Why on earth are many of the world’s most powerful technology companies, including Google, showing a special interest in an 87-year-old Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk?
The answer is that all of them are interested in understanding how the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as he is known to his hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, can help their organisations to become more compassionate and effective.
In a sign that the practice of mindfulness is entering the mainstream, Thay has been invited later this month to run a full day’s training session at Google’s main campus in California.
Thay, who has sold over 2m books in America alone, is also meeting more than 20 CEOs of other major US-based technology companies in Silicon Valley, to offer his wisdom on the art of living in the present moment.
He plans to discuss with them how they can develop a deep understanding of the inter-connectedness and inter-dependence of all life and offer practical tools to better integrate mindfulness in their daily work, in the products they design, and in the vision they have for how technology can change the world. The event will end with the practice of walking meditation.
The work of Thay has been acknowledged by several global leaders over the past 50 years. Current World Bank president Jim Yong Kim has said his practice is one “in which one can be deeply passionate and compassionate toward those who are suffering,” while Martin Luther King nominated him for the Nobel peace prize in 1967 for his work in seeking to end the Vietnam war.
King said that conferring the award “would re-awaken men to the teaching of beauty and love found in peace. It would help to revive hopes for a new order of justice and harmony.”
Despite his advancing years, Thay, who was ordained 71 years ago, is currently in the middle of a punishing three month tour of North America, immediately after a similar period running retreats across Asia.
His network of monks and nuns represents the world’s fastest growing monastic order and his week-long retreats in upstate Toronto, New York, Mississippi and California, each with a capacity of more than 1,000 people, have sold out in a matter of days.
Our voracious economic system
Thay, who warns that civilisation is at risk of collapse from the environmental and social damage caused by the voraciousness of our economic system, offers an alternative vision that focuses on true happiness, which he believes we have sacrificed on the altar of materialism.
His teaching is based on transforming our suffering by letting go of the scars of the past as well as worries about the future, via meditation and mindful living.
Pointing to our addiction to consumption as a clear sign we are trying to paper over our suffering, Thay suggests we should go in the opposite direction, to the very heart of our pain, in order to transcend it.
He believes that for business to play a role in slowing the runaway train of capitalism, corporate leaders need to recognise they have made a fundamental error in their narrow-minded belief that profit on its own equates to success.
Business needs a fundamental shift in consciousness
For that to happen, the corporate world needs to undergo a fundamental shift in consciousness by recognising the importance of integrating spiritual principles into its daily life.
In an interview with the Guardian at the end of his retreat last week in the Catskill Mountains on the art of suffering, Thay said: “You have to consider your idea of happiness. You think it is possible only if you win, if you are on the top.
“But it is not necessarily like that, because even if you are successful in making more money, you still suffer. You compete because you’re not happy and meditation can help you to suffer less.
“Many of us think you can only be happy when you leave other people behind; you are number one. You do not need to be number one to be happy.
“There must be a spiritual dimension in your life and in your business, otherwise you cannot deal with the suffering caused by your work or your daily life.”
Meetings with Martin Luther King
Recalling his meetings with King, which were pivotal in the the decison of the civil rights leader to come out against the Vietnam war, Thay said President Obama missed out a key ingredient when he last week celebrated the 50th anniversary of the landmark ‘I have a dream’ speech.
Central to King’s vision was the development of the Beloved Community and Thay has concentrated his energy on building more than a thousand ‘sanghas’ of lay practitioners around the world.“When President Obama said let freedom ring, he is talking about the kind of freedom coming from outside; political and social freedom, but even if you have a lot of freedom to organise, to say things, to write, you can still suffer a lot as you don’t have the freedom inside – from your anger and fear,” says Thay.
But is it possible for business leaders to create transformation through the building of a community ethos within their companies?
Mindfulness and meditation in the workplace
Thay believes that bringing mindfulness and meditation into corporations will help them to turn away from their destructive ways and recognise the inter-dependence of all life.
“Meditation practice can help business to suffer less,” he says. “That is good already because if your employees are happy, your business can improve.
