Hello, this is R-Hack team.
Do you know the word “mindfulness” which is a hot topic among business people these days?
Let us tell you about the “mindfulness meditation gathering” held at Rakuten Crimson House this time!
Why mindfulness for business people?
Let us re-cap what “mindfulness” means – it is to intentionally direct your consciousness to the very moment you are at now.
In our daily lives, we have so many things in our mind and are continuously thinking about things in the past or in future.
Don’t you have thoughts like “I did not do well at today’s presentation…”, “Uhh, feeling down about the meeting with my boss next week…” etc etc., in your mind?
Mindfulness is to get rid of such thoughts (mistakes in the past or fears about the future) from your mind, make it empty, then concentrate on the emotion or body condition of yourself as of now.
Meditation is a way of leading yourself to be in a state of “mindfulness”. You may have heard about the meditation which is quite common in the programs of Zen Buddhism or Yoga.
It is believed that conducting the meditation and making your mind in the state of mindfulness brings relaxation to you. As a result, it is thought to have great effects such as storing less stress on you or increasing the level of your concentration and improving your performance at work; hence a number of renowned companies include meditation into their training programs for their employees – so it is one of the hot topics in the business field.
At Rakuten we do have the “Mindfulness Network” for which anyone is welcomed to join. Their purpose is to improve the “Well-being” of Rakuten employees and they are having various activities including workshops, meditation events or lectures by guest speakers, etc.
The network is open to everyone and indeed they have 1,000 members signed up! The network is holding meditation gathering on a weekly basis and R-Hack team gave a try with one of them!
Eliminate all distractions & Refresh the body and mind!
The venue for the meditation is a large meeting room where the lights are off and kept quiet. The event is scheduled to be an hour but people can come and leave any time during that period, making it easy for anyone including beginners to join.
Now let’s take a seat and start meditation.
I tried to concentrate on “now”, “here”… but it is incredibly hard to do!
In less than 5 seconds I had so many stuff popping up in my mind or got caring about the people around me, … could not concentrate at all!
The most important thing is to pay attention to the breath, people said. Yes it does work; I could become silent inside and feeling quiet after a while with gentle breathing.
I could realize that a real, deep relaxation was there which is different from a usual break, by shutting down the daily noises even just for a few minutes because our brain continuously works busy during the time at work.
Got comments from participants of the mindfulness event about what are good about this event:
“In a few weeks I could recognize the higher level of concentration within myself while working.”
“I had joined this event when I was feeling exhausted from work every day; but I think I am feeling easier after doing this for 2 months.”
“Communication with my colleagues have got better now!”
We have some engineers in Commerce Tech who have been participating in this mindfulness meditation event on a regular basis; and they have positive comments like this:
“We can reset all different tasks in our brain and feel like as if we are releasing the brain. After the meditation, we can see our efficiency at work has got much improved”.
Looks like it is an important moment for business people who are always chased by multi-tasks, to clear their brain and mind in a quiet place.
At Rakuten we have many other activities to empower the health of employees’ body and mind.
Please check our future articles about those topics in R-Hack.
