Without further ado, here's the short excerpt from my essay, "Marketing: What's Love Got to Do With It" from the to-be-released October book with contributions from nine business bloggers, More Space: Nine Antidotes to Complancy in Business.
It seemed like a good thing to share right now. Since this piece is out-of-context, I just wanted to add the quote from Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, from “Waves of Compassion" was written in direct response to reactions post-tsunami.
Update: Just noted that Jennifer over at What's Your Brand Mantra is echoing my own thoughts: "Instead of reinforcing our walls and levees in a losing battle to keep the flood waters out, we can build a boat instead. It’s better to float with the current rather than drown in our disappointment and betrayed expectations. It’s better to be flexible in the wind rather than be snapped into pieces due to our rigidity and insistence on control. It’s better to open our heart and risk the inevitable hurt… for when we close ourselves off to selected parts of life, we really close ourselves off to all of it."
Excerpt begins:
Marketing people talk about emotion. They present charts and diagrams, even raise their voices and wave their arms, but fundamentally they treat emotion as... out-there, felt by someone else and able to be manipulated. Analyzing other people’s emotions and refusing to acknowledge our own dumps us in the same old rut. What a waste.—Kevin Roberts, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands
PHUKET, THAILAND, 27 December 2004: I lay weeping into my pillow at 4 A.M., curled on a green vinyl-covered twin bed in the fully lit hospital rehab room. The nurses attempted to muffle their chattering and the tsunami news streaming from the TV around the corner was turned down low. Were they OK? And what of the gypsy families on Koh Jum we saw near the boat bar weaving their nets and fashioning bamboo squid and shrimp traps days before? What of the Danish family in the bungalow closest to the sea? What of every single person that donned one of the Santa hats that Phen, the bungalow operator, passed out at the Christmas Eve party? I shook the thought. Yes, yes, they must be fine.
The unparalleled depths of sorrow, grief, anguish, and despair that rose like an angry sea dragon in the hours, days, and weeks that followed threatened to consume me even as the tangible tsunami did not.
At times like this we are tempted to draw up the bridge and fortify the walls, where in fact the thing to do is seize opportunity—while the heart’s soft spot is palpable—to further crack open the fortress walls that keep us distant from others. This was the first time in my life that the temptation to run from intense emotions didn’t win out. I didn’t “let go” of feelings—rather the pithy advice was “let be.” I simply rode the waves out. I sat with whatever came up without resistance and surprisingly I learned that the way out was through. Buddhists concertedly cultivate their capacity for empathy via openheartedness, or bodhichitta.
Fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta. —Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
Strangely enough, I’ve found that my ability to remain present to pain, grief, and sorrow has made me less hooked by these emotions; I’m able to withstand others’ dramatic outbursts and intense expressions of suffering without triggering unresolved emotions within myself. Meeting our own intense emotions without resistance allows us to skillfully and gently handle others’ emotions without our own getting in the way.
Recently I witnessed a woman standing at a church service topple right over. She was having a seizure. While a doctor ran over and paramedics were called, I found that my presence of mind was uncharacteristically unwavering in its calmness and loving healing thoughts extended outward without thinking. Normally, I’d be more panicked and worried. As spiritual teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche noted after the tsunami tragedy, “We want the suffering to go away because it scares us or it causes us personal pain” (italics mine). Our own anxieties and fears, along with undealt-with and frozen emotions, come back to the foreground of our memory. Thawing out can be painful, but I wouldn’t choose to go back to tundra of numbness.
Empathy can become second nature. The facial photographer and researcher introduced earlier, Dr. Paul Ekman, developed another test measuring how well someone can read people’s emotions from watching a videotape of rapid-fire, fleeting changes in expressions and attempting to correctly identify the emotion. This test’s results are known to correlate with empathy. Most people do very poorly, but two Buddhist meditators in the study received nearly perfect scores.
One of the two monks, Matthieu Ricard, was shown a film clip used in psychology tests to trigger and elicit disgust. The clip was of severe burn victims having dead skin carefully, painfully stripped from their bodies. When one has cultivated openheartedness in repeated practice as Ricard has, it’s not surprising that rather than the self-referential anxious and reactionary response of disgust, he felt “caring and concern, mixed with a not unpleasant strong, poignant sadness.” Ricard insists he is not an extraordinarily gifted monk—in fact, compassion and empathy are the entire point of practice. The Dalai Lama has said he does not practice a religion so much as he practices loving-kindness.
Chances are, you will not be in a tsunami. But any day you’re facing a separation can open your heart up to others located anywhere in the globe who are facing similar relationship endings and feel lonely, scorned, confused, or any other emotions that you are feeling. The day you go to the ATM machine and discover you’re down to your last ten bucks, you may suddenly feel your heart lurch out to those millions that contend with poverty on a daily basis. Whether you are in a minor car accident, lose a pet, go through a layoff, struggle with your teenager’s drug problem, file bankruptcy, lose a best friend to cancer, or any number of tragedies large and small, it’s an opportunity to connect with the soft spot within and wedge into the hairline crack to further dismantle the wall that separates you from others. You may only have a few opportunities—use them wisely.
As our technology becomes more sophisticated we perhaps think that our emotional responses need to be more sophisticated as well. But what seems best is simple, direct feeling that is not padded with logic or twisted concepts, such as, “Maybe they deserved it,” or, “I’m glad it’s not me,” or, “They should have known better,” or even, “That’s their karma.” These contorted responses reflect poorly on our own state of mind. If compassion feels unnatural, it’s probably because we’re still thinking of ourselves. –Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, “Waves of Compassion,” Shambala Sun, May 2005
Besides riding out the waves of emotion, I’ve been practicing metta—the meditation for cultivating loving-kindness and compassion that monk Ricard uses—lately myself. It begins with extending loving-kindness toward ourselves, then moves out in a circle to mentors and those who’ve supported us, then further on to loved ones, then strangers, and then even those we dislike (advanced practice!) until the loving thoughts extend to every sentient being in the universe. “It’s compassion with no agenda, that excludes no one,” says Ricard in an interview with Marc Ian Barasch in Field Notes on the Compassionate Life. “You generate this quality of loving and let it soak the mind.”
Excerpt ends. The metta I'd advise now would encompass all the people and animals in the Gulf Coast immediately before you extend out to all beings in the universe. Essentially you could look at metta as a way of extending love and prayers out from your heart. And this state of caring and benevolence makes it easier to be with and talk with others without our own defenses getting in the way - whether they are an irrate customer or a person suffering from catastrophic loss. Metta is also a Pali word for loving kindness, and can be used as a closing much like signing off 'Love, Evelyn'.
Metta.
Technorati tags: Flood Aid, Hurricane Katrina, Marketing | Credits: Flickr photo by keylime
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