Meditation, and "Spare us the Hippie Bullshit" --Mindfulness in and for the Workplace

I have just been reading a great Google article about the fad for "Mindfulness " ( Arianna Huffington is on a real kick about this, too) and the benefits to be obtained through Meditation...but basically as a means of increasing productivity and leading to "success."

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/06/meditation-mindfulness-silicon-valley/

Not that there is anything wrong with that. Some of my favorite meditation CD's are from Dr. David Illig, who calls his overall venture "Success World"--

I am not surprised this is all the rage of Silicon Valley...but it is not fun and games, as noted, or " that old hippie bullshit." 

Just like people do not play ping-pong at Google and other stress reduction--mind-relaxing and re-focusing activities--for "unproductive fun." This is all playfulness with a purpose.

I know the "purposeful" part of this would have definitely pleased all American models of success and hard work ( such as Thomas Edison)...

It certainly would have seemed very fitting for some of my forebears who were work-minded Prussians..( though in real life they often got carried away with unproductive fun, that's for sure).

But we have also long had a tradition that reminds us that striving and succeeding are not the only things in Life ( " take time to smell the roses")...( "Art for Art's sake")

Oh, yes,  Art for Art's Sake...that keeps reminding me of the famous designer Milton Glaser, whose offices in a beautiful old Beaux Arts building here next to the Murray Hill School have the words " Art is Work" painted on the glass above the doorway--

We get it..." Ye shall live by the sweat of thy brow," and all that jazz...

Well, I am glad that we all have been reminded that Art is Work and not simply the hippie fun and games we usually associate with Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Rodin and, of course, the somewhat "louche" ( as the French say) Andy Warhol...

I cannot help being somewhat teasy about all this..

As I remember anyway, a lot of the so-called "Hippie" stuff came from what was even then called "The Human Potential" movement...which also called our attention to psychotherapy too as a way of artists being able to lose neurotic blocks and free their artistic energies ( a philosophy very well expressed by the English psychiatrist Anthony Storr, who was on a campaign back then to reassure artists that psychotherapy would not somehow destroy their creative wellsprings-- because so many people associate art with neurosis anyway, thanks to a certain interpretation of Freud-- so that many artists were afraid that getting psychiatric help for instance, would make them "lose their talent."

Just the opposite, Storr and others argued, it would mean the freeing up of creative energy...

Well, it IS hard to imagine some artists as anything else than people on the edge of a nervous breakdown...(Ingemar Bergman comes to mind...and his worshipful would-be acolyte Woody Allen, who at one point said enough with fun and games, he wanted to make "serious" films--as he would often even tell his psychiatrist in his movies ( has there ever been an artist who does not trumpet his involvement with psychiatrists as much as Woody Allen? Wow, just think of "Zelig.")

Well, that's about as far as I want to go with this at the moment...hope you enjoy meditation and maybe even yoga (which are so closely associated with each other) whether or not it advances your career to the extent you were counting on it to do.

Namaste.