“If your business is causing environmental problems, then because you have practiced meditation you may have an idea of how to conduct your business in such a way that you will harm nature less.
“Meditation can calm your suffering and give you more insight and more right view on yourself and on the world and if you have a collective wisdom, then naturally you will want to handle and conduct your business in such a way that will make the world suffer less.”
Bringing mindfulness into the workplace can also help prevent employees from becoming overwhelmed by their work, according to Thay, but business leaders need to lead by example.
Business leaders need to take care of themselves
While many senior executives are starting to speak out about the importance of sustainability, Thay says few connect this to the internal culture of the organisations they run.
“If he [business leader] spends all the time taking care of the corporation, he does not have time for himself or his family, but it is important to recognise that the business will profit if he is more calm, more loving, more compassionate and understanding,” he says.
Partly to blame is the increasing speed and reach of computers, which makes it increasingly hard to find time to reflect and be inspired.
The power of aimlessness
Thay talks of the importance of developing the art of aimlessness, rather than the non-stop creation of more projects.
“People believe that happiness is in the future and the point of aimlessness is to stop running and find happiness in the here and the now,” he says.
“True happiness cannot be without peace. If you continue to run, how can you have peace and you run in your dreams also. That is our civilisation.
“We have to reverse this trend. We have to go back to ourselves, to our beloved ones, to nature, because electronic devices help us to run away from ourselves. We lose ourselves in the internet, business, projects and we have no time to be with ourselves. We do not have the time to take care of our beloved ones and do not allow Mother Earth to heal us. We are running away from self, family and nature.”
Erin Callan, the former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers, who resigned months before the bank’s bankruptcy, put her head above the parapet earlier this year to write about how work had completely consumed her.While most business leaders find it difficult to talk openly about the pressures they face, there are high profile examples of executives who share Thay’s concerns.
“When I left my job, it devastated me,” she wrote in the New York Times. “I couldn’t just rally and move on. I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did.
“When I wasn’t catching up on work, I spent my weekends recharging my batteries for the coming week. Work always came first, before my family, friends and marriage — which ended just a few years later.”
Dualistic nature of technology
While Thay worries about the destructive force of technology, he recognises its dualistic nature and therefore its power also to do good.
This is why he will call on the technology CEOs he meets to concentrate on developing apps and other devices that can help bring people back into balance.
“We need to have an awakening and when I talk to Google and the other companies, I will tell them to use their intelligence and goodwill to help us create the kind of instruments to come back to ourselves, heal ourselves,” he says. “We do not have to reject or throw away all these devices but can make good use of them.”
He talks of developing apps that can help people to calm their anger when it arises and refers to a watch he designed, on which every hour is marked by the word ‘now,’ rather than a number.
Google has asked the Buddhist monk to talk on the subject of intention, innovation and insight, which he says can all benefit from the practice of mindfulness.
Thay was invited to visit Google in 2011 and since then mindfulness practices have blossomed at the technology giant, including a growing number of people taking part in its formal mindfulness training programme, ‘Search Inside Yourself.’ Meditation rooms have also been created within many of the company’s offices.
He says: “Staff at Google want to know how to transform their suffering just like all other living beings.
“Many of them are very young and intelligent so they can understand the teaching and practice well and can spread this and they have the means to do that.
“It will help for them to know that everyone has the wish to do good because all of us have Buddha nature. When you look at the path which is not noble, you can see the other path. So looking into suffering you see the way of happiness; that is the teaching of the four noble truths and you do not need to be Buddhist to understand that.
