About Me
At one point, doctors said I would never ride a motorcycle in my life. But I did. And in 2010 when Harley Davidson launched in India, I was one of the first to ride, receiving a bike with an emblem that said ‘first to ride’!
Shares personal accounts of training the mind to overcome challenges
Ex-Managing Director at IDEO, the acclaimed design company
Internationally acclaimed Keynote and motivational speaker
Author of bestseller ‘Creativity Unleashed’
Addressed audiences of 1000+ people
25+ years of leadership experience
Coached several sportspeople and actors
Taught mindfulness across 5 continents
10,000+ hours of lifetime meditation experience
So What Do I Do?
During my stay in monasteries and also later, I had many deep and profound moments. I realized many things including the nature of my monkey mind. I also realized I was not my mind (monkey or otherwise). I had slowly developed a capability to simply rest in awareness and consciousness for long periods of time. And then when the mind did come into play again, it was so much better behaved. Like a trained monkey that would do my bidding (well, at least most of the time!) The thoughts that arose from an underlying healthy mind were so much more useful. One of those simple truths was that life is too important to be taken too seriously. Aha!
At one point, my purpose was revealed to me. I decided to dedicate myself to bringing the power of mindfulness to more and more people.
I had spent almost my entire professional life till then in fairly creative professions and had also been fortunate to work in some leadership roles. I realised what I had been training for all my life. All this time, Google had been teaching mindfulness to its employees and had goofily called the program Search Inside Yourself (instead of searching on Google). The program had become wildly successful and as they started teaching it to people and companies all over the world, they needed more teachers. They selected a batch of 100 teachers of some 30 different nationalities and somehow, I ended up qualifying (guess they wanted a few goofy people too).
Mindfulness or present moment awareness is by itself a wonderful practice. It is also a wonderful way of igniting creativity (I’ve written a whole book on this) and mindfulness brings out wise and compassionate leadership, the kind of leadership that the world needs in the 21st century.
And oh, mindfulness helps you live. Really live. As in, come alive!