On a more detailed level, the place I work  in particular inspires grasping, greedy, and outcome-driven behavior.  As a FOR PROFIT fundraiser that solicits funds for nonprofit and political groups (almost all left-wing progressive groups), it uses telmarketer tactics to exploit donors’ and callers’ genuine concern and passion for the issues, turning them into money.  The amount of money we raise strictly for the profit of the company and how much goes to the organizations we’re calling for is kept secret, but a google search speculates that only 35% of the money goes to the organizations that hire us.   We, as callers, are trained to be single-minded in obtaining donations, mislead donors about the nature of our work (almost all assume we are volunteers working directly with their beloved organization), and get as much money as possible in credit card form.  In order to keep the job, we have performance perimeters to reach.  We compete with each other to stay in the top tiers of performance, as the lower 40% of the room can be fired at any time.  Of course we, individually, have financial rewards for raising more money.          

Even before I started my experiement I was uncomfortable with the nature of my work, and I knew that I felt ever so much better when my conversations with donors respected their wishes (ie, “take me off the list,” “I can’t talk now,” etc.)  But, grasping to keep my job and my performance numbers high, I needed to enact the conversational grasping behaviours that I learned in training, such as agreeing to take the donor off the list, and THEN attempting to get a donation out of them, overcoming their financial misgivings by redirecting their attention to the issues they care about, and misleading them about the nature of the call.  Basic manipulative techniques.

When I started my experiment, I became downright tortured by this dynamic.  I knew what I was doing, and didn’t know how to stop.  I beat myself up, made a spectacle of myself in my plight when Santosh opened up the room for discussion, and still have no real idea how to resolve my sins.  Because as much as stopping grasping is a noble goal, the only way I can see to approach it is in AVOIDING, like crazy, the situations that I associate with the behavior.  Avoiding is its own form of grasping, right?  I do think I did the right thing for my situation in keeping my job.  But I also feel the tension in doing what has to be done even if what has to be done is basically flat-out wrong.  I like to address this tension through activism, which also has a huge element of grasping thoughts, words, and behavior. 
On Monday I do start a new job, whose tasks are noble and necessary and which compensates me comfortably.  But I suspect that if I were to start my experiment over again next week, I would find more tortuously subtle forms of grasping that are just as hard to resolve given my nature, the culture I live in, and my family’s particular situation in the world.  Yoga really is the gift that never quits giving.