“Our society needs a collective awakening in order to save ourselves from the crisis we are in. So the practice is that awakening should take place in every step, every breath. And if you have awakening you know you have a path of happiness. You stop suffering and then you can help other people to do the same.”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s tour of North America includes public talks in New York, Boston and Pasadena. There is also a four-month exhibition of his calligraphy hosted by Blue Cliff Monastery and New York’s famous design store ABC Home
AN ANTIDOTE FOR MINDLESSNESS
In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the cognitive psychologist Ellen Langer noticed that elderly people who envisioned themselves as younger versions of themselves often began to feel, and even think, like they had actually become younger. Men with trouble walking quickly were playing touch football. Memories were improving and blood pressure was dropping. The mind, Langer realized, could have a strong effect on the body. That realization led her to study the Buddhist principle of mindfulness, or awareness, which she characterizes as “a heightened state of involvement and wakefulness.”But mindfulness is different from the hyperalert way you might feel after a great night’s sleep or a strong cup of coffee. Rather, Langer writes, it is “a state of conscious awareness in which the individual is implicitly aware of the context and content of information.” To illustrate the concept—or, rather, its opposite—Langer often recounts a shopping experience. Once, when Langer was paying for an item at a store, a clerk noticed that the back of her credit card wasn’t signed. After asking her to sign it, the clerk compared the scrawl on the receipt with the one on the card, to insure that no fraud was being committed. That, says Langer, is perfect mindlessness.
One of the first cognitive scientists to study mindfulness in an experimental setting, divorced from its spiritual trappings, Langer remained for years a lonely voice. But the past decade or so has seen a tremendous uptick in empirical research, as scientific collaborations with nontraditional schools, like the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life Institute, have become more mainstream. We now know, for instance, that even brief mindfulness practice—typically, a kind of meditation that focusses on a particular aspect of the present moment, like your breath, your body, or a particular sensation—has a substantial positive effect on mental well-being and memory. It also appears to physically improve the brain, strengthening certain neural structures that are tied to heightened attention and focus, and bolstering connectivity in the brain’s default mode network, which is linked to self-monitoring and control.
When Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist who directs the University of Miami’s Contemplative Neuroscience, Mindfulness Research, and Practice Initiative, first began researching the effects of mindfulness on cognitive performance, in the early aughts, most of the existing studies focussed on what could be easily tested: the effects of short bouts of intense practice onimmediate cognitive performance. There had been comparatively little work done on the lasting impacts of mindfulness training, especially under conditions of high stress—the equivalent of evaluating the impact of a week of training on the results of a two-hundred-yard dash versus examining the effects of months of training on a marathon time. “The bulk of my work looks at high-stress cohorts, to see how mindfulness training can be protective against long-term stress,” Jha told me. It was also unclear how little meditation one could get away with and still emerge more mindful. “How low can you go? How little time can it take to sufficiently train people?” Jha said.
To test both the long-term impact of mindfulness and whether there might be a meditation equivalent of “Seven-Minute Abs,” Jha took a set of University of Miami students and split them into two groups, one that would receive mindfulness training and another that wouldn’t. “Their stress goes up throughout the semester, so you can really track performance over time—the natural decline caused by stress,” she said. The semester-long test would allow her to see whether mindfulness could benefit people in an increasingly hostile mental environment.
Jha designed a series of short, weekly training sessions, where students learned the basics of mindfulness theory and how to practice it—for instance, learning to focus on their breath while dismissing any intruding thoughts. In addition to a twenty-minute session with an instructor, they were asked to come in for two twenty-minute practice sessions each week, for seven weeks. The combined hour of instruction and practice each week was far less extreme than previous mindfulness-training courses that Jha had developed; one that she created for the military totalled twenty-four hours of practice.
About two weeks into the semester, before the training began, the students were asked to complete several tests. First, they performed a series of tasks that required sustained attention. In one, they watched a string of digits appear on a screen, and were told to press the keyboard’s space bar every time a new digit appeared, unless that digit was a “3.” At a few points in the study, the flow of digits was interrupted by questions about the participant’s attention span. In two subsequent tests, the students were assessed on their working memory capacity (how many letters in a list could they remember after solving an unrelated math problem?) and delayed-recognition working memory (could they quickly and accurately distinguish a face they had already seen from a set of new faces?). All of the students performed at roughly the same level.
Nine weeks later, when the students were tested again, large performance gaps had emerged: as the semester dragged on, the control group performed worse than they had originally, while the students who received mindfulness training became more accurate and focussed. Jha’s regimen, it seemed, wasn’t just a way to get better; it was a way to keep from getting worse.
