Pleasure & Pain: Worldly Winds at Work

Pleasure and pain are an integral part of life. Our economy is flush with offers of presumably pleasurable products and experiences. Consumers buy myriad medications and illegal drugs in an attempt to avoid pain.

Less clear is perhaps what role pleasure and pain play in our work lives. Let’s set aside time together on April 18 to consider:

• Where at work have I experienced pleasure and pain at work lately? How did they impact the resulting work?
• Do I ever use pleasure and pain as a carrot and stick to influence my customers, colleagues, employees, or clients?
• Where do I see the mechanics of pleasure and pain working in my own personal consumption patterns?

With contemplation questions like these we’d like to explore this topic together with you — exploring pleasure and pain in our business and economic lives. In this 75-minute session, we will meditate together, hear a short impulse talk, self-reflect and share in break-out groups.

Pleasure & Pain: Worldly Winds at Work
Thursday 18 April 2024
17:15 - 18:30 CET (Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Zurich)*
Join us online in this Zoom room
Event language: English

LOGISTICS 

Please RSVP to info@network-mindful-business.org to assist our planning. If it’s your first time joining one of our events, please share a couple sentences about your practice and how you came upon the Network for Mindful Business.

This event is offered for free. If you’d like others to benefit from continued activities of the Network for Mindful Business, donations are tax-deductible in Germany. If you’re outside Germany, you can pay it forward in some other way. 

Mindful of occasional technical glitches, please dial in 5 minutes early. A waiting room is set up, so you can also dial in even earlier. ;-)

We’ll send you a calendar invitation if you like — simply ask if we don’t send it automatically.

*We welcome attendees from all over the world, and are happy to have had people join from Bangkok and Boulder, New York and Amsterdam, Pennsylvania and Prague. Generally 17:15 CET maps to 8:15 in the morning Pacific Time (San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver) or 11:15 Eastern (New York, Toronto). It’s 23:15 at night in Bangkok or 22:45 in Mumbai for the first 3 events, but then an hour earlier for the last. Triple check the specific day you will attend to account for daylight savings time. The event description on our LinkedIn page should accurately reflect your own local time.

ABOUT THE SERIES

This online impulse is part of a series on the 8 worldly winds. Described in the Lokavipatti Sutta, these are 4 pairs of unhelpful human concerns that can throw us off balance, especially at work: gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain.

The 8 worldly winds are transient, so attachment to them invariably causes suffering. Yet they are extremely tantalizing — humans easily get caught up in these states of mind. Widespread worldviews worship gain, fame, praise and pleasure as primary goals of our lives. 

Besides stirring up dissatisfaction, the winds cultivate various unwholesome seeds in us. Praise overly inflates our ego; blame destructively deflates it. Pleasure can weaken empathy and resolve; pain may feed despair. Fame and disgrace can both be barriers in our relationships with others.

Equanimity in the midst of the worldly winds can help us achieve inner peace and liberation. The 8 worldly conditions describe our subjective reality but do not define our true nature. When we investigate our feelings — seeing that they are subject to constant change just like the whims of the weather — we can sense the unsatisfactory nature of both the positive and negative tones they take on.

Which winds catch you up at work? Have you seen both faces of these forces at different points in your career? Has your economic thinking challenged conventional thinking about desirable conditions? Has your spending and consumption been blown by the winds in some way?

In this series of 4 online impulses we dive into each pair and contemplate how they unbalance us — and how we’ve learned to mitigate their effects. 

Each impulse is unique; you can join this one without having attended the previous events.

ABOUT THE FORMAT

Online impulses from the Network for Mindful Business are a 75-minute format to meditate together, share shortly on the topic, allow for self-reflection and exchange in break-out groups. They generally take place from 17:15 - 18:30 CET (Central European Time a.k.a. Paris, Berlin, Rome), which makes for a nice close to the workday in Europe, a morning practice in the Americas and an evening close in Asia.

They grew out of local in-person events focused around various topics or koans and coalesced into an online format in 2020 as we moved toward more international activities.

The impulses are hosted alternatively by different core members of the Network for Mindful Business.