![Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition] - Daniel Goleman](/cover_340306.jpg "Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition] - Daniel Goleman")
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.
I wish you well in entering Meng’s world and Meng’s mind, and more importantly, in discovering your own mind and heart and body and relationships, perhaps in new and undreamed-of ways. May your adventure here be deeply nurturing. And may it bring peace—inwardly and in every other way.
—Jon Kabat-Zinn
Look within; within is the fountain of all good.
—Marcus Aurelius
What does the happiest man in the world look like? He certainly does not look like me. In fact, he looks like a bald French guy in Tibetan robes. His name is Matthieu Ricard.
Matthieu was born and grew up in France. In 1972, after completing his Ph.D. in molecular genetics at the Institut Pasteur, he decided to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. I tell him that the reason he became a monk is because he could not join Google back in 1972—and the monk thing seemed like the next best career choice.
Matthieu’s career choice leads us to the story of how Matthieu became the “happiest man in the world.” When the Dalai Lama became interested in the science of meditation, he invited Tibetan Buddhist monks to participate in scientific studies. Matthieu was an obvious choice as a subject, as he was a bona fide scientist, understood both Western and Tibetan ways of thinking, and had decades of classical meditation training. Matthieu’s brain became the subject of numerous scientific studies.1
One of many measurements conducted on Matthieu was his level of happiness. There turns out to be a way to gauge happiness in the brain: by measuring the relative activation of a certain part of your left prefrontal cortex versus your right prefrontal cortex.2 The stronger the relative left-tilt is measured in a person, the more that person reports positive emotions, such as joy, enthusiasm, high energy, and so on. The reverse is also true; those with higher activity on the right report negative emotions. When Matthieu’s brain was scanned, his happiness measure was completely off the charts. He was, by far, the happiest person ever measured by science. Pretty soon, the popular media started nicknaming him the “happiest man in the world.” Matthieu himself is a little annoyed by that nickname, which creates an element of humorous irony.
Extreme happiness is not the only cool feat Matthieu’s brain can pull off. He became the first person known to science able to inhibit the body’s natural startle reflex—quick facial muscle spasms in response to loud, sudden noises. Like all reflexes, this one is supposed to be outside the realm of voluntary control, but Matthieu can control it in meditation. Matthieu also turns out to be an expert at detecting fleeting facial expression of emotions known as microexpressions. It is possible to train people to detect and read microexpressions, but Matthieu and one other meditator, both untrained, were measured in the lab and performed two standard deviations better than the norm, outperforming all the trained professionals.
The stories of Matthieu and other masters of contemplative practices are deeply inspiring. These masters demonstrate that each of us can develop an extraordinarily capable mind that is, first and foremost, profoundly peaceful, happy, and compassionate.
The methods for developing such an extraordinarily capable mind are accessible even to you and me. That’s what this book is about.
In Google, the effort to make these methods widely accessible began when we asked ourselves this question: what if people can also use contemplative practices to help them succeed in life and at work? In other words, what if contemplative practices can be made beneficial both to people’s careers and to business bottom lines? Anything that is both good for people and good for business will spread widely. If we can make this work, people around the world can become more successful at achieving their goals. I believe the skills offered here will help create greater peace and happiness in your life and the lives of those around you, and that peace and happiness can ultimately spread around the world.
To promote innovation, Google generously allows its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time working on projects outside their core jobs. A group of us used our “20 percent time” to work on what became Search Inside Yourself. We ended up creating a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum with the help of a very diverse group of extremely talented people, including a Zen master, a CEO, a Stanford University scientist, and Daniel Goleman, the guy who literally wrote the book on emotional intelligence. It sounds almost like the prelude to a good joke (“A Zen master and a CEO walked into a room . . .”).
The name of the mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum is Search Inside Yourself. Like many things in Google, that name started as a joke but finally stuck. I eventually became the first engineer in Google’s history to leave the engineering department and join People Ops (what we call our human resources function) to manage this and other personal-growth programs. I am amused that Google lets an engineer teach emotional intelligence. What a company.
There turned out to be unexpected benefits to having an engineer like me teach a course like Search Inside Yourself. First, being very skeptical and scientifically minded, I would be deeply embarrassed to teach anything without a strong scientific basis, so Search Inside Yourself was solidly grounded in science. Second, having had a long career as an early engineer at Google, I had credible experience in applying emotional intelligence practices in my day job as I created products, managed teams, asked the boss for raises, and stuff. Hence, Search Inside Yourself had been stress-tested and applicable in daily life right out of the box. Third, my engineering-oriented brain helped me translate teachings from the language of contemplative traditions into language that compulsively pragmatic people like me can process. For example, where traditional contemplatives would talk about “deeper awareness of emotion,” I would say “perceiving the
