Engineering Mindfulness: Translating Contemplative Practice from Silicon Valley by Katie Temple A dissertation accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Dissertation Committee: Gerald Berk, Chair Anita Chari, Core Member Joseph Lowndes, Core Member Matthew Norton, Institutional Representative University of Oregon Fall 2024 2 © 2024 Katie Temple 3 DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Katie Temple Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Title: Engineering Mindfulness: Translating Contemplative Practice from Silicon Valley In this dissertation project, I examine the multiple relational processes establishing modern mindfulness as a legitimate corporate service in the twenty-first century United States. Existing literatures explain the industry’s formation through profit maximization yet growing evidence challenges the programs’ economic benefits, leaving our understandings of this stabilization underdeveloped. Using news stories, popular and academic texts, and in-depth interviews with corporate mindfulness trainers, I trace the cultural history of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI)—an educational nonprofit founded at Google and the first corporate mindfulness program in the U.S. I argue that SIYLI’s curriculum served as a critical site where Buddhist practice and corporate work were reconciled. Using formal lectures and partner exercises, SIYLI’s courses stabilized Buddhist practices such as lovingkindness meditation into a coherent corporate service. After the 2008 financial crisis, SIYLI expanded beyond Silicon Valley to sectors like manufacturing where it became a tool for employees to adapt to finance-driven restructurings. Detached from its Silicon Valley origins, where engineers used mindfulness to foster peer collaboration, mindfulness associated itself with the nexus corporation to help workforces metabolize precarious work conditions. On the ground, however, instructors encountered an “everyday politics” of workplace mindfulness where, in some settings, the practice reinforced corporate control, while in others, it offered the potential for more democratic and embodied forms 4 of contemplation. This project contributes to debates on the financialization of work in the contemporary United States 5 CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Katie Temple EDUCATION Ph.D. Political Science, University of Oregon, December 2024. M.S. Political Science, University of Oregon, June 2019. B.S. Political Science, Southwestern University, 2017, Phi Beta Kappa. TEACHING EXPERIENCE Sole Instructor of Record (University of Oregon) Feminist Political Theory (400 level, 25 students, Summer 2023; Winter 2024) Women and Politics (300 level, 65 students, Spring 2023; Spring 2024) GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS 2022 William C. Mitchell Graduate Summer Research Scholarship, Awarded by the Department of Political Science, University of Oregon. $4,000. 2021 Graduate Research Fellowship, “Making Work Work,” Awarded by the Wayne Morse Center, University of Oregon. $3,000. 2017 Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon. AWARDS AND HONORS 2021 Klonoski Teaching Award, Awarded by the Political Science Department, University of Oregon. $500. CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 2024 Tracing Mindfulness, Financialization, and Uncertainty,” presented at the Western Political Science Association Conference, Vancouver B.C., April 2024. 6 PUBLICATIONS “Gender,” in Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science, Vol. 1, ed. Clyde W. Barrow (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.), 2024. UNIVERSITY SERVICE Member, Political Science Graduate Council, University of Oregon, 2019-2021. Chair, Political Science Graduate Research Workshop, University of Oregon, 2019-2021. Union Steward, Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF), 2018-2020 7 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am so grateful to the many who held me up during this process. First, thank you to Professor Gerald Berk for his mentorship and friendship, and for the many cherished conversations in his garden. I want to express gratitude to Anita Chari for her loyalty. Thank you to Joe Lowndes for his kindness and support. Thank you to Olivia Atkinson, Alex Farrington, Mary Follo, Dustin Ellis, Jess Reanne, Parichehr Kazemi, Brett Scott, Sarah Stach, Selina Vega, and Esteban Woo Kee for making the unbearable bearable; to my mother and father Dee and Janell and my sister Alex; and to the Willamette National Forest. 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................................... 9 I. INTRODUCTION: CORPORATE MINDFULNESS IN THE UNITED STATES ................. 10 Political and Social Theories of Modern Mindfulness .............................................................. 12 Becoming Corporate .................................................................................................................. 19 Mindfulness Programs as an Ongoing Process ......................................................................... 