[Buddha-l] mindfulness

[Dan Lusthaus]

Those who have been following the developing research and conversation 
between meditation and clinical cognitive studies will know that the term 
"mindfulness" has served as one of the linchpins. A piece in the NYTimes:

http://tinyurl.com/lofb6cb

November 1, 2013
Mindfulness: Getting Its Share of Attention
By DAVID HOCHMAN
What is the sound of one hand texting?

As Soren Gordhamer patiently quieted a packed Wisdom 2.0 event in San 
Francisco in September for a guided meditation, a few in the communal 
meeting space known as the Hub couldn't resist thumbing another message or 
two before pocketing their sacred devices. A willowy young brunette in a 
black T-shirt shot video of the crowd with her iPad from her front-row seat. 
Even after Mr. Gordhamer, who is tall with a sculptural face and Errol Flynn 
hair, urged the group to "come into presence," his voice rising in emphasis, 
someone's phone was buzzing like a dragonfly.

Mr. Gordhamer started Wisdom 2.0 in 2009 to examine how we can live with 
technology without it swallowing us whole. The wait lists for his panel 
talks and conferences now run into the hundreds.

The "Disconnect to Connect" meet-up was typical. The audience was mostly 
young, mostly from the Silicon Valley tech scene and entirely fed up with 
taking orders from Siri. "There was a time when phones didn't tell you to do 
everything," said Mr. Gordhamer, 45, as the conversation got rolling. "What's 
work, what's not work, it's all become blurred."

And yet, the problem may offer a solution. Loïc Le Meur, a French blogger 
and entrepreneur and the evening's guest speaker, recommended a meditation 
app called Get Some Headspace. The program bills itself as the world's first 
gym membership for the mind. "It's a way to have a meditation practice 
without feeling weird about it," said Mr. Le Meur. He was wearing Google 
Glass with only a hint of irony. "You don't have to sit in a lotus position. 
You just press 'play' and chill out."

Earlier that morning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., 
Chade-Meng Tan, a veteran engineer, was laughing about the demand for an 
in-house course he created called "Search Inside Yourself." The seven-week 
class teaches mindfulness, a loose term that covers an array of 
attention-training practices. It may mean spending 10 minutes with eyes 
closed on a gold-threaded pillow every morning or truly listening to your 
mother-in-law for once. Google naturally sees it as another utility widget 
for staying ahead. "Whenever we put the class online, it sells out in 30 
seconds," Mr. Tan said.

This is not just a geek thing. Everywhere lately, the here and now is the 
place to be. George Stephanopoulos, 50 Cent and Lena Dunham have all been 
talking up their meditation regimens. "I come from a long line of neurotic 
Jewish women who need it more than anyone," Ms. Dunham, who's been 
meditating since she was 9, told a capacity crowd last month at the David 
Lynch Foundation for Conscious Based Education and World Peace in New York. 
Then there was the tweet last April from @rupertmurdoch, who announced: 
"Trying to learn transcendental meditation. Everyone recommends, not that 
easy to get started, but said to improve everything!"

The Marine Corps is testing Mind Fitness Training to help soldiers relax and 
boost "emotional intelligence," the buzzwords of the hour. Nike, General 
Mills, Target and Aetna encourage employees to sit and do nothing, and with 
classes that show them how. As the high priestess of the fully aware, 
Arianna Huffington this year started a mindfulness conference, a page 
dedicated to the subject on The Huffington Post and a "GPS for the Soul" 
phone application with a built-in heart sensor to alert you when you're calm 
or stressed.

The hunger to get centered is especially fervent in the cradle of the 
digital revolution. The Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz told Wisdom 2.0 
audiences about modeling his current software start-up, Asana, after lessons 
learned in his yoga practice. At the same summit, eBay's founder and 
chairman, Pierre Omidyar, shared the stage with Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai 
Lama's English interpreter, and pegged the auction site's success on human 
goodness and trusting in complete strangers. At another, Padmasree Warrior, 
the chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco, detailed analog weekends 
devoted to family, painting, photography and haiku.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist leader who introduced mindfulness 
to Westerners (Google got first dibs on him as a guest speaker), once said, 
"The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention." Yet for the 
majority of sentient beings today, simply getting through an episode of "The 
Big Bang Theory" without tending multiple screens is a quasi-mystical 
triumph. Naturally, the architects of our electronic age approach the 
situation as if it were an engineering problem.

