help some, maybe ease the pain just
a little. He finished his closing and began preparing for the worst,
while hoping for the best.
When the Rome, Georgia, jury finally filed back into the courtroom,
Stolz, at the counsel table, was intensely aware of the five stony
faces directly behind him. The foreman read the verdict: for the
plaintiff, and Stolz was flooded with a sense of relief; now he
could turn and face the children without hesitation.
The little boy was already standing. As Stolz left the well, the
child approached. He looked up with big, needy eyes.
"Does this mean my mama didn't do anything wrong?" he
asked.
Stolz began to cry. "It just tore me up," he recalls,
years later. "You try to do the best you can, and here it turns
out that all that time he'd thought that maybe his mother had done
something wrong."
Not everyone is as lucky as Stolz was that day. He found meaning
in his work--meaning that touched him deeply--beyond what law school
and his years of practice had prepared him to see. In the eyes of
that five-year-old, he found something that opened his own eyes:
not only could he do some "damage control," but he also
had the opportunity to heal this little boy's heart and free him
to go on with the process of grieving.
Stolz, a former state appeals court judge and now a name partner
in an Atlanta law firm, is well known in state legal circles as
a fine lawyer and a compassionate man. But he knows you have to
work to stay that way, to preserve your soul in a culture that values
winning to the exclusion of almost everything else. The boy in Rome
was one of many teachers who have sensitized him--who he has allowed
to sensitize him--to the different roles a lawyer can play in our
society.
Overcoming Domain-Bound Thinking
Lawyers tend to be proud of their skills, both those they acquired
in law school and those that can come only from years in practice.
And justifiably so. No other profession comes close to the law in
preparing people to take on a wide variety of challenges, whether
in the practice of law, business, politics, or journalism. Some
of it has to do with the simple fact that lawyers know how to get
things done. Their analytical skills are superb, they are skilled
negotiators, and they can quickly size up a situation and draw the
right inferences.
But many lawyers make a crucial error by failing to acknowledge
that some problems resist left-brain solutions and that the intellect
isn't the only tool available with which to address their own or
their clients' problems. Because of a heavy investment in their
intellectual prowess, they resist the notion that spirituality may
have something to do with their dilemma. Like actors who refer to
their voices as their "instrument" and assiduously guard
against anything that might imperil it, they feel concerned about
getting involved in issues beyond the solid, clear, analyzable dimension
they are used to--lest it fog their analytical lenses and muddy
their thinking.
This is a valid concern but also a very lawyerly one. It's "us
v. them" thinking. It leads to the natural conclusion that
a "spiritual" mind-set--one that can measure "the
swerve, or the inclination of the soul," to borrow a phrase
from the novelist Joyce Carol Oates--is something for other people,
fuzzy-headed folks with time to contemplate their navels in incense-filled
rooms. Lawyers, on the other hand, have to be tough-minded and nimble.
They have neither the time nor any obvious reason to develop an
inner life or to ponder the invisible. The implication is that the
two modes of thought--or perhaps more accurately, the two types
of intelligence--are antithetical and that, where lawyers are concerned,
the twain should never meet.
Although hard data on the complementarity of different modes of
intelligence are not yet available, scientists have considered the
question. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the eminent University of Chicago
professor of human development and education, and author of Flow,
says it is his opinion, and that of several other research psychologists,
that our very survival as a people requires that we integrate our
thinking.
While "specialized domain-bound thinking" is necessary
in a world dominated by specialization, Csikszentmihalyi believes
that too much specialization may imperil us. "Unless a certain
fraction of our thinking, both as individuals and as a culture,
is devoted to monitoring the state of the system as a whole--the
ecology, the polity, the community--we are likely to fall apart
as a people. We are getting increasingly differentiated cognitively,
but without cognitive integration, entropy is likely to prevail."
Without doubt, lawyers have a special social function, a unique
role to play in what Csikszentmihalyi refers to as the system as
a whole.
"Think about an orchestra. You can hear the trumpets, but
you're aware of the whole orchestra at the same time," says
Stephen Chakwin, a veteran New York litigator. "I've tried
to do that in my practice, and it has led to many successes. If
you understand the big picture, in which the small details matter,
you can understand how and why they matter, and you can explain
it to others. When you look at things through a spiritual dimension,
nothing says you have to turn the focus dial all the way to one
side."
The problem is that the dial has been turned too far the other
way, away from the kind of inner understanding that is rooted in
connectedness and relationship. As Alan Briskin puts it in his book
The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace, logic becomes "the
thin crust that suppresses meaning rather than fostering its awakening
within the individual." The result is a gap between the professional
and the human being, along with amnesia about the essential identity
of the two. The great challenge, then, is to return to a concept
of work as it has been understood in spiritual traditions for millennia--that
is, as an activity in which the inner and outer lives come together
in a meaningful engagement with the world.
But it can be tough. During the last two decades, the legal profession
has placed an increasingly heavy emphasis on efficiency, on working
"smarter," quicker, and faster. It makes demands not only
on your outer life--in constant deadlines, billable-hour quotas,
pressure to keep up with a rapidly growing body of new law--but
also on your inner life. The problem is that most lawyers have never
developed the resources to cope with those demands, let alone find
in them the kind of meaning that can make their work more rewarding.
They hear only the blare of the trumpet and miss the sonority of
an orchestra that can provide resonance and depth.
To find real pleasure in the legal life, you need to open yourself
to all your sources of potential meaning. You will discover that
understanding a client beyond her present legal problem does not
detract from the technical job at hand; it gives the technical job
deeper meaning by placing it in the context of a life. Contracts,
after all, are about human relationships; briefs are about disappointment,
wanting to be heard, needing to heal. Seeing these deeper meanings
is not a threat to good work; it enriches the experience of doing
the work, engages the lawyer's heart, and makes the end product
more likely to be compelling.
One model for what it might look like to live a legal life infused
with the energies of the heart and the spirit is that of Mohandas
K. Gandhi. Gandhi worked constantly, throughout his life, and yet
he maintained an uncanny ability to see the spiritual dimension
in even the most mundane activities--sweeping floors, spinning yarn--and
in unpleasant conditions, such as prison. And he was clear about
the implications for his law practice: "I understood that the
true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder,"
he wrote. "The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a
large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice was
occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases.
I lost nothing thereby--not even money, certainly not my soul."
Awareness of the entire orchestra became, for Gandhi, a way of life.
Not only can such an awareness add texture and richness to your
work and make it that much more rewarding, but also you can rest
assured that it represents a kind of integration that your clients
need. David Hall of Northeastern University speaks as a client when
he says, "When I go to a lawyer, I want something more than
just legal advice. I mean, when I go to the grocery store to buy
a loaf of bread, I hope to be treated a certain way by the cashier.
If she doesn't put the money in my hand and acknowledge me, I feel
diminished by that. So I don't want a caring lawyer who can't write
a good brief, but at the same time, I don't want a lawyer who can
write a very good brief yet he can't hear me. He can't understand
me and my story, and can't be there with me as I'm going through
a difficult experience."
Another Kind of Practice
For most lawyers, the word practice means only one thing: work.
You are, after all, practitioners. You practice law, and you are
in the practice of providing legal services. With all the practicing
you do, it may come as a surprise that you are profoundly in need
of a second practice, one that gives greater depth to the first.
The purpose of this secondary practice is to bring out the best
in you and help you get to know parts of yourself that have been
overlooked or pushed aside in response to the demands of a frantic
professional life. It will move you toward wholeness, toward accepting
yourself for all that you are, so that you can bring your heart
and soul to work, find the joy in it, and have more left to give
to others.
But it's also about taking care of yourself, not in the sense of
indulging your desires for bigger and better things, but by nurturing
your deepest needs--for peace, love, meaning, and a certain quality
of presence. If you are like most lawyers, self-nurturing doesn't
come easy to you. You work tirelessly to meet everyone else's needs--clients,
staff, family, the bar association--in what feels like a never-ending
battle to cover your flanks and keep bad news at bay. Despite all
the talk of avaricious lawyers, you end up feeling impoverished.
Only you can say what is truly nurturing for you. It may be taking
a walk in the park, soaking in a hot bath, putting aside a few minutes
for personal reflection, or spending a week in silent retreat. Perhaps
it's playing a set of tennis, watching your dogs frolic, listening
to a Bach cello suite, or carefully threading a necklace of colorful
beads. It really doesn't matter what it is, as long you engage in
it fully, with not just your head but also your heart.
For countless centuries and throughout the world, some kind of
spiritual practice was seen as an essential tool for educating the
inner person, a basic ingredient in the experience of being human.
