Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

I won’t tell you about the talks I wound up giving at Google or about my colleagues, who Meng talks about in the book, who also gave lectures in that series. They are all on YouTube, which is part of Google. And I won’t tell you about the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) classes at Google that Meng instituted there and that have been ongoing now for years. Nor will I tell you about the mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program, Search Inside Yourself, that Meng developed in parallel, with a team of remarkable people who originally came to visit because it was Google and because he was Meng. That is what this book is about.

What I would like to tell you about is what I discovered about Meng from reading this book, and what you might want to keep in mind as you make your way through it—because this is not simply a book but also a curriculum, a pathway you can follow with specific exercises and guidance, a meditative approach to relating to others and to yourself that, if you engage in it systematically, is profoundly transformative and freeing—and also hopefully fun. In fact, if you discover, after giving it a fair try, that it is not fun or doesn’t at least give you a sense of being personally compelling and potentially nurturing of what is deepest and best in yourself, perhaps it is not the right moment for you to undertake the entirety of the Search Inside Yourself program. But the seeds will inexorably have been planted just by reading the book and playing around with the exercises in whatever ways make sense to you at the moment, an open-ended experiment and adventure in mental and emotional fitness and its applications in your life, and in your work and calling.

What I discovered, and you will too, is that, all kidding aside, Meng is a very serious guy, and he is absolutely committed, as you will soon see, to mindfulness, creating the conditions for world peace, and making peacefulness the default mode on this planet, at least among the human species. And he is serious about using the platform and the power of Google to make it happen. I am guessing that was his strategy from the very beginning, in inviting meditation teachers, Buddhist scholars, and scientists who were studying contemplative practices from both the clinical and neuroscientific perspectives, and their applications in the fields of medicine and health, education, and beyond to give these talks at Google. It was a way of setting the stage for his plan to tip the world in the direction of peace. First Google, then the world.

I get the sense that Meng is so serious about his vision that he knows that taking something as important as mindfulness and its potential to transform the world too seriously would not necessarily be a good thing. So he leavens it with humor that is deadly (or maybe I should say “alively”) serious. Meng’s sense of humor may be an acquired taste, but I think that in reading the book, you, the reader, will quickly acquire that taste, and along with it and much more importantly, a taste for what it is pointing to, a taste of your own deep interior resources for acting in your own best interest by realizing that your interest is best served by recognizing and nurturing the interests of others at the same time.

This is what mindfulness-based emotional intelligence is all about. This is why it is so important, in so many ways, to literally and metaphorically search inside yourself. What is here to be discovered, or uncovered, is the full spectrum of who you already are as a person and the realization of how embedded you are in the multidimensional warp and woof of humanity and all life. And because mindfulness is not about getting someplace else—but rather about being fully where you already are and realizing the power of your full presence and awareness right now, in this moment—Meng’s program is really about finding rather than searching. It is about dis-covering, re-covering, and un-covering that full dimensionality of your being that is already yours and then developing and refining it through systematic cultivation and practice. From there, in combination with what you most love and with your imagination and innate creativity, it is bound to manifest in the world in any number of hopefully skillful ways, in the service of our mutual well-being and happiness.

If this sounds like a utopia, it isn’t. But if it sounds like a practical strategy for a more peaceful world, inwardly and outwardly, individually and collectively, locally and globally—well, it is. And that is exactly how Meng intends to play it. Having developed this program at Google and road tested it in that workplace environment, he is now ready, with this book and what will follow from it, to make the program available to the world in the spirit of open sourceware.

The curriculum of Search Inside Yourself is free. It can be used in many ways, in many venues, as you will see for yourself. The limits of its usefulness or adaptability are really only the limits of your imagination and embodiment. The Search Inside Yourself curriculum rests on an ocean of meditative wisdom practices that cultivate mindfulness, loving kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity, embodied presence, emotional intelligence, and many other fundamental aspects of our minds and hearts and bodies that are also available to you once you enter through this portal. As Meng makes abundantly clear, his aim is to “make the benefits of meditation accessible to humanity” and as accepted in the mainstream as the lifelong benefits of exercise. And, even more importantly, to ensure, to whatever degree possible, that they are implemented, lived, and enacted by each of us who might be touched by this invitation to search inside ourselves.

To this end, Meng has laid out a well-designed and well-tested pathway for the development and application of emotional intelligence in the workplace and at home. It is founded on cutting-edge science and the well-established track record of research in emotions and emotional intelligence, the importance of optimism, and the power of compassion and kindness as well as the growing neuroscientific study of mindfulness and compassion. This research is showing that significant benefits of meditation can be observed after only eight weeks of training. Richie Davidson and I did a study with a number of our colleagues showing that people in a work setting who practiced mindfulness in the form of MBSR for eight weeks showed a shift in their emotional set point in the prefrontal cortex in a direction of greater emotional intelligence, and in the same direction as monks who had practiced for over ten thousand hours—evidence that you don’t have to become a monastic, or quit your job, or abandon your family to benefit from meditation. In fact, work and family are perfect environments for working with your own mind and body, cognitions, and emotions in the ways Meng describes here. Before that study was done, it was generally thought that one’s emotional set point was fixed before adulthood and could not be changed. Our results showed that the brain responds to this kind of meditative training by reorganizing its activity in the direction of greater emotional balance. Other studies have shown that the brain reorganizes its very structure as well, an example of the phenomenon known as neuroplasticity.

It turns out that Meng is indeed a unique and skillful, if way out-of-the-box, meditation teacher, as depicted in the tongue-in-cheek cartoons. He is the first to say that he learned it all from others. He certainly has great teachers and collaborators in the form of Dan Goleman, Mirabai Bush, Norman Fischer, and others. But Meng himself puts it all together here in a very effective way and documents his sources assiduously. If Search Inside Yourself is a bit light on the time recommended for the actual formal meditation practices, that is by design. Once one has tasted the practice for oneself, the motivation is very likely to be there to extend the time of formal practice, not to achieve a special state, but to simply rest in awareness itself, outside of time altogether. This is the practice of non-doing, of openhearted presencing, of pure awareness, coextensive with and inseparable from compassion. It is not an escape from life. On the contrary, the practice of mindfulness is a gateway into the experience of interconnectedness and interdependence out of which stem emotionally intelligent actions, new ways of being, and ultimately greater happiness, clarity, wisdom, and kindness—at work and in the world. One small shift in the way we each conduct ourselves, and the crystal lattice structure of the world is already different. In this way, we are the world, and when we take responsibility for our small but not insignificant part of it, the whole is already different—the flowering we manifest emotionally and in every other way of some importance, potentially enormous.