In an age of technology and inventions, life is getting busier and quicker. Despite having smartphones for instant messaging and airplanes for sprightly travel, there is no free time with people. The idea of sitting in a quiet room, without doing anything for a few minutes each day might sound insane to many. But it’s not absurd to people in Silicon Valley.
Classes in mindfulness practices are prevailing at some of Silicon Valley’s signature tech giants. And this is the result of increasing awareness and availability of Yoga classes in the handset.
“There are more teachers of yoga practices in the San Francisco Bay Area than any other place in the world except Toronto,” Burgard, a Los Altos mindfulness-based psychotherapist, and educator said.
Recent discoveries, as in “meditation’s benefits coincides with recent neuron scientific findings showing that the adult brain can still be deeply transformed through experience,” by neuroscientists Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz, together with a Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, contributed to the craze. Just 3 months of yoga retreat affects cortisol awakening response, inflammatory stress markers, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It is reported to decreases anxiety and depression with increasing mindfulness.
The Boom of Meditation and Yoga in Silicon Valley
When the ancient art of meditation and contemporary mindfulness-based stress reduction technique had been inserted to smartphones, the era has got a new loop. Now its time for you to check out some of the apps and websites for practicing medication before you lock your smartphone in a closet for an hour a day.
Meditation apps and gadgets have also penetrated SV. Muse, a $US249-dollar “brain-sensing headband”, marketed as a personal meditation assistant, made $2.5 million.
The popularity of yoga classes within tech companies, where everybody is addicted to speed, clearly explains the tremendous hunger in Silicon Valley.
“The idea is basically to make this as widely available as possible so people can practice the meditation on a regular basis in their own lives,” Kabat-Zinn said.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the year 1979 had introduced the oldest commercial websites. Now, his colleagues in Sweden have developed apps with Kabat-Zinn’s series of guided meditations.
Taking about the number, it is marked that Meditation has gone mainstream, practiced by 18 million Americans. Just in silicon valley, more than a thousand Googlers have been through “Search Inside Yourself” yoga training, while another 400 are on the waiting list. Some 1,700 people attainted “Wisdom 2.0 conference” in San Francisco this winter, including executives from LinkedIn, Cisco, and Ford featured among the headliners. That’s 500% incensement from the number from three years ago.
“Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey all meditate”, San Francisco Chronicle claim. Their company also provides opportunities for employees to do so as well.
An internal course called “Search Inside Yourself” has Google employees on a fluorescent-lit presentation room on Google’s corporate campus. Across the Valley, classes in meditation and mindfulness have become staples at many of the region’s most prominent companies. The key goal of companies around the valley is holding regular in-office meditation sessions while arranging work routines that maximize mindfulness.
Silicon Valley, where there’s little patience for “hippie bullshit”, meditation isn’t an opportunity just to reflect upon the impermanence of existence but a tool to better oneself along with improving productivity.
Most of this started about a decade ago, only in 2007, when Google employee working of mobile search packaged contemplative practices in the wrapper of emotional intelligence, saw the demand spike. Now dozens of employee development programs at Google incorporate some aspect of meditation or mindfulness.
List of some people who contributed to yoga and meditation in the silicon valley:
- Kenneth Folk
- Folk popularized the notion of open source enlightenment in Silicon Valley
- Soren Gordhamer
- Soren, who used to teach meditation in New York prisons is now a Silicon Valley influencer after the popular Wisdom 2.0 conference.
- Vincent and Emily Horn:
- These self-described Buddhist geeks, create new ways to practice mindfulness while helping others develop apps for contemplation.
- Jack Kornfield
- Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, which hosts the technorati at his Spirit Rock sanctuary.
And the list just continues,
Definitely, medication makes you happy, creative and relaxed but that is not efficient in a place where the competition and race for results and success is the only goal. Thus, for the people in silicon valley, the most valuable benefit from yoga and meditation they get is high productivity and efficiency in personal life, social life, and work life. Yoga and meditation is a valuable tool especially in such stressful scenarios that cannot be afforded to ignored anymore.
