I wrote an article for our employee newsletter about my meditation history and our 10-minute meditation group.
Aloha everyone! I’m Robert Harrison (the other one), and it’s been my privilege to facilitate the employee’s 10-minute meditation community meditation sessions since January 2020. We practice various insight and mindfulness techniques twice a week over WebEx at 1 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Everyone is always welcome to join us.
I’m amazed it’s been going on as long as it has because when this all started, it was a one-off sitting held for a department moai event. For those of you who’ve been at my workplace for a while, you may remember moais – small social support groups we learned about through Blue Zones.
The team I was on then planned to hold our monthly department event for my department, where I’ve worked for almost twenty-four years. We decided that having a healthy salad with ingredients from the Rooftop Garden and a short office yoga session would be perfect. I chimed in and said I’d also lead a short, 10-minute meditation sitting. And so, it started.
I was a little nervous about leading meditation, something I’d not done much of then. I’d learned one form of meditation as a child when my dad took it up to help with his migraines. I did practice a little back then, mostly to emulate my dad. And, as I was involved in theatre in high school and college, I did practice a bit to calm my nerves before hitting the stage. In my forties (I’m sixty-five now), a renewed interest in my health led me back to meditation and a much deeper practice. I’ve never been trained, but I’ve been sitting regularly for years, working with and learning from meditation teachers.
The moai meditation went better than I expected. My co-workers asked if we could do it again the following week. I agreed. Yikes! This led to hunting for locations around our building for our sittings. Folks also asked if they could bring people from other departments. Sure.
Then COVID hit hard, and, as many of us remember, we went home. At about the same time, Our enterprise moved from one internal video system to the current WebEx system. The older system didn’t have the bandwidth to allow employee-led events, but WebEx did. Someone asked if, just maybe, I could lead meditation online. Soon, we were up and running.
We added a second weekly session and came to our present form. Weekly, on Tuesday, I send out an email with resources and announcements to the more than fifty community members. We sit online at 1 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, often with a dozen or more attendees. The sessions are recorded, no faces but mine, and posted to our WebEx Team Space for those who can’t attend.
I’m grateful for the support my department and many executives and employees have given to our little community… and, of course, for our community.