Where spirituality, commerce meet

Some business people travel to branch offices for financial information. Richard Whiteley suggests a trip to alternative realms. The Boston author and speaker, a devotee of the practices of healers such as medicine people and shamans, was among the participants last week at a Babson College conference on integrating spirituality and commerce. Whiteley got his master's in business administration from Harvard.

What spiritual practices enhance business decisions?

If shamans primarily are healers of the soul and the spirit, one could ask, "Do you think an organization has a soul?" Most people are going to say yes. So the first premise is that the individual [spiritual] practices will transfer to an organization in most cases. One of the practices is journeying, which is a process whereby [people] change their state of consciousness and journey into other realms.

You're not suggesting that at a board meeting, people should go into a trance?

I would not use the word trance. You can be both in ordinary reality and nonordinary reality at the same time. But yes -- wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get away from the numbers and tap into our higher wisdom and see what brilliance we're not letting out, because it's contained by the left-brain rationality of the business model? I've done this with the CEO of a company; I've done it with a small company where everybody was journeying.

It's not unlike meditating. You would find a place where you could be quiet. You would probably put on a tape that has monotonous drumming, which would facilitate your change of consciousness. You close your eyes. You're going to what we call the lower world. You would envision an entrance to the earth, and in your own mind's eye, you would enter. Once you were at your destination, you would perhaps consult with what we call a power animal -- a teacher or spirit guide -- or a teacher in human, humanoid form.

You wouldn't show them last year's sales and say how do we boost productivity, would you?

Absolutely. A company that's trying to keep its head above water asks that question all the time. Most companies are struggling, even though we're having a little recovery here; we're not hiring more people. What have you got to lose?

I assume shamanism wasn't on the curriculum at Harvard? Far from it.

What convinced you of its efficacy?

Nobody's more surprised at this than I am, coming from New England and kind of a WASPy background. But for the last 26 years, I've been doing a lot of personal growth work, kind of exploring the inner landscape. I ended up in a program that's called an introduction to shamanism. A year later, at a retreat, I realized this would help me live my life's purpose, which is to help bring spirit back to businesses and individuals.

Spirit is still a relatively sensitive topic in business, although it's much more discussed than it was five years ago. Some people take it to [be] religion. Speaking about religion officially in organizations is kind of frowned upon. It also seems to be, for many, soft. We're not talking about the hard things in business like managing inventories that we all learned in business school.

I was just working with a health care organization. There's about a couple hundred people in the room. The way we get our hands around spirit is to think of a time when you were fully engaged at work. What happened to your sense of time? If you let an audience answer that, you develop a sense of what [spirit] is: People felt important, engaged, committed. A high-spirited organization will always outperform, other things being equal, the low-spirited organization, whether it's survival in a down economy or flourishing in a boom economy.

History is full of nonspiritual business leaders who inspired or terrified underlings into being productive. I would never say that anything is the only way [for successful businesses]. Are companies beginning to use alternative or more ancient practices?

Yes. In 9/11, there was a high-tech company in the Boston area which lost one of their executives. A year later, I was asked to help orchestrate a memorial service. I had a soul retrieval for 200 people in the room and another 300 tuned in from remote locations. I asked them to get quiet and meditate a little bit on what part might have left them as a result of this experience, to be open to it being able to return.

Rich Barlow can be reached at rbarlow.81@alum. dartmouth.org.