Practicing Dharma at the Workplace
Let's
return to your daily practice. After your morning meditation, have
breakfast and set off for work. How are you going to practice Dharma
at work? First, try to remember the kind heart and the motivation you
cultivated in the morning. Throughout the day, continually remind
yourself that you don't want to harm anybody, that you want to be of
service to them, and that you seek to do all actions for the ultimate
enlightenment of yourself and others. To remind yourself of this, you
can use a frequent event as a trigger to call you back to your
motivation. For example, every time you stop at a red light, instead
of being irritated and thinking, "Why is this red light so long?
I'm late for work!" think, "Today, I want to have a kind
heart towards others." Thus the red light becomes an opportunity
to remember the kind heart. When the telephone rings, instead of
rushing to pick it up, first think, "May I be of service to
whomever is on the line." Then answer the phone. Every time your
pager goes off, calmly come back to the kind heart, then respond to
the call. A friend told me that her trigger to come back to the kind
heart was her children calling, "Mommy! Mommy!" Since this
happened frequently throughout the day, she became familiar with the
kind heart and also was much more patient with her children.Throughout
the day, try to be aware of what you are thinking, feeling, saying,
and doing, instead of living on "automatic." When we live
on automatic, we go through life reacting to things but never really
experiencing what life is about. This is why we feel out of touch
with ourselves, like strangers to ourselves. For example, you get in
the car and drive to work. When you got to work, if somebody asked
you, "What did you think about during the half hour you were
driving?" you probably wouldn't know. We are unaware of what is
going on inside us. Yet a lot is going on and this influences how we
feel about ourselves and how we relate to other people.
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