Welcome, dear reader, to another month of taking metta off the meditation cushion and out into everyday life.

Last month found me disengaging from difficult workplace dramas in “Metta Holds the Stage.” This month, rather than the hoped-for resolution of an 11 o’clock number in musical theater, metta asked me to take a seat and sit some more—in every sense.

I continued to turn up for my housekeeping, food service, and bartending shifts for the walking holiday company I am still working for, with as much metta as I could muster for myself and others amid the most toxic workplace I’ve ever experienced. 

Every day felt like a black-belt level test in maintaining right speech and equanimity in the face of bullying, provocation, gaslighting, blanking, gossip, and outright lies. You name it, it was happening like some virtual reality game gauntlet, taking on a life of its own that I couldn’t unplug.

Some days I felt up to the challenge, and undertook my tasks in peace while silently blessing the mess and telling myself the truth of what was happening. On other days I questioned my sanity.

Most of the team members never wanted me there in the first place. By now, my manager no longer wanted me there either. And considering head office’s alternating silence and mixed messages, I was starting to suspect it was easier to throw this new starter under the proverbial bus for speaking up rather than tackle the thorny issues my continued presence was exposing. The most baffling part was that rather than transfer me as I had requested in the face of bullying and blanking by my team mates, HR had decided that it was best that I stay put for the duration of my probation period so that I could prove I could play nice with others. At my three-month review, I was told in all seriousness that I needed to improve my communication and teamwork skills.

Common sense urged me to pack my bags and tell them all where they could stick their job. But whenever I sat, the Dharma nudged me to keep sitting both literally and figuratively whispering, “You’re either under the bus or on it.”

While I wouldn’t presume to compare the microcosm of my current workplace dramas with the macrocosm of the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks kept popping up in my mind’s eye.

If the name is new to you, Parks was an African American activist who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man during racial segregation in the American South. Taking that peaceful stand by continuing to sit, and her subsequent arrest, sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted more than a year and proved pivotal for the civil rights movement in the United States.

Parks did not refuse to give up her bus seat because her feet hurt. “I was not tired physically,” she wrote in her autobiography, “or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” (How Stuff Works)

As I sat every morning and evening, I seriously questioned my own “leave no one behind” team ethos: at what stage was my own moral compass leading me astray into self-harm?

This was tested to its extreme when, rather than receiving a response from my boss’s boss, as I had hoped last month, I instead found myself scheduled to work a 100-hour week alongside the very co-worker behind the smear campaign to get me to leave, while everyone else was granted summer leave.

Dear reader, you can imagine the unspoken tension in the air that this particular plot twist created. I carried on regardless, silently blessing the mess. Halfway through that interminable week, I was peacefully setting tables for dinner when our manager appeared to ask us to sign paperwork agreeing to work the extra hours. My co-worker understandably protested loudly as we’d been given no notice or choice in the matter, and I quietly continued to place cutlery as they hashed it out between them. Out of the blue, our manager turned to me, shaking their finger and yelling about all the gossip and games I was creating for the team.

It took all my self-control not to laugh in the face of such textbook projection. I calmly asked them to lower their finger and their volume, and turned to possibly the most extreme gossip and game-player I’ve encountered in my life to ask, “Have you ever heard me gossip?” Utterly confused by my peaceful about-face, they muttered no and how I made it very clear to everyone where I stood on the subject.

When we later found ourselves alone again folding napkins, I surprised them even more by simply saying, “F*ck this place, you deserve so much better.” They giggled nervously, admitting they’d never heard me swear. I blurted out a whole stream of pent-up f*cks, followed by a declaration that we all deserved better and that I was hoping for a transfer as soon as my probation period was over. In the three months I had known this seasoned bully, it was the happiest I had seen them.

Something important I learned about myself and my meditation practice during this tricky past month was that it was much harder to witness others being bullied than endure it myself.

One morning after serving breakfast, the kitchen team disappeared into the bar area without explanation, including one of my housemates, now a new friend and ally. I thought nothing of the raised voices I heard from behind closed doors as I clocked out, assuming that it was another heated discussion like I had experienced the previous week, and that they would have texted me if they felt they needed my support. 

