Hot-shot geeks at Google learn mindfulness meditation – no kidding!

As a practitioner of mindfulness meditation for the past several years, I continue to encounter skeptics who refer scornfully to contemplative types as “narcissistic navel gazers.” I heard that phrase just this week. Never mind that Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, now a spiritual leader for millions, was exiled from his war-torn homeland for his peace-making efforts.

So it was with great interest that I came across an article today at mindful.org that describes how Google is integrating mindfulness in the workplace:

Hot-shot geeks at the world’s leading information company are taking a ground-breaking course called Search inside Yourself. As Barry Boyce reports, it’s a new model for teaching mindfulness and emotional intelligence, and its creator {Chade-Meng Tan} is thinking big.

And for all you folks who dismiss mindfulness practitioners as narcissistic navel gazers, take a look at this:

World peace—expressed with no irony—is the recurring theme for Meng, and his contemplations have led him to the firm conviction that meditation is the path to world peace, since all prior efforts, he says, have failed by “imposing social or political structures on people. They tried to create world peace from the outside in. My idea is to do the reverse, to create world peace from the inside out.” In Meng’s view, meditation is the methodology for creating peace from the inside out.

Read the entire article at mindful.org – it’s well worth it.