Sick leave and stress leave is gradually on the increase in government departments and private businesses, and is costing a large amount of money in lost productivity. Studies have shown that meditation helps to reduce sick leave and increase productivity in the workplace.

Employees who meditate regularly come to work happier, with increased emotional stability, and develop better work relationships. Meditation boosts performance and wellbeing, decreases anxiety, depression and chronic fatigue.

Workplace meditation can be conducted easily within the work environment. Sessions are 15 to 30 minutes in length. Multiple sessions can be conducted over a 1 or 2 hour period such as a lunch break.

No previous experience or knowledge is required by those who attend.

Your Practitioner
is the 48 year old mother of a beautiful 16 year old daughter. Through her work, she has seen the many benefits of meditation and self-awareness and because of this has conducted many workshops and courses on these subjects. She has been actively involved with meditation classes for over 10 years. Her prime motivation is to assist others to enrich their lives and joyfully realise their full potential.

Business and Meditation

Many corporations are using meditation as a way of creating greater focus and clarity in the workplace. Employees who meditate regularly come to work happier, with increased emotional stability, and better work relationships.

In addition, they have a more collaborative approach towards work, it builds win-win attitudes within the company, higher productivity, and greater problem solving skills. Employees who are more creative, more focused, healthier and more energetic, naturally contribute more to a company. Productivity increases, absenteeism decreases and teamwork improves.

Microsoft, Citibank, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Nortel, Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Google, Apple and many others are finding meditation to be a very efficient way to motivate and energize their employees. The reasons companies are hiring the meditation teachers and conducting regular classes are easily justified to the management: increased brain-wave activity, enhanced intuition, better concentration, and improved health.

Mind your own business

Concentrate on every little action to reduce racing thoughts and stress.

Megan Gressor
November 24, 2006

Quotes from article

It is said to boost performance and wellbeing, decrease anxiety, depression and chronic fatigue, and have beneficial effects on conditions ranging from chronic pain and fibromyalgia to psoriasis, multiple sclerosis and even cancer. But it's not a futuristic wonder drug - it's an ancient Buddhist discipline gaining increased acceptance in mainstream medicine. It is mindfulness meditation, also known as "insight meditation"…

Meditation may sound like an alternative practice to some, but there is hard science to back up its effects…

Contrary to the stereotypes of meditation requiring sitting in the lotus position for hours, it can be performed any way at any time. "If you want to stand up or walk around and meditate, it's fine, because it's more about tuning into everyday experience," says clinical psychologist Dolores Foley. "It could be as simple as noticing the feelings of your feet on the floor when you jump in a lift, or the sounds around you, so the details of life become more acute."…

Youth worker David Harvey, 44, undertook mindfulness meditation training earlier this year to improve his professional and personal performance. "Now I meditate for about 30 to 45 minutes every morning and enjoy it. At one level it's about noticing your thoughts. By monitoring that awareness you start to have more control over your feelings. It's like an anchor in your awareness; it brings you back to your experience of what's going on rather than reacting to it…

"I'm a lot more energetic - now I'm getting up between 5.30am and 6.30am and I'm really awake - and have more satisfaction with what I'm doing. I'd recommend it for people interested not just in getting through life, but in getting more out of those little moments that make up life."…

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/health/mind-your-own-business/2006/11/21/1163871407298.html

Zen and the Art of Corporate Productivity
More companies are battling employee stress with meditation

JULY 28, 2003

Quotes from article

For Dave Jakubowski, vice-president of business development for Internet service provider United Online (UNTD ) Inc.,… "I'm in business," he says, "and I need results." So he recently turned to a [meditation] mat and 60 minutes of silence. "It's amazing," he says of his new meditation practice. "I'm able to sort through work challenges in this state of calm much faster than trying to fight through it. And I make fewer mistakes."…

Increasingly, the overstretched and overburdened have a new answer to work lives of gunning harder for what seems like less and less: Don't just do something -- sit there. Companies increasingly are falling for the allure of meditation, too, offering free, on-site classes. They're being won over, in part, by findings at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University that meditation enhances the qualities companies need most from their knowledge workers: increased brain-wave activity, enhanced intuition, better concentration, and the alleviation of the kinds of aches and pains that plague employees most….

AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals in Wilmington, Del., now offers three meditation courses aimed at energizing its 5,000 employees during and after marathon powwows….

Read entire article

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_30/b3843076.htm

Meditation
New research shows that it changes the brain in ways that alleviate stress

AUGUST 30, 2004

Quotes from article

For decades, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University have sought to document how meditation enhances the qualities companies need in their human capital: sharpened intuition, steely concentration, and plummeting stress levels. What's different today is groundbreaking research showing that when people meditate, they alter the biochemistry of their brains. The evolution of powerful mind-monitoring technologies has also enabled scientists to scan the minds of meditators on a microscopic scale, revealing fascinating insights about the plasticity of the mind and meditation's ability to sculpt it… 

"In our country, people are very involved in the physical-fitness craze, working out several times a week," says Davidson. "But we don't pay that kind of attention to our minds. Modern neuroscience is showing that our minds are as plastic as our bodies. Meditation can help you train your mind in the same way exercise can train your body."…

Some are already doing so. AOL, Raytheon , Nortel Networks , and even ultra-staid law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton offer their employees meditation classes. At some companies, the practice gets advocacy from the top. Medtronic's former CEO, Bill George, who has meditated twice a day for 20 minutes for the past 30 years, says: "Out of anything, it has had the greatest impact on my career." (Life offers many opportunities: George meditates from the time his plane taxis to when the steward offers him a Diet Coke.)…

Former Aetna International Chairman Michael Stephen also started meditating in 1974 and says it helped transform him from an impatient, demanding know-it-all into a more effective leader. Ex-Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro is such a devotee that he brought in teachers to help his execs learn the practice. And McKinsey Managing Partner Michael Rennie, an avid meditator, has studied the beneficial effects of meditation in corporations…

Of course, as with exercise, it's natural to face difficulties adhering to a schedule or to go through periods when you question the payoff. That's why it's important to find a teacher, a Zen centre, or some other authority to turn to in such moments, much as one turns to a personal trainer to help maintain or heighten the challenge of an exercise regimen.