Mindfulness training, Jha hypothesizes, may work as a protective factor against the typical stresses of student life—or any stress, for that matter, since it improves emotional equilibrium and enables people to better handle distractions. “It’s similar to how physical exercise can change the body,” Jha said. “We know that physical activity helps our bodies, but we’re just coming to the understanding that mental exercise is also critical to promoting mental well-being. It’s a cultural shift.”
Shauna Shapiro: How Mindfulness Cultivates Compassion
Author and researcher, Shauna Shapiro, explores how moment-to-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and surrounding helps us to see and alleviate suffering in others.
From the Science of a Meaningful Life Video Series
Meditation transforms roughest San Francisco schools
At first glance, Quiet Time – a stress reduction strategy used in several San Francisco middle and high schools, as well as in scattered schools around the Bay Area – looks like something out of the om-chanting 1960s. Twice daily, a gong sounds in the classroom and rowdy adolescents, who normally can’t sit still for 10 seconds, shut their eyes and try to clear their minds. I’ve spent lots of time in urban schools and have never seen anything like it.
This practice – meditation rebranded – deserves serious attention from parents and policymakers. An impressive array of studies shows that integrating meditation into a school’s daily routine can markedly improve the lives of students. If San Francisco schools Superintendent Richard Carranza has his way, Quiet Time could well spread citywide.
What’s happening at Visitacion Valley Middle School, which in 2007 became the first public school nationwide to adopt the program, shows why the superintendent is so enthusiastic. In this neighborhood, gunfire is as common as birdsong – nine shootings have been recorded in the past month – and most students know someone who’s been shot or did the shooting. Murders are so frequent that the school employs a full-time grief counselor.
In years past, these students were largely out of control, frequently fighting in the corridors, scrawling graffiti on the walls and cursing their teachers. Absenteeism rates were among the city’s highest and so were suspensions. Worn-down teachers routinely called in sick.
Unsurprisingly, academics suffered. The school tried everything, from counseling and peer support to after-school tutoring and sports, but to disappointingly little effect.
Now these students are doing light-years better. In the first year of Quiet Time, the number of suspensions fell by 45 percent. Within four years, the suspension rate was among the lowest in the city. Daily attendance rates climbed to 98 percent, well above the citywide average. Grade point averages improved markedly. About 20 percent of graduates are admitted to Lowell High School – before Quiet Time, getting any students into this elite high school was a rarity. Remarkably, in the annual California Healthy Kids Survey, these middle school youngsters recorded the highest happiness levels in San Francisco.
Reports are similarly positive in the three other schools that have adopted Quiet Time. At Burton High School, for instance, students in the program report significantly less stress and depression, and greater self-esteem, than nonparticipants. With stress levels down, achievement has markedly improved, particularly among students who have been doing worst academically. Grades rose dramatically, compared with those who weren’t in the program.
On the California Achievement Test, twice as many students in Quiet Time schools have become proficient in English, compared with students in similar schools where the program doesn’t exist, and the gap is even bigger in math. Teachers report they’re less emotionally exhausted and more resilient.
“The research is showing big effects on students’ performance,” says Superintendent Carranza. “Our new accountability standards, which we’re developing in tandem with the other big California districts, emphasize the importance of social-emotional factors in improving kids’ lives, not just academics. That’s where Quiet Time can have a major impact, and I’d like to see it expand well beyond a handful of schools.”
While Quiet Time is no panacea, it’s a game-changer for many students who otherwise might have become dropouts. That’s reason enough to make meditation a school staple, and not just in San Francisco.
David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, is the author of “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School District and a Strategy for America’s Schools.”
David L. Kirp
SFGate – Published 6:37 pm, Sunday, January 12, 2014
Google seeks out wisdom of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh
Global tech companies are connecting to the power of mindfulness and meditation to drive sustainability and happiness
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who’s visiting the Google campus this month, says we need to foster aimlessness rather than seeking to be number one. Photograph: David M. Nelson
Why on earth are many of the world’s most powerful technology companies, including Google, showing a special interest in an 87-year-old Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk?
