Five leadership secrets of the Trappist monk

In the 07/20/2010 issue of the “Washington Post.”

Over the last thirty years I have had the good fortune to have visited and stayed in various monastic communities in Australia, the USA, the UK, Thailand, Nepal, India and Tibet. My monastic friends have come from such communities as: New Norcia’s Benedictine Monastery in Western Australia, St Benedict’s Monastery at Arcadia near Sydney, The Trappist (Cistercian) communities at Snowmass, Colorado and at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky, Camaldolese hermitages in Arezzo, Italy, at Big Sur, California and at the late Bede Griffiths’ ashram at Shantivanam, near Trichy in South India. I am an honorary member of ancient Dhe-Tsang Buddhist monastery in the remote Gyalrong Region of Eastern Tibet, and have completed a month-long meditation retreat at Kopan Buddhist monastery in the mountains around Kathmandu, Nepal. As a young man I sat in vipassana meditation at Suan Mokkh Forest Monastery at Surat Thani in Thailand, and at Bodhinyana Forest Monastery in the hills around Perth. I often have stayed with the yogi-monks at the Divine Life ashram in Rishikesh on the River Ganges. During the years I gave lectures on the Western Contemplative tradition in Dharamsala, in the Himalayas I was guest of the Tibetan communities at the Nechung and Namgyal Monasteries, and at Geden Choeling Nunnery.

I have learned a number of lessons from the monks and nuns who live this way – according to the Rules as set by their various founders. Though living a far less ‘active’ life than me, I can say that the values and practices that inspire, underpin and motivate their lives have informed much of what I do and how I do it – and above all how I imagine the type of leadership I offer – to myself and others. Stephen Martin, who wrote the following article in the Washington Post, succinctly enumerates and describes five ‘secrets’ that point to their success as members of communities that have thrived, somewhere in the world, continuously for many centuries.

Stephen Martin, who explores leadership as a speechwriter and as a business columnist for the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, has written for America, Commonweal and U.S. News & World Report.

Trappist monks live apart from the world. But their rich and ancient traditions also offer vital lessons on leadership for those of us living in it. The Roman Catholic order, founded in Citeaux, France, has practiced prayer nonstop for nearly a thousand years. Responsible for supporting themselves, they have been entrepreneurs for just as long.

As times and market conditions have changed, Trappists have kept up by reinventing their businesses continually. Since the founding of Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, S.C., in 1949, for example, the monks there have sold cinnamon buns, ventured into logging, run a large egg farm and, most recently, started selling native plants. How have Trappists thrived through the centuries? Here are five of their secrets:

1.Get (really) disciplined. As in waking up at 3 a.m. every day for the rest of your life. That’s when Trappists rise for Vigils, their first community prayer of the day. They will gather for worship five more times before turning in at 8 p.m. In between, they work, study and pray some more. Their schedule almost never varies. Their meals rarely change. They talk as little as possible. Everything about their lives is ordered toward their mission of praising God.

On the surface, this routine seems like a soul-killing exercise in boredom. But tremendous focus paves their path to salvation. “The monk has a feel for the stark and the spare,” writes Michael Downey in his book, Trappist. “Fasting, abstinence, and keeping vigil are disciplines embraced so as to stay alert, awake for the coming of God.”

2.Throw away the key . At Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va., where I recently made a weekend retreat, the doors to the guest rooms lock only from the inside. When you go out, there’s no way to secure your laptop or Blackberry or car keys. It’s a rather discomfiting reminder of what makes the Trappist world go round: trust, in God and your brothers. Spiritual growth doesn’t happen when we’re holding back or playing defense. It takes openness.

“Anytime you get put together with 15 or 20 people you don’t know, you’ll find things about them that are objectionable, and they’ll find them about you,” said Daniel DeVoe, the guest master at Holy Cross Abbey who is seriously thinking of becoming a Trappist himself. The trick is learning to appreciate the strengths of others, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to acknowledge your own shortcomings and work to fix them. It’s all about building trust, the ancient glue that, against all odds, holds together monastic organizations to this day.

3.Know your customer. During a retreat several years ago at Mepkin Abbey, I found myself alone in the gift shop with Brother Stephen, an elderly, startlingly fit, lifelong monk. He rang up a few items, swiped my credit card and asked how I was doing. I asked customers the same thing all the time when I clerked at a grocery store in high school. Unlike me, however, he actually cared about the answer.

I confessed, frankly, to being tired with a busy job, grad school, a young son and another child on the way. There wasn’t a lot of time for prayer, which was what I probably needed most. He nodded and remarked that perhaps helping raise my family was a form of prayer in itself. We talked for another 10 minutes. More insights, tailored just for me, followed — and I shouldn’t have been surprised.

As Michael Downey explains, the work of monks “is not to be understood primarily as a product for consumers in a marketplace. …The fruits of the monk’s labor are sold as a means of livelihood, but they are sold to persons, real people with deep needs, not bottom-line consumers.”

4.Shut up. A monk’s life is a study in humility. It’s about setting aside personal plans and ambitions for the good of the community, saying goodbye to worldly pleasures and doing highly repetitive work with few tangible rewards. It’s a daily exercise in probing your flaws and coming to terms with your own insignificance. This adds up to a perpetual assault on pride, and it starts with quieting down and listening to what your brothers have to say.

“We’re all so impressed by what we know,” said DeVoe, the Holy Cross guest master. But rather than overestimating our own abilities, he said, real knowledge comes from paying attention to those around us. Monks have a longstanding tradition of turning to spiritual directors for guidance in the contemplative life. The feedback they get gives them a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses and serves as a spark for change. “You learn things about yourself that you wouldn’t know otherwise,” DeVoe said.