The point is: Don't just do something -- sit there.

Read entire article

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_35/b3897439.htm

David Lynch Wades Into Deep Waters

The director talks about business, meditation, happiness, and how to make a good movie that withstands the test of time. Lend an ear

MAY 26, 2006  

Quotes from article

David Lynch has never broken box office…. Since 1978, the iconoclastic director of such films as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, and TV series Twin Peaks, has persuaded studios, networks, and investors to provide backing for over 15 very un-Hollywood projects -- and come back for more. 

Along the way, he has earned three Academy Award nominations for best director, a Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival, worldwide critical acclaim, and a devoted following. In 1990, Time magazine proclaimed him a genius on its cover…

Lynch frequently lectures on using meditation to enhance creativity and decision-making in business. BusinessWeek correspondent Justin Hibbard spoke with Lynch at the TiEcon 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif…

Most people don't associate meditation with business. Why are you talking to businesspeople about meditation?

For business, you need ideas. If your consciousness starts expanding, you've got a better chance of catching more ideas, bigger ideas. The analogy is fishing. The little fish are on the surface. Then you go deeper, and they get bigger and bigger down there. Big fish, big ideas…

You recommend that businesses offer meditation to employees in the workplace. Why would a company invest in that?

Now, if I was running a big business, I would say to every employee, "You have a chance to learn to dive within." And within a couple of months, you start seeing people come to work brighter, happier, with way more eagerness to go the extra mile for you. It would become like a family. And the ideas would flow. For businesses, it's money in the bank…

Is it usual for ideas to come during meditation like that?

Yeah, it is. Your meditation is to go within, transcend, and experience pure consciousness. You come out refreshed, wide awake, and energetic. You can now focus on those problems, focus on your business, focus on your film. It's easier to focus, and it's a more intense focus 

So you use visualization?

Yeah, a lot of times it's that. You needed a solution, and solutions come more easily with the more consciousness you have. If consciousness is pure gold, all you need is the key to open up that big vault door, and all that gold is yours…

Read entire article

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may2006/id20060526_578796.htm

Studies on Meditation in Business

A Swedish bus company has a program called Meet Yourself based on lifestyle changes, exercise, emotional release work, deep relaxation, role play, and meditation. In the late 1990s over 150 people participated in this program which is two hours a week for 18 months. The results were: 50% less accidents, less petrol consumption, less absenteeism, and less turnover. Recently, a similar program was begun for drivers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Banco Brazil initiated a program to improve customer/employee relations. The program was the creation of a bank trainer who knew the value of more open communication and meditation for working relations. He managed to interest 120,000 bank employees in working in a more relaxed and easy way. For the first phase of the program 240 trainers were prepared to lead a total 0f 1600 seminars with 47,000 tellers at Banco de Brazil. The seminars focused on the needs of the bank, the life and work expectations of the employees and meditation. As the training unfolded, the trainers found meditation "the most relevant factor" in their working in a better way. As these understandings touched the stressed out tellers, they began to see themselves and their work situation with radically different eyes, and began to find greater enjoyment in their work. The fist phase of the program was so successful that it was followed by 700 seminars for managers.

     In two companies that introduced meditation, managers and employees who regularly practiced meditation improved significantly in overall physical health, mental well-being, and vitality, when compared to control subjects with similar jobs in the same companies.
     Meditation practitioners also reported significant reductions in health problems such as headaches and backaches, improved quality of sleep, and a significant reduction in the use of hard liquor and cigarettes, compared to personnel in the control groups.

Anxiety, Stress and Coping, International Journal 6: 245-262, 993.

Norway (TV report)
Meditation is fast arriving amongst the top Norwegian business leaders. Maybe not so strange when, as research results show, it can prevent diseases as serious as heart attacks and cancer.
     "This is Hans Aanonsen, vice-president of Kreditkassen (one of Norway's largest banks). He is on his way to the most important meeting of his day [smart looking young executive in suit and tie shown entering Osho Devananda Meditation Center in Oslo].

     [He says]: "For me this has become part of my life. Some must have bread and juice and cod liver oil in the morning. I feel I need a dose of this. This opens up the channels. I felt that I somehow needed to improve in communication and with personal relations with other people. I felt in a way that I didn't always get my message across, and I didn't always hear what others were saying."

     [Interviewer:] Does this mean that you have become a better vice-president than before?
     "I feel that I have become more efficient in my job. Then others can decide whether I have become better!"

     New American research shows that meditation can prevent heart disease, and some insurance companies in the US now favour customers who meditate daily. [cut to Dr George Meredith]

     "Research in meditation has been going on for many years, and it has shown to be effective in numerous areas of health. In fact if there was a tablet which could do what meditation has been proven to do it would be a best seller, without a doubt. The chief cardiologist at the Beth Israel Hospital in New York commenting on meditation...his words were, "It is almost medical malpractice not to offer it."

     [Shot of last stage of meditation and the banker, dressed in suit and, tie and glasses again, obviously happy, and smiling]

     He says through his laughter, "It is so good! I am so happy!"

From Norwegian TV-2, National TV Nine o'clock news