Three Organizational Orientations

            Going to facilitate the group meditation tonight, I felt very tired. Maybe due to the weather or for a variety of different reasons, I could not muster much confidence or boldness in my steps, and felt as though I were just going to the motions of attending the center every week. For some reason, I almost fell asleep in the first session, and I then felt a sense of shame. At times, I wonder if the reason I am not attending to my practice is that I am seeing the facilitation of the meditation practice itself as a role more than as a passion. I also noticed that because of this tendency to retreat into a habitual role when I am not feeling engage or am tired, I don’t develop sufficient initiative to do something extra such as play the Dharma video at the end for the group or share about the passage from a sutra. In any case after feeling the regret and shame, I quickly recovered my sense of responsibility to the group but also wondered what I could do to better serve the group in the future.

                The above vignette is a segue for me to describe three distinct orientations that a person can take toward organizations. The first relates to the idea that I am a passive body to be acted upon by the organization—an orientation that is similar to Miller’s “transmission” model of learning (Miller, 2018, p.119), where learners are “passive bodies” to be given instructions from a lecture or an authoritative source. This orientation corresponds to a narrative more or less looking at causes or motivations for doing things, as though we are more or less billiard balls which interact with physical forces such as the weather or “a variety of different reasons” as noted in the first part of the vignette above. It’s safe to say that learners or participants in the organization under this mentality 

The second orientation is what I call “role based” or “role playing”, wherein the person attending an organization becomes a more active shaper in their identity, by tending to and reflecting upon particular behaviors they engage in which relate to the organization’s structure or the lives of others. I believe this corresponds to Miller’s “transaction” approach (ibid) where learning takes place through acquisition of new skills but also through improvisation of such skills in interaction with others. Transactional learning tends to take place in groups, and may involve active application of learning to solve problems or become sophisticated in one’s roles. This orientation shapes people in organizations to be active stakeholders and givers who see their identity implicated in the organization’s growth. Rather than relating to the organization passively, such participants see themselves as shaping the organization’s processes through a confident grounding in their relationships to others and to the organization itself. I also see this as confidence in one’s identity as unfolding interconnection with others. Here, I try to leverage my social identity and recognition as a volunteer to get me through the difficulty of engagement.

The third orientation is what I call soulful/spiritual orientation (something I am borrowing from Miller’s work) and that is to consider the process of being in an organization as not limited to the boundaries and played roles of the organization itself. More so, soulful orientations acknowledge or awaken to the ways in which our commitments to specific organizations and relationships are designed to point to lessons that the soul needs to learn along life’s journey. These “life lessons” are more about the heart and how the heart relates directly to itself and its felt world. Sometimes called “contemplative”, soulful orientations are often not about skill learning or acquiring certain kinds of identities, but are more about being able to connect to this present moment in all its fullness. Thus, this orientation operates from the abundance of being rather than the deficit of objects. Naturally, this corresponds to a transformational model (ibid) which focuses on learning to reflect one’s most heartfelt place in the universe through the relationships in which one engages. This comes back to my learning moment when I recognized that my heart wasn’t connecting to the meditation group, and I could do something to adjust myself to be more engaged instead of making myself into a passive recipient or role-player.

            Knowing that these three orientations are always present in one’s choices can help a person navigate and balance between them as well as stay engaged in an organization by knowing there can be dry periods or times when we go off kilter. I consider these to be road maps because they prevent a person from over-reliance on organizational supports when the organization is really a vehicle for a spiritual understanding and journey. At the same time, having three orientations acknowledges that we do have dependencies in organizations, and this is one aspect of being part of the world that we all have to navigate.

Miller, John P. (2018) Love and Compassion: Exploring their Role in Education. Toronto: University of Toronto Press