I talk about Practice and consistency. Which flows over into how we conduct ourselves in the business world. Yet there are times in both worlds where it is very important to know when to throw both practice and consistency out the window. If you cannot do this then you are not practicing and you are not consistent, you have a habit and ritual which may border on a compulsion.

Compulsions do not help anyone at any time. They most certainly do not help your staff. A compulsive leader will demand that things are done in a specific way just because that is how they know they are in charge. A non-compulsive leader will have a great degree of flexibility and recognize when it is time to throw the "way it is always done" out the window in order to be responsive.

If you have followed my other blog years ago, or were one of my students when I ran Dragon Mountain, then you know that the ability to be responsive is huge with me. After all, what else are you practicing for? When we give up the daily routine or ritual in order to break form and respond to something it does not mean we throw out our moral, ethical and legal guidelines in order to fix a situation. It means we step out of practicing something into applying it to practical use. We throw the ritual of practice out in order to engage in the action of practice. That may be confusing to the non-Buddhist, but the word "practice" is used in multiple ways (in the English, it has more variations that apply in the Pinyin and Sanskrit).

Some people ask why there is such a strong emphasis on physical training in Chan. The whole qigong/gongfu thing. Most of that has evolved into a form of moving practice and it is applicable in modern life, not because it makes you a badass that can fly through the air in a meeting and knock someone's block off with a one-inch punch, but because it teaches you intense physical awareness and control. Think about that. Stress, along with other emotions, have their appearance in the body first. If you are highly skilled at detecting changes in your body and addressing those physical symptoms through immediate changes in breathing or muscle control it buys your mind time to reframe, refocus and re-approach a situation.

Yet to stay in a state of constant practice, or worse, to leave a conflict or problem situation in order to go practice tells me that you do not understand its nature and it has become a habituated escape. It is a compulsion of withdrawal and denial. The reason you practice in quiet rooms or with special rituals and maybe even fancy clothing is so that the experience is ingrained in your cells so that when you are confronted with an issue in the world your cells can call upon that memory and practice in the moment to become a part of the guidance for how you meet a situation.

Which reminds me, I need to post on the whole "mindfulness in the workplace" thing and why that is a mis-guided thing with potentially harmful outcomes. Think about it. The Western world has ripped the concept of mindfulness out of several Eastern religions/cultures - stripped it of its meaning - and is trying to apply it to the workplace in order to increase productivity. Did you ever wonder why there are no such attempts at applying this technique to the workforce in the very cultures where mindfulness comes from?