These were time-tested methods for quieting the mind and accessing
truths and levels of understanding that profoundly enhance even
the most mundane activities of daily life. If playing golf happens
to make you feel at one with the world, keep doing it. But there
are other practices, most of which take much less time on a daily
basis than a round of golf, that can enhance your relationships
and deepen your enjoyment of your law practice (as well as your
golf game).
The Mindful Practice
Actio sequitur esse: Action follows being.
Here are some of the things that Florida plaintiff's attorney Warren
Anderson tries to be mindful of while he's working on a case:
* the essential beauty of life, and the fact that handling
this particular case is why he went to law school
* that accepting representation of another human being is
a serious commitment and should always be treated as such
* that it is important to always try to see the situation
from the other side's point of view
* that both the case and his clients "interconnect with
the larger web of life"
* that the situation calls for humbleness, restraint, and
compassion even while he is zealously representing his client within
the law.
But his mindfulness doesn't stop there. He tries to be wholly present
to whatever he is doing, thinking, and feeling. That is the essence
of mindfulness, as it has been practiced--mostly in the East--for
thousands of years.
Realizing that he, like the rest of us, habitually gets lost in
thoughts, expectations, and automatic emotional reactions, Anderson
acknowledges that the practice is a challenge. "It's a couple-step
process. I often catch myself not doing it, and then I try to do
it. The thing is, we're trained not to do it and to just represent
clients zealously at the expense of everything else. But it's a
practice that helps me remember that I have a responsibility to
more than just that--to the court, to justice, to ethics."
As an example of how he tries and sometimes fails to practice mindfulness,
Anderson, whose office is in Jacksonville Beach, describes an incident
in which he wrote a letter to a lawyer in Ohio, who was acting as
local counsel for one of his clients in that state. Because it was
a health-related matter, Anderson summarized his client's physical
condition, including various pre-existing problems. "I would
have been thrilled with that if I were him," he says. "But
then I dictated interrogatories for him too. So I did the lion's
share of the work, while he'll get the lion's share of the fee.
"Now, he didn't ask me to do all this work, but I wrote him
a letter and I said, essentially, from now on, you'll do all the
work. It was fairly cold. Well, my paralegal saw the letter and
pointed out to me that the tone was not exactly gracious. So I changed
it. Instead of saying, 'Step up to the plate; you're getting paid
for this!' I wrote, 'I hope the material helps. Let me know if we
can be of further assistance.' I had not been practicing mindfulness,
and it required that she point out to me how a little phrase could
be taken, how it could affect someone else. Some time ago, she spent
a week with Jon Kabat-Zinn, and so she's predisposed to help me
with certain things, like my tendency to get disappointed with people
and lose perspective."
How Mindfulness Helps
At the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts
Medical Center, Jon Kabat-Zinn has been demonstrating over the past
twenty years how practicing mindfulness can reduce stress and enhance
health and well-being. In fact, researchers recently documented
that the part of the brain responsible for generating positive feelings
becomes significantly more active as a result of undergoing the
type of training Kabat-Zinn has pioneered. Although the roots of
mindfulness practice are in Buddhism, Kabat-Zinn's achievement has
been to bring it to mainstream Western institutions, including business,
health care, education, and, most recently, law.
He describes mindfulness, which is more easily experienced than
put into words, as paying attention in a particular way: on purpose,
in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. It's a kind of meditation,
done standing up or sitting down, at home, at work, in the car--anywhere
and everywhere. It is simple but far from easy, and its effects
can be powerful and transformative, which is why courses modeled
after the UMass program have sprung up throughout the country.
What makes the practice of mindfulness so valuable for lawyers
is that it requires no special equipment and can be done anywhere,
at any time. In other words, it is a practice for developing the
inner life that can be done while you practice law. And it has tremendous
practical benefits. When you are mindful of the moment in a nonjudgmental
and open way, you can suddenly see things you never noticed before;
new choices become possible. You can see stressful situations with
greater clarity and calm; this gives you a chance not to lose your
balance, and to face the situations creatively and with confidence.
No longer on autopilot, you can really look at what is important
to you and realize that, although much of what happens to you is
beyond your control, you have enormous power over how you respond
to, and deal with, whatever comes your way.
In the context of a law practice, these are some of the additional
benefits mindfulness offers:
* It can help you become aware of your own biases and prejudices
and how they get in the way of effective work.
* It can help you see the potential in difficult moments,
so that rather than reacting mindlessly to what is happening on
the surface, you have an opportunity to learn what may be going
on at a deeper level.