22 Engineering Mindfulness ........................................................................................................... 28 II. CHAPTER ONE: BUILDING THE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEDITATION ......................... 30 The Meditative Neurosciences .................................................................................................. 31 Search Inside Yourself .............................................................................................................. 40 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 51 III. CHAPTER TWO: ADAPTING MINDFULNESS OUTSIDE OF SILICON VALLEY ....... 53 Twenty-First Century Silicon Valley ........................................................................................ 54 Mindfulness & Silicon Valley ................................................................................................... 58 Diffusing Mindfulness Outside Silicon Valley ......................................................................... 61 From Silicon Valley to the Corporate U.S. ............................................................................... 65 Mindfulness in the Nexus Corporation ...................................................................................... 68 Investment Banking ................................................................................................................... 70 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 74 IV. CHAPTER THREE: THE POLITICAL POTENTIALS OF WORKPLACE MINDFULNESS ........................................................................................................................... 76 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 76 Mindfulness and Perception ...................................................................................................... 77 Cases and Methodologies .......................................................................................................... 83 Negotiating Mindfulness On-the-Ground .................................................................................. 85 Adaptations by SIYLI’s Instructors ........................................................................................... 88 The Local Politics of Workplace Mindfulness .......................................................................... 92 V. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................ 94 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 94 What Does Mindfulness Teach Us About Work in the U.S.? ................................................... 96 The U.S. Wellness Industry ....................................................................................................... 97 The Normative Stakes of Workplace Mindfulness ................................................................... 98 REFERENCES CITED ............................................................................................................... 101 9 LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page Figure 1. Davidson & Ricard in EEG lab at University of Wisconsin…………….…... 38 Figure 2. Ricard monitors brainwaves during lovingkindness meditation………….…. 38 Figure 3. General Mills employees participate in guided meditation………………….. 69 10 I. INTRODUCTION: CORPORATE MINDFULNESS IN THE UNITED STATES After the 2007-09 financial crash, mindfulness became a mainstream employee offering in U.S. corporations. Companies like JP Morgan Chase and Salesforce provided mindfulness- based workshops and constructed meditation rooms in their headquarters.1 By 2015, mindfulness had emerged a common employee benefit for well-paid professionals in high technology and finance. “I am being stalked by meditating evangelists,” one New York Times journalist wrote in 2015. “They approach with the fervor of a football fan attacking a keg at a tailgate party.”2 The question is how? How were mindfulness and meditation made into such a dominant corporate service in the early twenty-first century? What does its formation reveal about rising corporate power and socioeconomic inequality in the contemporary United States? At first glance, mindfulness and meditation appear at odds with corporate life. Rooted in modern Buddhist traditions, mindfulness involves the nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations in the present moment. Since its entry into twenty-first-century mainstream U.S. culture, mindfulness and meditation have been adopted into secular domains including education, healthcare, government, and business. While often marketed to reduce stress, Buddhist social theories also conceive of mindful awareness as a spiritual or ethical practice. Mindful attention of the present moment enhances one’s perceptions of the social world, including the deep interdependence between all living things. Mindfulness was integrated into corporate life after the 2007-09 financial crash, a historical period of crisis and intensifying social inequalities, but the exact reasons for its appeal 1 Burton and Effinger, “To Make A Killing on Wall Street, Start Meditating”; Kim, “Salesforce Put A Meditation Room on Every Floor of Its New Tower Because of Buddhist Monks”; Kelly, “JP Morgan Is Channeling Its Inner Google With an Eco-Friendly New Headquarters Offering Yoga and Meditation Spaces.” 