The answer is that all of them are interested in understanding how the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as he is known to his hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, can help their organisations to become more compassionate and effective.
In a sign that the practice of mindfulness is entering the mainstream, Thay has been invited later this month to run a full day’s training session at Google’s main campus in California.
Thay, who has sold over 2m books in America alone, is also meeting more than 20 CEOs of other major US-based technology companies in Silicon Valley, to offer his wisdom on the art of living in the present moment.
He plans to discuss with them how they can develop a deep understanding of the inter-connectedness and inter-dependence of all life and offer practical tools to better integrate mindfulness in their daily work, in the products they design, and in the vision they have for how technology can change the world. The event will end with the practice of walking meditation.
The work of Thay has been acknowledged by several global leaders over the past 50 years. Current World Bank president Jim Yong Kim has said his practice is one “in which one can be deeply passionate and compassionate toward those who are suffering,” while Martin Luther King nominated him for the Nobel peace prize in 1967 for his work in seeking to end the Vietnam war.
King said that conferring the award “would re-awaken men to the teaching of beauty and love found in peace. It would help to revive hopes for a new order of justice and harmony.”
Despite his advancing years, Thay, who was ordained 71 years ago, is currently in the middle of a punishing three month tour of North America, immediately after a similar period running retreats across Asia.
His network of monks and nuns represents the world’s fastest growing monastic order and his week-long retreats in upstate Toronto, New York, Mississippi and California, each with a capacity of more than 1,000 people, have sold out in a matter of days.
Our voracious economic system
Thay, who warns that civilisation is at risk of collapse from the environmental and social damage caused by the voraciousness of our economic system, offers an alternative vision that focuses on true happiness, which he believes we have sacrificed on the altar of materialism.
His teaching is based on transforming our suffering by letting go of the scars of the past as well as worries about the future, via meditation and mindful living.
Pointing to our addiction to consumption as a clear sign we are trying to paper over our suffering, Thay suggests we should go in the opposite direction, to the very heart of our pain, in order to transcend it.
He believes that for business to play a role in slowing the runaway train of capitalism, corporate leaders need to recognise they have made a fundamental error in their narrow-minded belief that profit on its own equates to success.
Business needs a fundamental shift in consciousness
For that to happen, the corporate world needs to undergo a fundamental shift in consciousness by recognising the importance of integrating spiritual principles into its daily life.
In an interview with the Guardian at the end of his retreat last week in the Catskill Mountains on the art of suffering, Thay said: “You have to consider your idea of happiness. You think it is possible only if you win, if you are on the top.
“But it is not necessarily like that, because even if you are successful in making more money, you still suffer. You compete because you’re not happy and meditation can help you to suffer less.
“Many of us think you can only be happy when you leave other people behind; you are number one. You do not need to be number one to be happy.
“There must be a spiritual dimension in your life and in your business, otherwise you cannot deal with the suffering caused by your work or your daily life.”
Meetings with Martin Luther King
Central to King’s vision was the development of the Beloved Community and Thay has concentrated his energy on building more than a thousand ‘sanghas’ of lay practitioners around the world.“When President Obama said let freedom ring, he is talking about the kind of freedom coming from outside; political and social freedom, but even if you have a lot of freedom to organise, to say things, to write, you can still suffer a lot as you don’t have the freedom inside – from your anger and fear,” says Thay.
But is it possible for business leaders to create transformation through the building of a community ethos within their companies?
Mindfulness and meditation in the workplace
Thay believes that bringing mindfulness and meditation into corporations will help them to turn away from their destructive ways and recognise the inter-dependence of all life.
“Meditation practice can help business to suffer less,” he says. “That is good already because if your employees are happy, your business can improve.
“If your business is causing environmental problems, then because you have practiced meditation you may have an idea of how to conduct your business in such a way that you will harm nature less.
“Meditation can calm your suffering and give you more insight and more right view on yourself and on the world and if you have a collective wisdom, then naturally you will want to handle and conduct your business in such a way that will make the world suffer less.”
