Conducting Business with Equanimity and Empathy

When you do business with someone, you are entering into a relationship with that person. You could see the relationship as adversarial (who will get the best of whom?), but you could just as easily see it as mutual, each of you providing, as fairly and as pleasantly as possible, what the other needs. We could see our customer, our supplier, our shopkeeper, and our banker as friends, people who, like us, want to be happy. To look at commercial life in this way takes sensitivity and mindful awareness. This we can develop by paying attention to our thoughts and responses just as we pay attention to our breath on the meditation cushion.

Paying attention requires that we be honest and realistic about our greed, fear, and confusion. To what extent is our attitude about money connected to our sense of self — our sense of being powerful and important, or weak and unimportant? Clearly, whatever self-esteem, or lack of it, we may have probably exists independently of money. We project these feelings onto money and likely conduct our financial lives in a distorted, or at least unconscious way. Perhaps we are just playing out our childhood conditioning. Having grown up deprived, we may worry that there won’t be enough. Or, having grown up with plenty, we may feel guilty about owning too much. By observing in detail what we do, say, and feel as we deal with money, we can bring these unconscious and dysfunctional feelings to conscious awareness. Eventually we might be able to view money less as a source of worry, pride, or guilt and more as a means of exchange between people, a convenient device for the distribution of the material goods necessary for living, a way for us to share life together.

Norman Fischer
from When You Greet Me I Bow; Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen