Working Under High Voltage

Series: Work and Dzogchen

Working Under High Voltage

Tasks pile up, demands keep increasing, responsibilities grow heavier, and professional relationships deteriorate, sometimes to the point of conflict… All of these situations test our ability to adapt and draw on our resources.

Tension gradually builds up, insidiously affecting the way we work and interact with others. When faced with these difficulties, our instinctive responses often involve fighting the tension, avoiding what triggers it, or trying to regain control immediately.

As demands continue to mount and room to maneuver shrinks, and tension has nowhere to subside, imbalances can gradually set in. Anxiety, loss of self-confidence, irritability, difficulty concentrating, sleep disturbances…

Whether experienced personally or shared by others, suffering in the workplace is becoming an increasingly prominent theme in our society’s narratives. Yet the mental processes involved are nothing new.

“Ultimately, we realize that the key is not to transform the experience, but to recognize what within us remains free from all movement”

From the Dzogchen perspective, suffering takes root in ignorance of our true nature, in the illusion of a self and a phenomenal reality that exist independently, which we perpetuate day after day. No matter what illusion we trap ourselves in, whether at work or elsewhere, we always find at its root this same process of grasping, identification, and projection. We are caught up in our perceptions, thoughts, and emotions, with which we identify to the point of regarding them as solid and enduring realities.

The key, then, is to understand how, beyond the events themselves, the way we perceive them contributes to perpetuating this suffering. In highly stressful situations at work, our experience tends to become inwardly focused. The more our attention is concentrated on the manifestations of stress, the harder it becomes to identify its origins and various components. Recurring thoughts, physical sensations, and emotions become intertwined until we lose our ability to step back and discern what is happening within us. Anxiety intensifies, our sense of space shrinks, and it becomes increasingly difficult to break free from this vicious cycle.

Becoming aware of these mechanisms can already break the cycle. It allows us to begin questioning this reality that we perceive as fixed and permanent. With practice, we learn to let whatever arises in the mind settle and to stop being constantly swept away by the flow. 

The goal is not to suppress thoughts, emotions, or sensations, but rather to distinguish them clearly enough so that we no longer experience them as an inseparable whole. Then, they can be observed as they are : arising and disappearing, without any real connection between them.

As Mila Khyentse Rinpoche suggests in a podcast on stress and anxiety, a simple practice can begin by focusing on bodily sensations, which are often easier to identify. After separating the sensation from discursive thoughts, the goal is to remain present with it, rather than trying to escape or fight it. We then observe that the sensation dissipates naturally, giving way to more space and a sense of calm… until it is interrupted by a new one, and so on. Gradually, a space of clarity emerges, and we simply realize that, like thoughts and emotions, sensations have no inherent existence.

Ultimately, we realize that the key is not to transform the experience, but to recognize what within us remains free from all movement. We can then be “KO on the outside (shaken by outer conditions) but OK on the inside (this inner self being the spontaneous recognition of our nature)”, as Damien illustrates so well.

However, taking this alternative path in the face of adverse conditions does not mean cultivating a state of passive calm. For most of us, it involves a long process of training that leads to the recognition of our fundamental nature, the stabilization of that recognition, and its integration into our daily lives. This path thus requires not only the ability to “remain in the natural state,” but also to “sustaining its freshness” – two inseparable dimensions, as Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche emphasizes. [1]