Customer Service, Burnout, And Self-Compassion

The meditation is great for begginers experiencing a lot of stress. Offering self-compassion in the midst of burnout. This meditation begins to bring awareness to the pain and suffering caused by harsh customer service experiences. Also, bringing gentle attention to the busy mind that drifts in meditation. Finally, a visualization that focuses on expanding our awareness outward.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Canon Coffee, As far as the machines. My name is Sam Kanemacher and I'm here just to do a little Dharma talk slash meditation. Today I was thinking about customer service. Customer service can be very difficult in all sorts of jobs. My customer service for me can be especially difficult when my customers are not caffeinated because their espresso machines are not working and so they're addicted to caffeine and they haven't had any yet and they bring their machine to me or their machine is getting fixed fast enough and so they're really upset. So the question is how can you know it can be really difficult to work with those situations in the moment and if we don't handle them well we can get burnt out and so one really important thing to do is to take care of yourself. Offer yourself compassion in times when you're not experiencing the stress of customer service. You know you can do this through meditation and you simply you know you can simply nurture the parts of you that get triggered when you're in customer service situations. So you know you can think about how someone might have hurt you and where you feel that in your body. So let's do that now. First I just want to invite you to close your eyes and be somewhere where you can be still either lying down or sitting upright or standing and I just want you to take a couple deep breaths to calm your mind and exhale and inhale and exhale Now just allow your breath to massage your body. Notice the sensations in your body as you inhale and exhale as you breathe. Simply by noticing our breathing we can offer ourselves compassion and loving-kindness. Now if you drifted away from the meditation just gently come back it's no big deal. You want to be gentle with yourself whenever you drift away otherwise you're probably not likely to meditate again. One of the most important parts about meditation if not the most important part is when you drift away which you will from paying attention to the meditation everybody does it even the most experienced teachers just gently come back and just practice gently coming back and if you don't gently come back then you don't but you know maybe next time and be compassionate with yourself about not gently coming back. You said oh you know I shouldn't have been drifting off and thought again. Well be gentle with the person who's judging you know they're there they're there offer the judge a little in your mind a little compassion. Breathing deeply. Now I just want you to notice the energy in the center of your chest. Imagine that there is a small ball of light in the center of your chest and imagine as you breathe it slowly grows bigger expanding to your entire chest and then to your arms and legs. Let that ball of light expand to the entire room and maybe you notice some spaciousness that you didn't feel before. Maybe you want to expand that light to your entire city or town. Just bringing loving awareness to everything that that light touches and loving awareness to yourself too because the light is touching you also. And then coming back to your body. Noticing where your seat your bottom touches your seat or your feet touch the floor where gravity causes your body to touch the earth. And we just give a simple phrase a meta. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be at peace. May all beings be free. So with that that was just a simple meditation to help build compassion. Really on a basic level as you kind of advance your compassion practice you know you can look at meditations that first you kind of start out with yourself and then you kind of do some maybe like focus on a neutral person and then you can focus on some difficult people. Maybe not the most difficult situation but you know just some difficult people and imagine yourself extending compassion to them. And I'll do some meditations about that later and of course there's if you just look up you know compassionate practice or loving kindness practice in YouTube you know there's lots of things out there. I particularly like Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City. They have great teachers and a lot of great really helpful compassionate teachings. So thank you for meditating with me today and may you be well.