From Chapter Four: THE Contemplative Practice

Man's activity consists in either a making or a doing. Both of these aspects of the active life depend for their correction on the contemplative life.

- A.K. Coomeraswamy

A Practice That Quiets the Mind

Getting off the mental treadmill on a regular basis is essential. It's a basic human need that keeps you sane and contributes to your overall health and sense of well-being. But it is how you quiet your mind, and with what quality of awareness you do it, that really determines its benefits. The number of misguided ways you can try to tamp down the turmoil is probably endless. You can steamroll through your days, lost in thought, reacting reflexively to the stimuli you encounter, and then simply rely on sleep to quiet the inner buzz. You may get a lot of work done that way, but you won't learn much about yourself, and you'll certainly miss most of what is beautiful and nourishing within and around you.

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The literature on meditation is full of stories about people whose practices drastically boosted their personal energy and actually reduced their need for sleep. It may have something to do with what author and meditation teacher Jack Kornfield refers to as "stopping the war within." Because meditation promotes nonjudgmental observation of one's own body and mind, it gradually makes you aware of the disruptive and divisive role judgment can play in all aspects of your life (separating "me" from "others" or even from "myself," for example). This growing awareness can foster a mental orientation in which the things lawyers tend to automatically view as separate and even contentious--us/them, lawyer/client, client/community-are more easily seen as harmonious parts of a single whole. . . . In helping you to recognize the common ground you share with other people, contemplative practices enable you to go beyond such divisions and release the energies required to sustain them.

Corporate Law and Yoga

For an hour and a half on Thursday nights, Justin Morreale creates his own sacred space at [Boston's] Bingham Dana LLP. Morreale has practiced law for two more years than he's practiced yoga--thirty years in the law; twenty--eight at yoga. He is convinced he would never have survived, much less thrived in, the world of high-powered corporate law without his yoga practice.

Today he wears four professional hats. He runs Bingham Dana's 100-lawyer corporate department, sits on the firm's management committee, serves as cochair of Bingham's business development group, and has his own practice, in which he represents such clients as the Boston Red Sox and a variety of emerging companies, mostly in the biomedical and high-tech fields. He is also married and has seven children.

"I have a lot of streams and tributaries coming into me, even if I'm not involved in doing all the deals," he says. "Every day, I get dozens of E-mails and voice mails, people are constantly coming into my office, and I've got lots of board meetings and conferences with clients to attend to.

"What yoga does for me is that it allows me to process the stress in a certain way, a way that makes it all work for me," he says. "Most people in my situation would be wired all the time. I'm not." . . .

Morreale is constantly amazed at how consistently yoga helps people, even in very immediate ways, to overcome stress. Although he doesn't really know how it works on the physiological, chemical, or spiritual levels, he says it works for almost everyone. As evidence, he tells how learning yogic breathing changed the life of one lawyer who works at very high stress levels, running around town from client to client, crisis to crisis. As a result of taking Morreale's class, he now routinely pulls off the road in the afternoon to do a couple minutes of yogic breathing. "He says it changes his day and has changed his life in ways that go beyond his work," Morreale explains. . . .

For Morreale, the question of whether or not to practice yoga or some other contemplative practice is, to use the vernacular, a no-brainer. "It enhances everything in life," he says, "relationships, work, and any wisdom tradition that is already there for you. You start to see more clearly, you become more open, and you understand and appreciate more. A teacher of mine used to say that everything comes through the same door. If you're not open, you don't get the pain, but you also don't get the love, the beauty, the joy. A real key to lawyering is making sure that other lawyers and clients have an easy time relating to you. It's what rainmaking is all about too. If people feel you're open and you can hear them--if they sense you have some inner depth--they tend to be drawn to you and trust you more."

Botschaftssuiten Vilamoura(Chapter 4 Includes contemplative practice exercises)