MIND + BODY: The Garrison Institute, housed in a
former monastery along the Hudson River in Garrison, N.Y., takes what neuroscientists have learned about the effects of
mindfulness on cognition and behavior and applies it in meetings that address environ- mental policy, teaching, health care, and other issues.
The institute’s conferences attract diverse audiences, fromsci-
entists to teachers to real-estate developers—all of whomhave different vocabularies and different frames of reference.Areflec- tive environment can help promote a kind of “meeting of the minds,” Pearl said, encouraging participants to be open to other ways of approaching ideas. “It produces a very different out- come,” she said. “Once people have experienced it, they won- der, ‘Why are meetings held any other way?’”
Zen and the Art of Attention Marc Lesser has been connecting Zen to business practices ever since the 1980s, after spending a decade as a student and teacher at Bay Area monasteries. Lesser managed the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, in Carmel Valley, Calif., the oldest Japanese ֿS Buddhist
ֿto o Zen monastery in the United States, which in the
summer operates as a full-service resort. Then andnow, “people love coming to Tassajara,” Lesser said, in part because of the high quality of the service provided by its Zen students. Hisown “Aha!” moment came when he realized that the basic princi-
Participants’ learning outcomes from the meeting were later measured in a series of memory, language, comprehension, and listening tests, and compared with their performance fol- lowing a similar session conducted 12 days earlier without meditation.
ples, values, and practices that he’d spent years learning at Tas- sajara were deeply embedded in its business as a resort and con- tributed to its success. Lesser went back to school to earn an MBA, and today is
both chairman of the board of the San Francisco Zen Center and CEO of ZBA Associates (ZBA: “Zen of Business Admin- istration”), which provides Zen-influenced consulting, coach- ing, and speaking services to clients, including Google and Stanford University. When Lesser is talking to groups, he tends to use the term “mindfulness” to refer to self-reflection, rather than meditation. “Mindfulness has become hugely accepted, particularly throughout the health and wellness world,” he said. “All over the country, doctors, nurses, and aides are being trained in mindfulness practice for stress reduction, with great success.” When Lesser recently led a meeting for a group of 200 high-
powered CEOs, he stayed away from the word “meditation”— andfrom “mindfulness,” to avoid arousing any resistance. Instead, he invited attendees to focus on training their attention. He remindedthemthat asCEOs, they all understoodthe importance
Some highlights: Average improvement across all tasks: 12.5 percent Largest improvement for a single task: 117 percent Largest individual improvement across all tasks: 21 percent Smallest individual improvement: 2 percent.