Published on May 13, 2025 12:02 PM GMT
A ritual framework for how to transform our work into a meditative / introspective practice to help cultivate wisdom and joy. This July 20, 2025 I'm running a "Mindful Research" retreat / residency where we will live and work in community with other scientists sharing the value of awareness, and learn to do research as meditation – see here for details.
I've struggled for a long time with how to bring the profound bliss of meditation and introspection practice into my work process. It never felt right for those transcendent states of feeling "fully human" to be restricted to retreat settings. The point seemed to be to learn to live each moment from this place, but somehow no one ever taught how. Worse yet, while meditative cleaning or cooking at least somehow made sense, doing intellectual work while maintaining meta-awareness seemed utterly hopeless.
So I was quite excited when I recently discovered this 5-step structure that seems to be core to most spiritual practices and rituals, and which finally clicked for me as the potentially right theory for how to turn work (and everything else) into meditation. I found this while trying to understand what's the deal with the various elaborate, loud and colorful Hindu worship rituals (pujas), that involve things like bathing a rock (e.g., Shiva lingam) in milk and honey, then cleaning it back off, putting flowers and bananas on it, then eating them, etc. etc. The framework I describe here felt like it brought many pieces together for me – both of religious practices, and of practical ways to live a happier worldly life.
Karma yoga
To begin, I want to say that there is already an ancient traditional answer to how to "work as a meditation" – and this is the theory of Karma Yoga (Karma roughly means action or works, so this is sort of "work yoga"). The core of this practice boils down to "do your best and leave the rest" – or "do what must be done, and what will be will be," "you are entitled to the action, but not to the reaction (results)," "do your duty without concern for the fruits of it," and other rephrasings. So this non-attachment to the results seems to be key – and that does feel right to me – it has the character of how kids play. Kriya, which also translates as action, is such spontaneous, free, playful way of doing things, without worrying about results. But beyond these sorts of slogans and ideas (often attributed to the text Bhagavad Gita), I somehow never found direct practical guidance on how to achieve this ideal of detachment and equanimity where "you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same" (R.Kipling).
5 steps
So let me break down the 5 steps, as they apply to religious ritual, work, yoga, relationships, life, etc. The point here is that problems arise when we skip steps, or mess up some steps because we're not aware of them.
- Open the space: arrive at the temple, or set up your work space, or turn on your computer, roll out your yoga mat, arrive at a friend's house, etc. This step is pretty impossible to skip, but it's possible to miss its role as formative of the rest of the process. If we want to be in meditation, the "temple" we set up for ourselves will impact the quality of our practice. So we can be aware and intentional about making a space that will support whatever it is we're doing: shower and dress nice for the temple or for the yoga, make a clean simple workspace, no distracting objects or open tabs, perhaps bring a cake if you are visiting a friend, etc. It's a bit of a ritual of self-love and respect for the task we are about to do.Seed the task: feel into what you are about to do, why, how, and what you want to get out of it. This part we often skip or unintentionally misdirect into negativity. “If you want sweet mangos, don’t plant bitter neem.” So if you start your task feeling how you don’t want to do it, the entire process will be hard, frustrating, and self-sabotaging. Instead, find an intention that you are excited about: perhaps you can look for a meditative trance in a repetitive boring task, or personal growth in tasks you find challenging, or practicing compassion for difficult relationships, or learning to be with confusion, or celebrating your mastery for tasks you’re good at, etc. In a temple, this is the step where you connect with the sense of awe at the magnificence of the universe or God – and that may be the best way to approach work as well.Grow it: do the task. On the one hand, this is the “main work.” However seeing it as such is precisely the wrong approach. Instead, this is the part where we let go and watch it happen. When we grow a flower, we nurture and support its natural unfolding, we don’t try to pull it up by yanking on it. Like Daoist “effortless effort,” this is where we trust that our setup and intention will do their work, and we merely drop into meditation. As when watching our breath, we will get distracted, and need to keep bringing our attention back to the task over and over, patiently and without judgement. But we don’t effort, and we don’t force the task. We go at the natural pace, we let the task unfold and solve itself using our hands and minds. This is what mastery feels like – but even with new or unfamiliar tasks, we can practice the meta-mastery of dealing with new problems. When in doubt, go meta – and be a master there.
Harvest the fruit: take in what you have accomplished. Paradoxically, this is the most fun step, and one that we most often skip. In a temple, you physically eat the sacred bread and wine, or celebrate with other worshipers over a meal and feel good about yourselves and the ritual you’ve done. When connecting with a friend, you might hug and feel how your relationship has changed with this interaction – whether grew, challenged (expanded), or deepened. After a work block, you can review and celebrate what you have accomplished, be proud of yourself, teach your nervous system to want to do this again. I like to do a power pose to feel this in my body. The important thing here is that even if you didn’t finish any task or have any results, or even if you broke something, it is still crucial to reflect and celebrate. The most important result from our work is how it changes ourselves, what we learn or become aware of – and this result is always available for us to celebrate.