* It can help you become aware of the quality of your own
presence--including what you are saying and how you are saying it--so
that others' responses become more understandable.
Stacey is a Colorado lawyer who does mostly bankruptcy work. She's
had a bit of training in mindfulness and does a fair amount of reading
on the subject. When she is mindful, she says, she feels as if she
has a whole new palette of options available to her every minute
of her day. Suddenly she realizes that this amazing spectrum of
choices has been there all along; she had only to turn on the light
of awareness to notice it.
When Stacey is practicing mindfully and a colleague or opponent
flies off the handle, she tries to simply notice the feelings that
come up for her without responding reflexively. Instead, she waits
until she's ready. Oftentimes she chooses to look more deeply, to
consider what might be behind the outburst. Maybe there's an illness
in the person's family, or perhaps someone just told him off.
In the past, when an interview with a client was getting off track,
Stacey became self-critical; internal voices told her she really
didn't know what she was doing and even questioned her choice of
work. Now when that happens, she just watches it happening, often
noticing that her stomach is knotting up. She lets herself be aware
of it all without having to get attached to it. She doesn't fight
the voices or the physical sensations, so they have no real power
over her. Suddenly she becomes aware that she can choose to work
with the client in a different way. She stops, takes a mindful breath,
and thinks about how she might connect with the person in her office
in a way that helps them both find their way.
As a rule, lawyers do not consider the value of their own inner
resources, those that exist in their bodies and minds. Practicing
mindfulness gives you a chance to explore them.
"We do and do and do, but we don't stop to reflect on who's
doing the doing," Kabat-Zinn has written. "We feel cut
off from our own experience and feelings. We are driven by the mind,
by thought, by expectations, by fear, by wanting to get somewhere
else. If you always want to be someplace else, then you are never
actually where you are, and therefore not fully alive. Nor are you
capable of dealing with the pressures and difficulties that arise
if your mind is inattentive and is half not here. . . . The deeper
levels of intelligence and wisdom that come from clear and full
seeing will not be available to you because of this foggy cloud
in the mind."
When you are mindful, you notice that it isn't just your mind that
is engaged in your work; it's also your body and your heart. Everything
you do has a correlate on the level of being--it is felt and understood
in an inner way. Being aware of that inner experience can make life--and
work--much more interesting and much more enjoyable.
Being With the Breath
In mindfulness practice, the primary tool for cutting through the
fog in the mind and finding your place in the present moment is
awareness of your breath. As a focus for attention, it is unsurpassed.
It's always there with you, and it is intimately tied to your presence
here on earth, so paying attention to it is an excellent way to
remind yourself that you are, in fact, here. Now.
If you try staying with a full breath--through inhalation and exhalation--being
fully present to how it feels in this moment to just breathe naturally
and know that you're breathing, you'll notice that it brings you
to an awareness of your body. And the crucial thing about your body
is that it knows only the moment; it's your mind that takes you
into tomorrow when you're actually sitting here, on the phone with
a client; or into the past, when you're working on a memorandum
against a tight deadline. So awareness of the breath acts as an
anchor to bring you back to yourself. In the moment.
And when you try to simply breathe with awareness, the challenge
of being present becomes clear. Are you wondering whether you're
doing it right? Worrying that you might be wasting your time? Doubting
that it has any relevance to your life? These thoughts are perfectly
normal, and if you just observe them without judging, they will,
like all other thoughts and feelings, dissipate as new mental formations
take their place. When you're alive to the present moment, you can
see this happen and allow it, and come to realize that all moments
are rich with possibilities. It's odd really; the logic behind being
where you are is so staggeringly obvious that we tend to overlook
it: since you'll never live anywhere else but in this moment, in
this now, why not really be here?
Carlton is a public defender in the Northwest. When he's in trial
and it's time to start his cross-examination, he makes a point of
connecting with his breath. Inevitably that brings with it a realization
that he is in the courtroom representing another human being, not
off in his mind somewhere. Then all sorts of things can happen.
It's almost as if he can see spaces between moments, enabling him
to use each one consciously. If he is in command of all his materials,
if he knows the case inside out, the added sense of self-awareness
makes everything flow smoothly and he feels absolutely in control,
like a real maestro.