"This isn't the old San Francisco hippie fluff," said Mr. Tan, who started 
the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute as an extracurricular 
program in 2007. More than a thousand Googlers have gone through the course, 
which uses scientific research and the profit motive to entice coders and 
programmers to be here now.

Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies verify the benefits of mindfulness 
training, and Mr. Tan appeared familiar with all of them. Meditation 
thickens the brain's cortex, it lowers blood pressure, it can heal psoriasis 
and "it can help you get a promotion," he said. Companies like Goldman Sachs 
and Farmers Insurance also hire Mr. Tan and his team to teach techniques 
like pausing before sending important emails and silently wishing happiness 
upon difficult co-workers.

Mr. Tan's official Google title is Jolly Good Fellow, which nobody can deny. 
During the interview, he sat cross-legged and barefoot at a conference table 
inside the Googleplex, and was never far from an enlightened one-liner. 
"People come to me with profound concerns like how do you get through 211 
items on your to-do list," he said. "I tell them, one item at a time, duh."

It is easy for Mr. Tan to joke. With the financial benefits that come from 
being Google employee No. 107, he works only three days a week and 
concentrates more on giving away his wealth than growing it. "I don't have 
much sympathy for miserable rich people because sharing money is the key to 
happiness," he said. "For me, becoming rich was a wonderful experience, but 
then the thought became, now what?"

That's a question Evan Williams said he asks himself frequently. The 
billionaire-to-be co-founder of Twitter is a regular at Wisdom 2.0 events 
and began meditating just over a year ago. His practice has made an impact 
in ways both profound and less so. Last month as Twitter was finalizing its 
paperwork to go public, Mr. Williams did the unthinkable for someone in his 
position. He took a 20-minute walk through San Francisco without his phone. 
"I was able actually to look around and think about things for most of that 
period," he said. "I would have had many more fleeting anxieties doing that 
a year ago, but I'm better with those silences now."

Mr. Gordhamer said the desire is rampant for "non-doing," as he put it. 
"What the culture is craving is a sense of ease and reflection, of not 
needing to be stimulated or entertained or going after something constantly. 
Nobody's kicking out technology, but we have to regain our connection to 
others and to nature or else everybody loses."

Mr. Gordhamer's response to this came five years ago while residing in a 
double-wide trailer in remote Dixon, N.M. He was newly divorced and had lost 
his job organizing events for Richard Gere's Foundation. At the time, Mr. 
Gordhamer was reading a lot of Eckhart Tolle and kept returning to one idea: 
Rather than asking, "What do I want from life?" he asked, "What does life 
want from me?" Convinced he had settled on an answer, Mr. Gordhamer withdrew 
the last $10,000 from his bank account and started Wisdom 2.0.

With prominent speakers from the technology and "wisdom" communities, the 
first conference in 2009, held outside San Francisco, was a modest gathering 
of 325 people. By 2012, the wait list ran to 500, with headliners that 
included co-founders of Twitter, Facebook, eBay and PayPal. Last winter's 
lineup featured Ford's chairman, Bill Ford, interviewed by his meditation 
guru, Jack Kornfield; Congressman Tim Ryan on using mindfulness to transform 
education; and Marianne Williamson, on ending world hunger with the aid of 
social media. The conference in February, at a convention hotel in downtown 
San Francisco, is expected to draw around 2,000 attendees over four days and 
is part of a year-round cycle of events.

