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IT WAS THE SILENCE HEARD ’ROUND THE MEETINGS WORLD. In April, the Kyoto Convention Bureau (KCB) reported that attendees who took part in 10 minutes of meditation exercis- es at the beginning of meeting sessions improved their learn- ing by an average of 12.5 percent. Rev. Daiko Matsuyama, the Zen Buddhist priest who led the meditation for KCB in Kyoto, Japan, noted in a press release that people often arrive for meetings tired and stressed from travel and work. “If your tea cup is already filled,” he said, “there is no point in pouring more tea in it.” Matsuyama added: “If [attendees] are to take on board new information, they must first make room for it. Simple meditation exercises can make all the difference — enter the meeting in a calm state of mind, take a few deep breaths. The difference is profound, and it can also have a bril- liant effect in bringing out a lot of positive energy in you.”
‘Kind of New Age, Sort ofWeird’ Industry blogs and newsletters lit up with the study’s results, which James Kent, KCB’s international marketing coordina- tor, called “simply astonishing.” But they came as no surprise at all to those organizations that already integrate meditation and other principles of mindfulness into their meetings. “I can’t think of any meeting that wouldn’t be improved by meditation,” said Mary Pearl, Ph.D., CEO of the Garrison Institute, which —housed in a former monastery in Garrison, N.Y.—sponsors both spiritual retreats and secular conferences that explore how the results of contemplative practice can be effectively applied to improving education and medicine, and to the challenge of addressing climate change. Meditation sometimes is dismissed as “some kind of New
Age, sort of weird” practice, said Pearl, a wildlife biologist and former college dean who earlier this year was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). But meditation as a spiritual practice is rooted in cen- turies of tradition in Asian culture; and in recent years, neuro-
Mindfulness, By the Numbers
For the Kyoto Convention Bureau study measuring meditation’s effect on a meeting’s learning outcomes, 20 par-
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scientists have documented the positive changes in brain func- tion of people who practice mindfulness. The implications for meetings, Pearl said, are obvious. “Peo-
ple are so used to going to conferences where it’s snap, snap, snap,” she said. From multiple concurrent sessions—where attendees sometimes dash to the beginning of one session and the end of another—to exhibit-hall visits shoehorned in dur- ing breaks, “information is flowing in everywhere. And in the end, it’s exhausting.” One result of this “battering of too much information” is that it gets in the way of absorbing and assim- ilating new ideas. “You don’t get out of a meeting what you might have,” Pearl said, “had it beenmoremindfully planned.” At theGarrison Institute, participants take time to reflect not
just at the start of a meeting day, but throughout the event, including pausing for a few minutes between the timea speaker ends a presentation and the beginning ofQ&Aperiods. Often, Pearl said, “we are not even aware of what the important ele- ments are of what we’ve just heard, until there is some time to reflect.”
ticipants — all Japanese — began a meeting with 10 minutes of meditation. They were led by Rev. Daiko Matsuyama, a Zen Buddhist priest, who guided them in controlling their breathing and emptying their minds of distractions by counting. Only Matsuyama was a regular practitioner of meditation.
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