If you can imagine that your awareness is like the sky, in which
thoughts and feelings come and go like clouds, then you can choose
when it is appropriate to act on any one of them, or simply to watch
them drift by. In practical terms, if, in the course of your legal
work, the thought "He's trying to get me" crosses your
mind and triggers certain impulses, you can do any of several things.
You can simply react to the impulses, possibly embarking on a course
of action you will come to regret (although you may never know how
unnecessary and inappropriate it was). Or, you can step back and
realize that--as the sky--your awareness can hold the clouds (i.e.,
the thought and the impulse) and examine them. Because the sky contains
the clouds, it needn't be controlled by them. Seeing this, you can
then choose to respond or not to respond, depending on what you
really want and your now clearer sense of the actual situation.
Paying attention in this way reveals every moment to be fertile
and full of potential. "In every moment, things can go a lot
of different ways," Kabat-Zinn says, "and we have some
say in which way they go, because we can respond instead of just
reacting." It is worth noting too that at the other end of
the awareness spectrum--the mindless end--are the states of mind
that quite often underlie lawyer disciplinary actions, whether they
have to do with neglecting to return phone calls or forgetting to
communicate key information.
It needn't happen. With the breath as your anchor and a commitment
to being awake and present, awareness in the moment is always within
reach.
Enhancing Balance
Integrating such awareness into your law practice can help to redress
previously hidden imbalances. When you pay attention to your thoughts,
feelings and physical sensations--again, moment to moment and without
judgment--you can actually see how fragmented you may be in a given
moment, how your mind, with its reflexively analytical/dualistic
bent, can unwittingly shield you from truths and possibilities that
don't fit neatly into any of the prefabricated boxes you carry around.
You also become aware of the constant chatter that fills your head--a
characteristic not just of lawyers, but, to some degree, of all
human beings--and how merely noticing it makes it easier to get
past it to what really matters at the moment.
That's exactly why Anderson finds it so helpful to integrate mindfulness
into his law practice. "Sometimes, for example, I don't do
so well when people disappoint me," he says. "I get frustrated
with incompetence or slowness, and I have to be real careful with
that. Also, when clients call me and start whining, I try to get
by that and really see what's going on with them. It's so easy to
turn them off, but mindfulness practice has helped me stay with
them. As a consequence, I get the sense that people really feel
like I am there with them. They know I'm giving priority to their
case. And it goes beyond just being a nice guy. Some of the webs
that connect us all are pretty intricate. It's a matter of paying
attention, because what you say to people can be so devastating
or cause the wrong reaction, and then they take that reaction into
their dealings with others, with family and friends and colleagues
and all the rest.
"It comes back to my favorite quote from Thoreau," Anderson
says. "He said, 'To affect the quality of the day, that is
the highest of arts.' It's true. It's better than being a musician
or a sculptor. We all know people who are fully alive, smiling,
and grateful almost anytime we see them--people who don't dwell
on gossip, on the negative, but on the beauty, the wonder, the awe
of life. I think to live and move through life like that is the
highest of arts. And I think that bringing mindfulness to your life
brings you closer to that."
Transforming Your Practice
Practicing mindfulness can have extraordinary benefits for lawyers.
Not only is it a way to live more fully, moment to moment, day to
day, but it also can help you do your job better. When you are silent
and still, cultivating wakefulness, you free yourself to see more
than you otherwise would, often more than the other side sees. And
because you are awake in the moment, you have greater latitude in
how you're going to handle the next moment.
By helping you recognize and get past the fears, beliefs, and opinions
that get in the way of listening well, mindfulness helps you hear
more of what your client is really saying, allowing you to bring
the broadest possible perspective to a case. This can have an impact
on winning.
But more important, in being mindful, you can reclaim your life.
You can be there more--and in a deeper way--for your family, for
yourself, for your colleagues, and for your clients. It improves
concentration and allows you to work with your own mind to foster
creativity and innovation. And when you take care of yourself by
regularly dropping into non-doing, when you stop striving for even
one brief moment, you open the door to your inner life and nourish
parts of yourself that want nothing more than to simply be in the
moment.
Here are some ways of making mindfulness part of your law practice
and your life:
* Make a point of noticing how much mental time you spend
in the future--in meetings before you get there, in the office when
you're playing with your kids, in another city when you haven't
left home yet.
* Spend five minutes a day cultivating inner stillness.
* Be mindful of the quality of your presence and how it affects
other people. Are you keyed up? Distracted? Bursting with energy?
Bored?
