Excerpt from Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life

The Green Group Goes Contemplative

The spiritual benefits of contemplative practices have been known for thousands of years. And in recent decades, their profound health benefits have been studied and documented. Another facet of their power, however, is only just starting to be understood and applied in our society: their ability to enrich communication, heal rifts, and unite people on a deep level to pursue a common goal.

This is something the Green Group has come to appreciate. The Group is composed of CEOs of major national environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, National Resources Defense Council, and the Wilderness Society. Most Group members are male, most are rather aggressive, and most are lawyers. And when it comes to building bridges and finding commonality on a deep level, most face the same tendencies and obstacles that plague their colleagues who work in law offices.

Not long ago, Green Group members realized that they faced a conundrum. Evidence showed that churches and synagogues were playing the most significant role in raising the public's environmental awareness, bringing into question the continuing relevance of the organizations that the Green Group represents.

The Group wisely decided to figure out why these religious bodies had enjoyed such efficacy in communicating the vital importance of conservancy to their flocks. In other words, they decided to learn more about the sacred roots of environmental responsibility across faiths. To do this, they approached Paul Gorman at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, who heads the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. Gorman suggested that the Group try coming together in a contemplative way, to spend some time together in silence-and only then talk about their concerns.

Group members had never been particularly close. They met principally because they had goals in common but tended to be turf conscious and competitive, their relationships fraught with internal friction. So when Mirabai Bush of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society-which develops and promotes contemplative practice through courses like the one at Yale Law School (see Chapter 12)-was asked to run a retreat for the Group, she was clear about the challenges she would face. "These are not tree-hugger types," she says. "They are definitely CEO types."

And so the Group convened at a retreat center far from Washington and New York, where nearly all of the members are based. There, they were taught both walking and sitting meditation, and they spent the greater part of each day in silence, speaking only at specified times.

According to Phillip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust, the retreat was an extraordinary success. "The kinds of relationships our market economy tends to create as a substitute for other kinds . . . we don't relate to each other as people, but as institutions and roles. That's how it had been in the Group."

What changed that, says Clapp, who has meditated for years, was the silence. It helped members distance themselves from their institutional identities and remember why they wanted to be heads of environmental groups in the first place-a vision they often lost in the pressure to raise money or to be the group that is most expert on a given issue. In Clapp's view, there is no question that the retreat created an ability to communicate on a human level that had not been there before. "We really realized that the more cooperatively we work together, the better the movement will be," he says. "Of course, you have to do it more than once, and we are committed to continuing it. It's interesting, because they are definitely not a spiritually oriented group."

They are, however, results oriented, and not only did a new sense of cohesion arise as a result of the first retreat, but so did several concrete goals. Together with the Center for Contemplative Practice and the Partnership for the Environment, the Green Group formalized these goals:

• Facilitate greater collaboration among national environmental organizations by providing an opportunity in a contemplative environment for Green Group CEOs to know one another (and themselves) beyond institutional personas and agendas.
  
  
• Draw out and explore religious, spiritual, and moral perspectives generally unspoken within the environmental movement.
  
  
• Provide a foundation of understanding and trust between secular environmental organizations and the American religious community.

After the Group's first retreat, they worked together on the Clean Air Act, which was coming up for reauthorization. They now attribute their success in that effort to having been together in such an open way at the retreat, and to bringing that spirit of openness into discussions about what they see as their common work in the twenty-first century.

For Clapp, it shows that when people have a passionate commitment to a common goal, only their socially constructed roles stand in their way. "When they start relating to each other on the basis that they share a complete and total commitment with each other, when they realize they have a prime directive, there's no limit to what they can accomplish."