At the beginning of the month, I had the opportunity to attend the seminar Search Inside Yourself. It was initiated by Meng, a software developer at Google, and the seminar can now also be attended outside of Google. Many seminar participants report that it has changed their lives, and some have taken completely new paths after the seminar. When I read something like that, I get skeptical at first, because it sounds very esoteric and anything but attractive to me. However, there is also scientific evidence that meditation and mindfulness exercises have a positive influence on the brain, especially on the ability to concentrate. It’s worth a try, I thought to myself. Unlike my colleagues in Mountain View, I had the seminar several days in a row and not individual days over several weeks. It was two and a half very intense days. I won’t tell you everything about the training, there is also a very good book about it, which is better in every way than what I can write here (by the way, the book I bought in 2012 had moved me to take the seminar). But there are also a few differences to the book, the most important of which is certainly that you can’t help but do the exercises during the seminar. I particularly remember one meditation exercise that has to do with the concept of “kindness” (most likely to be translated as kindness or charity). You sit opposite another participant, in my case it was a young colleague with whom I had never spoken before. We should memorize each other’s faces and then close our eyes. And then came sentences like:
- Your counterpart has a body and a mind, just like you.
- Your counterpart has feelings and thoughts, just like you.
- Your counterpart has felt sadness, disappointment, hurt and confusion in his life, just like you.
- Your counterpart wants to be free of fear, pain and suffering, just like you.
- Your counterpart wants to be healthy, loved and happy, just like you.
- Now we want to make a wish for your counterpart:
- I wish my counterpart the strength, the resources and the emotional support to navigate through the difficulties in life.
- I wish my counterpart to be free from pain and suffering.
- I wish my counterpart to be happy.
- Because my counterpart is a human being, just like me.