Bringing mindfulness into the workplace can also help prevent employees from becoming overwhelmed by their work, according to Thay, but business leaders need to lead by example.
Business leaders need to take care of themselves
While many senior executives are starting to speak out about the importance of sustainability, Thay says few connect this to the internal culture of the organisations they run.
“If he [business leader] spends all the time taking care of the corporation, he does not have time for himself or his family, but it is important to recognise that the business will profit if he is more calm, more loving, more compassionate and understanding,” he says.
Partly to blame is the increasing speed and reach of computers, which makes it increasingly hard to find time to reflect and be inspired.
The power of aimlessness
Thay talks of the importance of developing the art of aimlessness, rather than the non-stop creation of more projects.
“People believe that happiness is in the future and the point of aimlessness is to stop running and find happiness in the here and the now,” he says.
“True happiness cannot be without peace. If you continue to run, how can you have peace and you run in your dreams also. That is our civilisation.
Erin Callan, the former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers, who resigned months before the bank’s bankruptcy, put her head above the parapet earlier this year to write about how work had completely consumed her.While most business leaders find it difficult to talk openly about the pressures they face, there are high profile examples of executives who share Thay’s concerns.
“When I left my job, it devastated me,” she wrote in the New York Times. “I couldn’t just rally and move on. I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did.
“When I wasn’t catching up on work, I spent my weekends recharging my batteries for the coming week. Work always came first, before my family, friends and marriage — which ended just a few years later.”
Dualistic nature of technology
While Thay worries about the destructive force of technology, he recognises its dualistic nature and therefore its power also to do good.
This is why he will call on the technology CEOs he meets to concentrate on developing apps and other devices that can help bring people back into balance.
“We need to have an awakening and when I talk to Google and the other companies, I will tell them to use their intelligence and goodwill to help us create the kind of instruments to come back to ourselves, heal ourselves,” he says. “We do not have to reject or throw away all these devices but can make good use of them.”
He talks of developing apps that can help people to calm their anger when it arises and refers to a watch he designed, on which every hour is marked by the word ‘now,’ rather than a number.
Google has asked the Buddhist monk to talk on the subject of intention, innovation and insight, which he says can all benefit from the practice of mindfulness.
Thay was invited to visit Google in 2011 and since then mindfulness practices have blossomed at the technology giant, including a growing number of people taking part in its formal mindfulness training programme, ‘Search Inside Yourself.’ Meditation rooms have also been created within many of the company’s offices.
He says: “Staff at Google want to know how to transform their suffering just like all other living beings.
“Many of them are very young and intelligent so they can understand the teaching and practice well and can spread this and they have the means to do that.
“It will help for them to know that everyone has the wish to do good because all of us have Buddha nature. When you look at the path which is not noble, you can see the other path. So looking into suffering you see the way of happiness; that is the teaching of the four noble truths and you do not need to be Buddhist to understand that.
“Our society needs a collective awakening in order to save ourselves from the crisis we are in. So the practice is that awakening should take place in every step, every breath. And if you have awakening you know you have a path of happiness. You stop suffering and then you can help other people to do the same.”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s tour of North America includes public talks in New York, Boston and Pasadena. There is also a four-month exhibition of his calligraphy hosted by Blue Cliff Monastery and New York’s famous design store ABC Home
Study reveals gene expression changes with meditation
With evidence growing that meditation can have beneficial health effects, scientists have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body.
A new study by researchers in Wisconsin, Spain, and France reports the first evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a period of mindfulness meditation.
The study investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice in a group of experienced meditators, compared to a group of untrained control subjects who engaged in quiet non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of gene-regulating machinery and reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows rapid alterations in gene expression within subjects associated with mindfulness meditation practice,” says study author Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Most interestingly, the changes were observed in genes that are the current targets of anti-inflammatory and analgesic drugs,” says Perla Kaliman, first author of the article and a researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona, Spain (IIBB-CSIC-IDIBAPS), where the molecular analyses were conducted.
The study was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
Click here for the complete article – Gene Study.