
Building mindfulness into the Asana culture - marcog1
https://medium.com/@moskov/mindful-sana-e5932912d1df
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rphouser
The term “co-creator” (at the end of the article) jumped out to me as an ideal
way to treat all employees of a company. If everyone’s ideas about company
processes are valued and integrated, that creates an atmosphere of respect and
allows everyone to invest in the success of the processes. Sounds like a great
work environment.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Does that mean everyone gets stock?

Ah. Thought not.

I have no issue with meditation or mindfulness.

I have huge issues with trying to combine them with for-profit strive-and-
drive hit-the-goals success culture. To me, that's a contradictory and frankly
crazy-making combination.

The last time I saw something similar was when Lululemon tried to make yoga-
culture and positivity obligatory. That was not so successful at making
employees treat each other well:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stewart-j-lawrence/when-
yogis-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stewart-j-lawrence/when-yogis-kill-
the-grisl_b_1077457.html)

I don't doubt Asana is a cool place to work. But I don't think it's necessary
to use jargon from other cultures and spiritual traditions to make people
happy and get stuff done.

I find the approach culty and creepy, and unless rewards are being distributed
with the workload, I also question whether it's fully informed at best - or
entirely sincere, at worst.

~~~
rphouser
Not sure how mindfulness and “strive-and-drive” are
incompatible/contradictory. Isn't one of the goals of mindfulness to take time
to ensure everything is working as efficiently as possible? And I feel
rewarded when I impact work processes, when I’m able to share my ideas and see
them discussed and implemented. Monetary reward is not the only motivator or
measure of fulfillment for people. (And I don't even work at Asana)

Also the lululemon piece seemed to be about the company creating a marketing
campaign with whatever made-up version of yoga most improved sales, which
seems far from the internal practices that are discussed in this article.

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tedchs
For those interested in mindfulness, I recommend the book Search Inside
Yourself. It's based on the course at Google by the same name, as mentioned in
the article. It's an easy read and I found it actionable in everyday life.

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illuminated
Really great read. Agree with almost everything written. The only part I'd
find hard to implement would be the pre-meeting meditation... I've tried once
to have a colleague, a certified Yoga instructor, to have short Yoga sessions
in the morning with everyone, but it quickly became a joke, not a real thing.

~~~
marcog1
That specific point was about Google. At Asana, we offer 1:1 and group Yoga
sessions, and some people get together to meditate. A lot of people take it
quite seriously, but it's in no way pushed on anyone.

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davesque
All the techniques in this article could have been discussed just as
effectively without introducing an ambiguous and frankly suspicious term such
as "mindfulness". Being open and honest about conflicts, facing uncomfortable
facts, and allowing people to have a say in things could all be described
simply as "good business" or "common sense". Relying on a buzzword such as
"mindfulness" betrays a religious agenda.

~~~
timr
How is "mindfulness" a religious term? When you're "mindful" of something,
you're conscious or aware of it. It's in the dictionary. Seems like the
perfect word for describing a process of greater awareness...and if that word
also happens to be used in Buddhism and Yoga to _mean the same thing_ , well,
that's hardly a coincidence, is it?

It's not as if they're talking about practicing Ganesh worship.

~~~
afafsd
The word as used in the dictionary isn't religious, but 99% of the people are
using with connotations of a sort of religious-mystical-woo.

(I refer just to the noun-form "mindfullness" and not all forms of the word,
e.g. "to be mindful of [some specific thing]".)

Reading the article made "Asana" sound less like a business and more like a
slightly creepy cult. Which, hey, if that helps them make money then more
power to them, but they should be very careful that this kind of thing
(meditating before meetings?) doesn't start turning into discriminatory hiring
practices.

~~~
vidarh
99% might have connotations like that to it, but that doesn't prevent large
healthcare groups etc. from using it. E.g. Kaiser Permanente offers courses in
"Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction", and so there is plenty of non-religious
training material available for mindfulness meditation.

Even some of the best introductory resources on mindfulness meditation from
Buddhist sources are refreshingly free of "religious-mystical-woo", or careful
to separate the woo from the practice. E.g. my of my two favourite
introductory resources, one (Gil Fronsdal's podcasts "Introduction to
Meditation") specifically jokes about "the 'B'-word" and mentions buddhism
just barely for context, and the book Mindfulness in Plain English mentions
Buddhist traditions only for historical context.

As an uncompromising atheist and skeptic, this is the reason I ended up with
mindfulness meditation over alternatives.

~~~
Dewie
The concept of a/theism might be orthogonal or irrelevant, depending on the
viewpoint, to Buddhism.

By the way "uncompromising atheist and sceptic" sounds like a contradiction,
at least in the sense of _scepticism_ as the discipline of always questioning
things (in general, not specifically when it comes to things like Buddhism,
which I won't give an opinion about whether it is worth to investigate or
not). But I guess it isn't really a contradiction if it is _scepticism_ as in
_close mindedness_. But it's good that you've found some material that caters
to your specific sensibilities and cultural background.

------
jinushaun
This probably explains why Asana has such a complex and convoluted (read:
horrible) user experience. It sounds like it breeds a culture that is too
afraid to upset other people, so bad ideas never get shot down.

I can't believe that a company that dog foods its own product to develop the
product isn't easier to use. I know everyone has different styles of working
and organizing data, but for me, Asana is so bad...