5.Live in the margins. In his book Leaders Make the Future, futurist Bob Johansen notes that “true innovations are likely to come from the margins that are stretched, rather than from the mainstream.”

Trappists make their home in the margins. They labor in obscurity, their chosen path makes little sense to most people, and they’re criticized, sometimes even by fellow Christians, for closeting themselves away when they could be out in the world helping people with urgent problems. They have Web sites and use e-mail judiciously, but they take care not to swamp themselves with information and distraction. They remain, in other words, as counter-cultural as ever, and therein is their strength.

Over the centuries, as Downey writes, monasteries around the world (and not just Trappist ones) have served as “renowned centers of peace and refuge, the focal points of culture and education.” That’s surely because they have stood beside the mainstream and observed it carefully but never immersed themselves in it. Their perspective is always a bit out of step with the times and refreshingly original as a result.

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men,” Thomas Merton, America’s most renowned Trappist monk, wrote in his landmark autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.

More than 60 years since its publication, and centuries since their founding, Trappists still go their own way, focused and unhurried, free of the need for the world’s approval. By training, they’re too modest to say their experience with leadership can teach us anything, but we’d be wise to learn all we can from them anyway.

If you wish to have more information about Meath Conlan’s spiritual tours to India and beyond, please view my TOURS page here, or email Meath at: meath@diversejourneys.com

Geshe Yeshe Tobden: Tibetan Mystic

In the Indian Autumn of 1988, I was ‘on assignment’ delivering a series of lectures on the history and development of Western Contemplation. These were to Tibetan monastics among the Dhaulagiri Ranges of the Great Himalaya. While there I came to hear of an extraordinary hermit-lama who lived right on the snow-line above Dharamsala and McLeod Gange. This is not far from where His Holiness the exiled XIVth Dalai Lama now lives. One day, with Canadian Tibetologist Dr Gareth Sparham, I clambered up the twisting, rocky goat-tracks, until, away in the distance, I could barely discern the little hand-made dry-walled stone hermitage-huts dotted across the mountain range. These were all that Geshe Yeshe Tobden and his disciples had to protect them from Himalayan Tigers, the snow and cold wind. The daylight wouldn’t last forever, so the two of us headed straight for them.

On arrival, the reason for my hike up the mountain, Geshe Yeshe Tobden met us with great friendliness and hospitality. He sat me down on the guest-chair – a solid rock within his enclosure. Here he oven-roasted me flat bread in his bee-hive oven-fire, and, smearing it with butter and conserve that I’d brought with me in my back-pak, he served us tea with some of the powdered milk I’d brought. This kindly old man with his warm and sage eyes told me of his years as a professor in Tibetan Studies, as well as his decision to abandon all ‘worldly’ pursuits and come to live relatively ‘near’ His Holiness, where he could devote his life to meditation and spiritual living as a hermit. I liked him immediately, and that disposition grew for the whole time I was with him.

Among our conversations there was one that became an instruction. It is the practice of Tong Len: a method for connecting with suffering; ours and that which is all around us,  in our daily lives and everywhere we go. Tong Len a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the heart’s knotted tightness. Tong Len, if taught and practiced skillfully, awakens the compassion that is already deep within us, no matter how we might seem to appear to be on the outside.

Tong Len shows us how to care about other people who are, at times, fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, or mean. Tong Len teaches us principally to have compassion and to care for these people. Most helpfully, Tong Len shows us how not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. Rather than fend off such pain and hiding from it, we can open our heart and allow ourself to feel that pain – as something that will soften and purify us. Paradoxically, our pain has within it the capacity to make us far more loving and kind.

Though my recall is not as accurate as I might like, the summary of Geshe Yeshe Tobden’s teaching went something as follows:

In as relaxed a way as possible, recall the specific problem or unpleasant situation that this particular Tong Len Practice (session) is about to focus on.

Reflect gently on the various aspects of the problem situation, its atmosphere, as well as its specific constituents. Calmly accept the problem; don’t deny its reality. See and embrace the multiple sides of the situation, the positive as well as the negative aspects. Don’t deny any of its reality.

As you quietly reflect on these positive and negative aspects of the situation and people involved, as you “breathe them in,” also keep track of the equanimity, compassion, and happiness you experienced to some degree in your meditation (even if it’s only a little bit for now) and give these positive feelings to the problem situation and people: “Breathe out” your happiness as an unconditional gift to them. Remember, you are not denying the negative. You are loving it anyway.

Reflect on yourself with regard to this situation. We human beings are miraculously complex, multi-layered beings, so contemplate on how different parts of you are responding to the situation. Don’t deny anything you see about yourself, (even if it’s fearful or shameful). In a kindly way, accept all these different aspects of yourself, the “good” sides and the “bad” sides, and give your unconditional happiness as a gift to them.

Be gentle. Try not to force changes. But if aspects of yourself change as a result of putting the positive and negative together, try your best to give your love to the negative sides: and as best you can, accept the change.

Tong Len Practice seems to go against our usual rationale of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure. Skillfully practicing Tong Len liberates us from the prison of selfishness. Little-by-little we feel love – both for ourselves and others. We also begin to take care of ourselves and others; awakening our compassion, opening up a larger view of reality. In Tong Len, we begin to connect with the open, clear-skies side of our being. Gradually, like clouds in the sky, our pain and suffering, anxieties and stress seem not to be so solid any more. This, in itself, is a positive skill to have.

If you have enjoyed this short story, you or your friends would like to receive my periodical newsletter, which contains articles of human interest and spirituality, as well as information about forthcoming seminars and retreats, and journeys to India, Nepal, and Bali then please kindly send word to me at:

meath@diversejourneys.com