2 Grant, “Can We End the Meditation Madness?” 11 are not immediately clear. Existing literatures attribute its popularity among executives, investors, and entrepreneurs to its cost-saving benefits. Neoliberal accounts in organizational studies (as well as its corporate advocates) suggest that mindfulness increases productivity and reduces indirect organizational costs like healthcare expenses.3 Cultural critiques, meanwhile, emerged in popular media around 2013 condemning the corporate co-optation of mindfulness for productivity and profit.4 Yet research has begun questioning the economic benefits of mindfulness programs altogether. Mindfulness programs are reportedly costly, inefficient, and make no impact on organizational performance,5 making their widespread popularity not entirely self-evident. Nevertheless, in the period following the global financial crisis, mindfulness and meditation emerged as an employee wellness perk, a leadership philosophy, and trading strategy. A cottage industry of corporate mindfulness trainers emerged who catered to corporate clients like General Mills, Ford, and Goldman Sachs. Media coverage from outlets like Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, and Bloomberg was largely positive and uncritical. Routledge published its first Companion to Mindfulness at Work 6 in 2021, firmly establishing its position in the corporate mainstream. How? How were Buddhist practice transformed into coherent corporate services within the U.S. corporation? What kinds of power dynamics did these practices brush up against? And what does their wholesale adoption teach us about recent transformations in U.S. political economy? 3 Gelles, Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out; Dhiman, The Routledge Companion to Mindfulness at Work. 4 Purser and Loy, “Beyond McMindfulness.” 5 Goyal et al., “Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-Being: A Systematic Review and Meta- Analysis”; Hafenbrack and Vohs, “Mindfulness Meditation Impairs Task Motivation but Not Performance”; Berinato, “Mindfulness Is Demotivating.” 6 Dhiman, The Routledge Companion to Mindfulness at Work. 12 Political and Social Theories of Modern Mindfulness Despite the extensive research on mindfulness in modern organizational life, including in religious studies, critical social theory, and sociology, the historical formation of the corporate mindfulness industry remains underexplored. Below, I synthesize several contributions from existing literature including mindfulness as a medical practice as well as an ideological formation. Despite this work, as I demonstrate, the exact processes stabilizing Buddhism with financial capitalism remain underexamined. Buddhism’s Adaptation to Modernity Research in religious studies has explored the historical interaction between Buddhism and modernity in the previous 150 years. Buddhism, a classical religion beginning in contemporary India around the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.E., spread outside Asia into Western countries through travelers and missionaries in the 1800s.7 According to religious scholar David McMahan, in The Making of Buddhist Modernism, religious traditions like Buddhism adapted to new contexts based on what “resonated” with dominant social practices of the time.8 Practices associated with what McMahan calls “Buddhist modernism,” the dominant contemporary form of Buddhism, were shaped by European Enlightenment values like the prioritization of individual authority, empirical observation, and freedom of thought.9 McMahan suggests that features commonly associated with modern mindfulness, such as the focus on intuition, are more indicative of Western intellectual culture than classical Buddhism. These hybrid forms were most apparent in the U.S. during the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. Eastern 7 Coleman, The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition, 56. 8 McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism, 15. 9 McMahan, 18. 13 spiritualities like Zen Buddhism merged with the artistic cultures of San Francisco and New York City.10 In the twenty-first century, mindfulness and meditation emerged as secular stress reduction techniques. Literature on mindfulness by Asian and American Buddhist teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh and Jack Kornfield as well as the rise of mindfulness apps like Calm and Headspace made mindfulness into a formidable consumer market.11 Within dominant discourses, religious studies scholar Jeff Wilson notes that classical Buddhist concepts like karma or nirvana were “decontextualized” from their original religious, cultural, and historical contexts.12 This detachment took place through the medicalization of mindfulness by figures like Jon Kabat-Zinn. Kabat-Zinn, professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, developed his mindfulness-based stress reduction program (MBSR) in 1979. This