I later discovered that they were given no notice of the meeting and—outnumbered four-to-one—were shown some 20 photographs of alleged mistakes they had made. They were then yelled at that if they continued to make these mistakes, they would make everyone homeless!

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and urged them to report their version of the events to our boss’s boss. By then they were visibly shaking, worried about their work visas and the families they supported, so I asked permission to write an account on their behalf. More silence followed, which had me wondering if perhaps something more serious was going on in the background.

What to do? What not to do? By now it was clear that everyone—including me—wanted me to walk out, but Rosa Parks and the Dharma kept asking me to sit it out instead.

And so one Sunday morning, still unable to leave the area due to the limited community bus service, I felt moved to attend a local Quaker meeting. This particular meeting house was built near to the site where George Fox gave his three-hour sermon in 1652 that is now considered the birth of Quakerism. It was the closest to a sangha I could be under the circumstances, and proved a deeply nourishing silence amid all the willful blindness going on at work.

In that group stillness, I felt buoyed by the positive changes that both Quaker silence and truth had sparked, particularly on behalf of the abolition of slavery.

Wrapped in the mantle of that quiet, and determined to generate metta for whatever madness was still to come, a simple next step popped into my mind: if my boss and their boss weren’t prepared (or possibly unable) to face whatever I was facing, perhaps it was time to blow the whistle?

I looked up the company’s whistleblowing policy and decided that rather than tell the CEO what I felt the problems were from my limited perspective at the bottom of the corporate ladder, I would simply present the facts in the spirit of a mystery shop. In the hours it took me to compile all my emails asking for help and all the confusing and misleading and absent responses, my compassion for myself and the word count grew and grew and grew to some 60 pages.

While my meditation practice had helped me to keep my peace and simply observe day after day, the time had clearly come to hand over the blessed mess to a higher perspective in both human and Dharmic form.

Before pressing my lips to the whistle and pressing send, I bumped into my boss’s boss’s boss in the car park after a particularly tricky breakfast service. We had already met briefly in the kitchen on my first day when they were on an observation visit, and they asked me conversationally how I was.

I blurted out an honest answer, close to tears, and we agreed to meet in a café off site a few hours later. I then followed the Dharma’s nudge to send them the 60 pages rather than their boss.

As we later sat down for a coffee, I turned into George Fox and spoke truth for nearly two hours on behalf of everyone—particularly three co-workers who in confidence had shared feeling suicidal. I honestly couldn’t tell how it was received or whether I was believed, as it all sounded nuts even to me.

However, it felt the fair thing to give the grand-boss a chance to address my concerns before climbing higher. In turn, I was asked to sit tight for two more weeks while they reviewed and investigated all I had shared.

After three-and-half months without an intermission from all these workplace dramas I’ve shared in this and my previous two articles, waiting another fortnight felt like an eternity. I agreed on two conditions: if I wasn’t satisfied with the result I would still go ahead with whistleblowing, and that there finally be a clear next step for me in all this.

Forty-eight hours later, CCTV cameras went up in the very kitchen we first met. It was interesting to note how nervous—and suddenly very helpful—the cameras made everyone, yet I felt myself finally relax after my own three-month observation visit.

And so, dear reader, whatever immovable situation you may currently be facing in your own lives, maybe the kindest thing we can all do is simply sit tight on the bus, rather than be thrown under it, until the Dharma raises the curtain on life’s next act?

Or, to metta-morphose the lyrics to “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved” by The Script:

Going back to the corner where I first saw you
Gonna camp in my sleeping bag, I’m not gonna move

Some try to hand me money, they don’t understand
I’m not broke, I’m just a broken-hearted man

Policeman says, “Son, you can’t stay here”
I said, “There’s someone I’m waiting for if it’s a day, a month, a year”
Gotta stand my ground even if it rains or snows
If she changes her mind, this is the first place she will go

People talk about the guy that’s waiting on a girl
There are no holes in his shoes but a big hole in his world
Maybe I’ll get famous as the man who can’t be moved

The metta who can’t be moved
The metta who can’t be moved

See more

What People Get Wrong About Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (How Stuff Works)
George Fox and the history of the early Quakers (YouTube)
The Rosa Parks Story (2002) (YouTube)

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