* Let yourself not know. Try it first on something in which
the stakes are not very high. See what it feels like to be in uncertainty.
See where it leads.
* When you arrive in the office, really be there as you greet
each person. Make eye contact and smile.
* Ask yourself whether your body and your mind are on speaking
terms. If not, what might put them back in touch? What would it
take for you to actually "inhabit" your body more?
* Try to see your work--for better and for worse--as a way
to enrich your inner life.
* When you find yourself being judgmental, try instead to
be discerning. Look deeply into whatever captures your attention,
and try to see it clearly and precisely, to understand its qualities
and its purpose. This is a wonderful lawyerly skill that can be
honed to great precision. Unfortunately, it is too often sabotaged
by the tendency to judge rather than to really see.
* Keep in mind that efficiency and enjoyment are not mutually
exclusive--in fact, they make a potent combination.
* Make a determined effort to be present even for the things
you have come to do mechanically. When you answer the phone for
the twenty-seventh time today, really be there with answering the
phone for the twenty-seventh time. When you draft a simple incorporation
for the twelfth time this month, really be there with drafting that
simple incorporation. You may just be surprised by what you find
in that moment, now that you're aware.
* Whenever you realize that your mind is off someplace else,
don't get down on yourself. Try to be grateful for the awareness,
and go on being as present as you can.
A Day in the Mindful Life
Mindfulness can be practiced anytime, from the moment you wake
up in the morning until you slip off to sleep at night. Ideally,
mindful awareness should be there in every wakeful moment of the
day. In fact, it is the very
continuity of awareness--from sensation to thought to feeling, across
the transitions that fill our days--that makes it so powerful.
Noting, for example, that as you wake up, the first tendency of
your emerging consciousness is to clamp down, banishing the sluggish,
dream-inflected world of sleep, you may choose to relax and soften
the transition into full wakefulness, letting yourself come alive
to the day more slowly and naturally.
You may, as you sit up and hang your legs over the bedside, become
aware of tension in your back, a feeling that intensifies as thoughts
of a ten o'clock deposition arise in your mind. Taking a deep breath,
breathing into the tension, you let it go, place your feet on the
floor, and stand up.
Remaining mindful of your surroundings, you hear the bedsheets
rustle and turn to gaze at your spouse, whose eyes are open, looking
your way. When you smile at each other, you are aware of a sense
of gratitude.
The next thing you know, you are in the shower, soaping yourself,
wondering how you got there. You realize your mindfulness lapsed
for a time and left you lost in anxious thoughts about the depo
and a meeting this afternoon with the CEO of a high-tech start-up
whom you would love to have as a client. But you don't have to dwell
on the lapse--it is natural, part of the process, not worth foundering
on.
You remain mindful as best you can, maintaining awareness up to
and after the lapses, occasionally noticing things that lift your
heart--your daughter's latest drawing on the refrigerator, the sun
through an opening in the living room curtains. You make a special
point of keeping your awareness as you say goodbye to the family,
giving hugs and kisses, making eye contact, letting them matter
to you as much as they really do. ...
Later, at the deposition, things are going reasonably well. At
one point, you find familiar thoughts arising in your mind, some
of them about the other side's lawyer. "He's doing this just
to stick it to me," is one. "Arrogant bas-tard!"
is another. But you let them pass, knowing that you want only to
act in-tentionally, not automatically, mindlessly.
And so the moment passes and new moments arise, and in each one
you see that you have choices--to speak or not to speak, to interpret
a response generously or with skepticism or even scorn, to embody
integrity or a lack of it. By the time the deposition is over, you
feel unusually satisfied, pleased to have seen and heard, felt and
appreciated as much as you did. You feel a renewed strength to take
on the rest of the day.
Mindfulness Triggers
If you look around, you'll find that the world is full of things
that can act as triggers for mindfulness. Stop signs and stoplights
could hardly be any more obvious in their demand that you make yourself
still for a moment. If you choose to heed their demand, they can
transform the experience of being caught in traffic from an ordeal
into a meditation in motion.
You can program the screen saver on your computer to flash you
a reminder, ask your secretary to rap lightly on your office door
at random intervals, put your watch on the opposite wrist from what
you're used to so that you can't check the time automatically and
will be forced to come to attention to find it.
Be creative, and try things until you find what works best for
you.
How about stopping to breathe and reconnect every time you record
your billable time? How about before every meeting, negotiation,
or settlement conference?
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