eight-week MBSR course uses secularized practices like body scans, breath work, and yoga postures to improve stress and chronic pain.13 Medicalized models of mindfulness were tailored for secular, non-Buddhists, which helped it gain entryway into like hospitals, clinics, and corporations. This popularity was the result of “the contemplatives,”14 a group of elite scientists, educators, and spiritual practitioners that integrated contemplative practices into broader U.S. society since the 1970s. In The Mindful Elite, sociologist Jaime Kucinskas traces the contemplative movement to dialogues between Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute, a nonprofit founded by Francisco Varela in the late 1980s.15 Rooted in 10 Coleman, The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition, 62. 11 Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture, 147–48. 12 Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture. 13 Van Dam et al., “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation,” 45. 14 Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out. 15 Van Dam et al., “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation,” 37. 14 the modern Buddhist tradition, the contemplative movement used practices like mindfulness, body scans, tai chi, yoga, and numerous types of meditation included transcendental, breathing, and compassion16 for personal and social benefit. As with other spiritualized forms of mindfulness, the underlying assumption was that increasing awareness of one’s thoughts as well as of life’s interconnectedness positively shaped a person’s development. Kabat-Zinn, as well as other “institutional entrepreneurs,”17 as described by Kucinskas, institutionalized these practices across the U.S. using “consensus-based tactics.” With data- driven evidence, this professional movement worked within the status quo and assimilated into dominant institutions. Religiously focused literatures like Kucinskas’s contribute to our understandings of mindfulness’s adaptation into modern, institutional life. However, they provide few tools to make sense of these interactions in the context of the financial sector’s dominance in the U.S. In The Mindful Elite, for instance, Kucinskas’s account of Google’s Search Inside Yourself mindfulness program18 examines connections to the wider secular contemplative movement but without an in-depth analysis of how U.S. corporate and financial dominance influenced the practice. Critical Theories of Mindfulness As Buddhism gained visibility in the United States, cultural critiques analyzed mindfulness in the context of neoliberal domination. In 2001, five years after Time Magazine’s feature “Buddhism in America,”19 philosopher Slavoj Žižek predicted “Western Buddhism’s” 16 Bruce et al., “Contemplative Practices: A Strategy to Improve Health and Reduce Disparities.” 17 Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out. 18 Kucinskas, 59–60. 19 Van Biema, “Buddhism in America.” 15 rise as the “hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.”20 Western forms of meditation, he argued, “’let oneself go,’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process.”21 Once mindfulness programs like Google’s had matured, a so- called “mindfulness backlash”22 emerged in popular media outlets. In 2013, scholars Ronald Purser and David Loy published an article titled “Beyond McMindfulness”23 in The Huffington Post critiquing its workplace usage. “Savvy business consultants,” they argued, had stripped Buddhism of its “original liberative and transformative purpose,”24 reducing it to a secular practice curated for corporate needs. Critical scholarship on employer-sponsored mindfulness continued, conceptualizing capitalism as a discursive or cultural logic operating beneath conscious awareness. Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness25 critiqued workplace mindfulness programs for optimizing workers’ productivity rather than spiritual development. The courses produced a “mindful subject” with “eyes closed” who’s “blissfully detached from the outside world”26 while also “willfully productive and responsible for their own self-care.”27 Drawing from Foucault’s concept of biopower, Zack Walsh detailed the cultivation of neoliberal subjectivity through mindfulness’s “internal conditioning processes.”28 In these contexts mindfulness promoted a form of neoliberal individualism: by instructing workers to meditate and focus “on the present moment,” social problems like stagnant wages were internalized as personal responsibilities. This was tied to 20 Zizek, “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism.” 21 Zizek. 22 North, “The Mindfulness Backlash”; Rocha, “The Dark Knight of the Soul.” 23 Purser and Loy, “Beyond McMindfulness.” 24 Purser and Loy. 25 Purser, McMindfulness. 26 Purser, 22. 27 Purser, Forbes, and Burke, “Preface,” xiii. 28 Walsh, “Mindfulness Under Neoliberal Governmentality: Critiquing the Operation of Biopower in Corporate Mindfulness and Constructing Queer Alternatives.” 