The problem when we skip this step is that we postpone the celebration until we get our final result, which cultivates attachment and “deferred happiness syndrome” or “delayed life syndrome.” Then we keep thinking that “I will finally start living when …” Besides the obvious problems, this also keeps us thinking about the task, preventing us from being fully with whatever we do next. Our awaited result may never come, and even if it does, we might never see it – as with posthumous recognition, or not seeing the impact you had on someone. Either way, such results are not really in our control, and we must learn to harvest that which we have now. This is the key to realizing the teaching of Karma yoga – we don’t care as much about the outcome if we already enjoyed and learned from the process.
Close the space: leave the temple, clean up after yourself, put away your tools, shut down your computer, leave your friend, etc. Another step that we can’t skip, but often try to – because it embodies our fear of death. We think that when something ends, it won’t happen again – we don’t like parties ending, we fear breakups, we stay up late trying to do a bit more work, we try to hold on to ecstatic spiritual experiences… And we’re right: “you can’t step into the same river twice.” But why can’t we trust that the new river will be great too? We don’t avoid exhaling in fear that we won’t inhale again – even if we know that one day that is exactly what will happen. Closure is what creates space for us to fully be with our next adventure. It took me all my willpower to close my 100+ tabs and programs and actually start shutting down my computer after each work session – but now that I do, I work with a simple clean workspace and a fast RAM – both in the computer, and in my own mind. Turns out it’s not hard to come again to the temple – and under 30 seconds to boot up a computer.The magic of this 5-step cycle is that it really applies to every way we interact with the world: we put some of our inner energy out into the world, it somehow transforms and grows, and we reap the benefits, taking some energy back in. This creates a sort of out-in energetic waving that we can learn to feel in everything we do – eventually in every breath. The art of living and most spiritual practice is about learning how to have a good harvest – to reap more energy than we put in. Part of this is selecting the tasks, jobs, relationships, and rituals that work for us personally. But the other part is mastering the tasks, relationships and rituals we have by learning to feel, ride and optimize these out-in waves. Karma Yoga is when we feel energized from doing our work.
Corollaries
- Temple worship, in this view, can be seen primarily as a practice to then apply this 5-step cycle in all other life activities. In the temple, the 5 steps are quite explicitly encoded in the ritual (even if not explicitly spelled out), while also being very pure as an exercise: while working on a task may or may not yield tangible benefit, bathing a rock in milk clearly does absolutely nothing on the physical level. So a ritual practice is centered around a task that cannot physically succeed in any way, so that the extent to which we feel its impact is entirely attributable to how well we master the practice itself.More layers: One way to understand the 5 steps is as (1) opening of physical space, (2) opening of energetic space, (3) "actionless action" in the created container, (4) closing energy, (5) closing physical. This layered structure may thus be refined or redefined if physical and energetic spaces are not detailed enough, or don’t make sense for a given scenario. We can add steps for opening / closing of mental space, spiritual space, emotional space, action space, commercial space, etc. The flexibility and simplicity of such framework makes it plausible that it can explain a wide variety of human rituals. In all cases, this opening / closing frame subtly but systematically alters our sense of self. Then the core piece – just being in the created space – may look very active or quite, but either way, gives an experience of being something other than our normal self. Closing steps are key to return to our “normal” state so we may become aware of and integrate our insights, which only become apparent on contrast. Like when you are dozing off, but only realize you were sleeping once something wakes you up.Agile sprint workflow (planning, stand-up, execution, review, retrospective) sort of fits into this general framework – though the devil here is definitely in the details, and degree of mindfulness this cultivates depends on how the steps are executed. But the potential is there!
Shadow work: Finally, with or without this 5-step process, work will always force us to face parts of ourselves we’d rather not look at. This is the core challenge and opportunity of any work, but especially of mindful work: working with our shadows. In my experience, this is what makes work the most powerful and difficult mindfulness practice I know. Every task I don’t like doing, every frustration or boredom or anxiety, every conflict with my colleagues, every victory and recognition, every failure – all give an incredible array of triggers and opportunities to stop and reflect, try to see what’s behind this, to breathe and let the experience flow without resisting it, to expand the boundaries of what I know is possible for me, to expand the boundaries of what I call “me.” In this way, I see the opportunity for work to be the deepest spiritual practice we do, when held and cultivated in right awareness.
This July 20, 2025 I'm running a "Mindful Research" retreat / residency where we will live and work in community with other scientists sharing the value of awareness, and learn to do research as meditation – see here for details.
[cross-posted from my blog https://www.pchvykov.com/blog]
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