What an honor it was for me to join the beautiful Sharon Salzberg in conversation as part of her Living an Authentic Life Summit. Sharon has been a teacher of mine for years, and her gentle, compassionate approach to lovingkindness always brings such a sense of spaciousness and peacefulness when I get to share time with her. What a beautiful opportunity it was to join her to speak together about what contracts us, and how we can move, together, beyond it.
During our time together, we spoke about many things -- and we laughed and smiled as much as you'd guess after seeing the above photo! One of the core pieces of our conversation, though, was shame.
Sharon refers to the feeling of being "contracting" when she talks about what keeps us away from an "authentic life": "And, of course, it's contracting to not be fully seen."
Shame keeps us here: whether it's shame because of something that has happened or something that we fear will happen. In either case, we're trying to avoid pain -- which is actually one of the most normal human reactions. Who wants to feel pain?
Yet... shame can never help us avoid feeling pain, because (as Sharon so poignantly points out) there is pain in not being seen. There is pain in isolating ourselves, and in hiding our lights from the world -- in short, there is pain in not living an authentic life.
Authentic Lives At Work
I'm often asked how I was drawn to the work I do now, with organizations and workplaces, when my heart's work is so clearly deeply rooted in the lovingkindness and compassion work that Sharon invited me to speak on.
First things first: what do you suppose dissipates shame? It's the prosocial behaviors we learn in the PRISM toolkit -- compassion, love, joy, forgiveness -- that is our way in to this dissipation... after which the rest of the PRISM toolkit takes root and does its work, too.
It's no coincidence that the same toolkit that dissipates this deep shame in our core selves is the toolkit that ultimately results in decreased workplace bias incidents. In fact, the PRISM toolkit is transformative wherever a dominant cultural narrative has kept our true selves in the dark.
In fact, the truest answer to "how did you come to apply the PRISM toolkit to organizational DEIB work?" is very simply that no one else was doing it. No one else was exploring how we could use mindfulness practices to make diversity trainings successful when many companies had spent money and time watching them fail over and over. No one else was working to understand how neuroplasticity could be applied to the workplace. Yet in the time we've been doing this work, we've impacted over 300 organizations and 60,000 professionals. Most importantly, many of them have shared with me after the fact: "I didn't know this could work until I found you."
My conversation with Sharon was such a good reminder that we bring our full selves wherever we go -- including, and especially, work! If you're reading this and wondering how we might be able to help you, I hope you'll reach out to us, and choose prosocial behaviors like love and empathy over shame and guilt. #LetsDoIt