At the Wisdom meet-up in September at the Hub, a smiley young man with a 
nametag that read "Walter Inward" was showing off a new smoking-cessation 
app he had created for the iPhone. On one wrist, he wore a Buddhist mala 
bead bracelet; on the other, a high-tech Basis band that uses skin 
conductivity to record heart rate, sleep and steps.

He turned out to be Walter Roth, 30, chief executive of a tech start-up 
called Inward Inc. Mr. Roth said he had attended every Wisdom 2.0 event 
since 2009. Mindfulness has made him more competitive, he said. "Not only do 
I put fewer things on my to-list but I actually get them done and done well. 
It's like I've learned that to be more successful and accomplish more, I 
must first slow down."

The paradox of profit-minded techies engaging in the realm of nonattachment 
is not lost on those shepherding these wired flocks. Marc Lesser wore the 
black robes of a Buddhist priest as director of the Tassajara Zen Mountain 
Center near Big Sur in the 1980s. "I literally didn't know what to do with 
the $60 monthly stipend I used to get," he said. Today, as an M.B.A. and 
chief executive of Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, he is 
comfortable integrating money with mindfulness. "All business is about 
helping people in some way and you can't do that without focusing on 
success," he said. "The hope is that turning a profit can be done more 
wisely and compassionately."

At his first Wisdom 2.0 conference in 2010, Arturo Bejar, Facebook's 
engineering director, sat in the back row. "I was reluctant because I'm 
primarily a numbers person," he said. But hearing the author and meditation 
teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn say that if people fully saw one another, they could 
get along better, a light bulb went off for Mr. Bejar. He decided to 
integrate that idea into his work handling content concerns from Facebook's 
one billion users.

Collaborating with neuroscience and psychology researchers at Stanford, 
Berkeley and Yale, Mr. Bejar made significant changes to the ways 
communication happens on Facebook. This year, the company introduced 
emoticons to capture a broader range of human feelings, along with a gentler 
formula for settling tension between users. Previously, someone tagged in an 
unfortunate Facebook photo could flag the image as offensive and hope the 
other person would remove it. Now, a form pops up with options like, "It's 
embarrassing," "It's inappropriate" and "It makes me sad," along with a 
polite request to take the photo down.

Introducing that simple, thoughtful language has tripled the likelihood that 
users will send a message asking for the photo to be removed, Mr. Bejar 
said, adding that the overall response has been significant. In the United 
States, if someone marks a Facebook photo as "embarrassing," it is 83 
percent likely that the poster will respond or delete it. Facebook will soon 
add a similar function to text posts. "We didn't realize how hard it was to 
feel heard in electronic communications, but now there are mechanisms for 
being more expressive and thoughtful," Mr. Bejar said.

Those mechanisms are spreading like ripples on a mountain pond. The 
Huffington Post added a page this year called "The Third Metric" that 
focuses on cultivating balance, appreciation and calm. Around 200 people 
crammed into Arianna Huffington's TriBeCa living room in June for a kickoff 
conference where guests like Candice Bergen and Mr. Stephanopoulos all but 
shared their mantras.

Last month, the people behind Lululemon started whil.com, a site that 
encourages visitors to turn off the brain for 60 seconds by visualizing a 
dot. "The hour-and-a-half yoga break is too much for most people," said Chip 
Wilson, a co-founder. "Getting away from the chaos of work and technology 
even for one minute is all you really need to feel refreshed." Still too 
great a time waster? Mr. Tan at Google said one mindful breath a day can 
lead to inner peace.

Even the most distracted are easing up and letting go. These days, Mr. 
Williams spends most of his time overseeing an online literary venture 
called Medium. The office holds companywide nature retreats and offers 
guided relaxation sessions twice a week. "Meditation always had bad branding 
for this culture - it seemed very hand wavy," he said. "But to me, it's a 
way to think more clearly and to not feel so swept up."

Asked if he might make a habit of strolling through San Francisco without a 
device vibrating in his pocket, Mr. Williams paused for what sounded like a 
moment of reflection, but then he laughed.

"It wasn't a conscious effort to turn off my phone," he said. "It happened 
that I needed to charge it."