We’ve touched on the yoga benefits for coders and programmers and it seems this trend is continuing throughout Silicon Valley. Check out this Wired article on mindfulness and meditation at Google and other tech companies:

Chade-Meng Tan is perched on a chair, his lanky body folded into a half-lotus position. “Close your eyes,” he says. His voice is a hypnotic baritone, slow and rhythmic, seductive and gentle. “Allow your attention to rest on your breath: The in-breath, the out-breath, and the spaces in between.” We feel our lungs fill and release. As we focus on the smallest details of our respiration, other thoughts—of work, of family, of money—begin to recede, leaving us alone with the rise and fall of our chests. For thousands of years, these techniques have helped put practitioners into meditative states. Today is no different. There’s a palpable silence in the room. For a moment, all is still. I take another breath.

More than a thousand Googlers have been through Search Inside Yourself training. Another 400 or so are on the waiting list and take classes like Neural Self-Hacking and Managing Your Energy in the meantime. Then there is the company’s bimonthly series of “mindful lunches,” conducted in complete silence except for the ringing of prayer bells, which began after the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.

Many of the people who shaped the personal computer industry and the Internet were once members of the hippie counterculture. So an interest in Eastern faiths is all but hardwired into the modern tech world. Steve Jobs spent months searching for gurus in India and was married by a Zen priest. Before he became an American Buddhist pioneer, Jack Kornfield ran one of the first mainframes at Harvard Business School.

BUDDHISM TEACHES THAT WE ARE ALL INTERCONNECTED. AND NOWHERE IS THAT MORE APPARENT THAN ON FACEBOOK.

And if we start such training, Meng insists, we won’t just be helping ourselves. “My dream is to create the conditions for world peace, and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale,” he writes. “Fortunately, a methodology for doing that already exists … Most of us know it as meditation.”

Click to read more of this meditation and mindfulness benefits piece by Noah Shachtman.

Image via Google Commons

~Unknown

“Acceptance, done with any kind of hope, motive, expectation or goal, is not real acceptance – it is rejection in disguise, an attempt to escape the moment. True acceptance is a thrillingly fearless naked plunge into the unknown, a total alignment with all the creative energies of life itself, and an emergence into the vastness of the moment. There are no promises, for acceptance is timeless.”

~Jeff Foster

Via PeaceLoveYoga

We connected with SARDOGS Nepal on twitter and think the work they are doing is awesome.

Here is their mission statement and some work accomplished:

More than 70 % of our Nepalese people live from farming, fishing and day labor jobs. Many are spending their entire lives in remote area villages. When in these communities a person goes missing or a child is lost there is no search operation and no police coming to the poor peoples assistance. In times of natural disaster foreign aid concentrates in the mayor urban areas only and no one comes to the rescue of villagers. Average income of these people is often lesser than an US Dollar per day.  A policeman in Nepal earns just enough money to keep himself and his family afloat whit a salary that does not allow him to travel long distances or do volunteer search and rescue with local people. This is the grave difference with his colleague in a western country. Costs of living in Europe are far higher than in Nepal. In the eyes of a Nepali an European makes more than 100,000 Rupees a month which is about 900 EURO average at today’s exchange rate.

A Nepali Police Constable makes only 98 EURO per month! Who can expect a 24 hours search and rescue party from these poor men? When a child in Europe is lost an entire machinery starts moving and this is a very good organized thing. When a child in Nepal is lost, it is not even mentioned in the local press and considered bad karma.  When foreign mountaineers meet with an avalanche in Nepal, big equipment and big money moves into our country.  No one dead or alive is left behind, no matter the costs. This is a good thing of course.

Nepalese porter or day laborers get lost in the unforgiving nature of our mountains all the time!  It’s Karma again and people just show their resignation. We want to make a difference!  We can do this if we have many small supporters. Every small amount counts. We realize that this does not come forward in a big bulk from a large Donor Organization. These only deal with governments. Private Initiatives in Nepal are always ignored. It’s the simple people with small money that comes to the rescue of our locals so far. How nice would it be to have a Patron who takes care of the running costs of our Academy.  A private Donor Company who is social minded and gives back to the people! 

With the kind help of only a few sponsors so far we are accomplishing the following:

1. Training and keeping standby effective Nepalese Nation wide Disaster Response Units, Urban Search and Rescue Teams, Logistic standby mobile Medical Aid teams like a Medical First Response· Teams, Search & Rescue Dog Teams for missing people in Nepal·; · for individuals gone missing as well as for search & rescue of victims due to natural and man made disasters· inside Nepal and· in it’s neighboring friendly countries, if these request us officially for assistance.

2. Breeding and training of suitable search and rescue dogs of international known valuable pedigree and standards.

3. Establishing standby Mobile Disaster Response Units for times of need.

Much Respect. We hope to visit soon.

On May 25, 1948, a former United States Army flier entered the American Embassy in Paris, renounced his American citizenship and, as astonished officials looked on, declared himself a citizen of the world.

In the decades that followed, until the end of his long life last week, he remained by choice a stateless man — entering, leaving, being regularly expelled from and frequently arrested in a spate of countries, carrying a passport of his own devising, as the international news media chronicled his every move.

Garry Davis, a longtime peace advocate, former Broadway song-and-dance man and self-declared World Citizen No. 1, who is widely regarded as the dean of the One World movement, a quest to erase national boundaries that today has nearly a million adherents worldwide, died on Wednesday in Williston, Vt. He was 91, and though in recent years he had largely ceased his wanderings and settled in South Burlington, Vt., he continued to occupy the singular limbo between citizen and alien that he had cheerfully inhabited for 65 years.

Read more about Garry in this feature from the NYT.