Finance Monthly January 2020 Edition

I was forty-five years old when I travelled to India for the first time. The trip was to Ladakh, which translates to “land of high passes”, the Himalayan and Kundun mountain ranges in that region being ideal for mountaineering. And although I am an ice climber, I wasn’t there to climb. I was there to meditate. I travelled to see the Dalia Lama with a good friend of his, and a teacher of mine, Dr Robert Thurman. Dr Thurman, named as one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans, has taught me a great deal about meditation, but on that journey to Ladakh, the course of my meditation practice was impacted most profoundly by his wife Nena, a baroness formerly known as Birgitte Caroline von Schlebrügge. Nena’s advice was this: when you can’t move your body, “move your mind”. Like many advanced meditators, Nena had achieved a degree of stability in her meditation that allowed her mind to move into expanded states of awareness. Up until that point, as a student of epistemology, I assumed those deep meditative states were reserved for monastics and yogis, people who devoted tens of thousands of hours to formal sitting meditation practice. But Nena was no monastic – she had been a supermodel, was the Executive Director of Menla, and perhaps most impressively, had raised four children. Her example proved that it was, in fact, possible for those of us with careers and families to hack our meditation. Rewind twenty years, pre-hack, my meditation practice started out quite badly, in that I didn’t. I avoided practice at all cost. I didn’t see value in sitting and doing nothing. Consultants like me are paid by the hour for thinking. To sit and specifically not think seemed to me to be valueless. I just didn’t get it. I made excuses. Somewhere along the way, I had derived a formula that looked like this: mind = good = busy. This logic is rational, from the standpoint of the individual. I survived into my twenties being busy. And I was fairly happy, so what was there to change? As it turns out, there was actually nothing to change. Change happens all on its own. You can fight it and experience discontentment, or When you can’t move your body, “move your mind”. “ “ 46 www.finance-monthly.com FINANCE CAREERS - MEDITATION