16 neoliberal changes in U.S. political economy like deregulation and reductions in social safety nets. Workplace wellness programs, though marketed as “win-win”29 solutions for both employees and employers, ultimately reinforced the existing hierarchies between workers and owners. These wellness narratives are suspect, as Marx’s theory of class conflict suggests, because the interests of capital and labor are fundamentally irreconcilable. Despite these insights, structuralist approaches like Purser’s attribute corporate mindfulness’s formation to the core logics of profit maximization. These accounts do reveal how mindfulness sediments existing relations between capital and labor, but studies have already challenged narratives about mindfulness’s positive return on investment. By focusing on mindfulness as a tool of thought control, these accounts also dismiss workers’ epistemic authority. Indeed, related accounts describe corporate mindfulness as a form of “delusion,”30 an “ideological cloak,”31 an “ideological lubricant,”32 or form of “thought control”33 that reinforced corporate interests instead of personal liberation. Even when workplace mindfulness generated empowerment in these literatures, such as quitting or demanding better working conditions,34 they were framed as the exception rather than the rule. 29 Nopper and Zelickson, Wellness Capitalism: Employee Health, the Benefits Maze, and Worker Control. 30 Driver, “From Empty Speech to Full Speech? Reconceptualizing Spirituality in Organizations Based on Psychoanalytically-Grounded Understanding of the Self.” 31 Kamoche and Pinnington, “Managing People ‘Spiritually’: A Bourdieusian Critique.” 32 Drougge, “Notes Toward A Coming Backlash: Mindfulness as an Opiate of the Middle Classes.” 33 Carrette and King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. 34 Driver, “From Empty Speech to Full Speech? Reconceptualizing Spirituality in Organizations Based on Psychoanalytically-Grounded Understanding of the Self”; Islam, Holm, and Karjalainen, “Sign of the Times: Workplace Mindfulness as an Empty Signifier”; Cortois, “Expressive Individualism in the New Spirit of Capitalism: Mindfulness and Outdoor Management Development.” 17 Capitalism and Well-Being Sociological literature draws more attention to the social processes producing the corporate mindfulness industry. This included work on authenticity and its relation to economic production but tended to narrowly focus on the commodified product itself. In their seminal work, The New Spirit of Capitalism,35 French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello build on Max Weber’s premise from The Protestant Ethic that capitalist economic systems, inherently absurd, require a justificatory ideology —a “spirit”—to keep people participating in the capital accumulation process. For example, their analysis of French management texts revealed “network capitalism,” the dominant spirit in the 1990s, repurposed the aesthetics of 1960s radical politics, such as freedom of thought and egalitarianism. These features emerged through organizational culture including flat management hierarchies and a focus on personal “authenticity” via wellness programs or employee resource groups. Boltanski and Chiapello conceive of the relation between social and economic domains with more fluidity, drawing attention to social critique and other forms of social agency that influence the capital accumulation process. Aspects of their analysis, as well, speak to mindfulness’s proliferation in Silicon Valley but they omit discussion about how capital accumulation commodifies which authentic practices. In their discussion of the “commodification of the authentic,” they illustrate how corporate managers “penetrate[d] domains (tourism, cultural activities, personal services, leisure, etc.) which had hitherto remained comparatively external to mass commodity circulation”36 but the local level conditions of this commodification are neglected. 35 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 36 Boltanski and Chiapello, 446–47. 18 Contemporary social research has continued to explore the cultural shifts between capitalism and authentic life via wellness and self-care. In her chapter “The Madness of Mindfulness” from Natural Causes,37 journalist Barbara Ehrenreich draws criticism against workplace mindfulness and its origins in Silicon Valley. She describes such programs like Google’s Search Inside Yourself as “Buddhism sliced up, commodified, and drained of all reference to the transcendent” for mental fitness.38 By drawing parallels between mindfulness and other “biohacking” movements like dietary supplements, Ehrenreich overlooks the interactions making mindfulness legible in Silicon Valley in the first place. In The Happiness Industry, British sociologist William Davies, likewise, examines the wellness consulting circuit as part of the broader “happiness industry.” Drawing from the utilitarian philosophical tradition, he analyzes the measurement of positive affects like “happiness” created by modern governments and research bodies. Davies’s historical account of modern happiness sciences is illuminating but, like other criticisms, reverts to framing workplace mindfulness programs as an instance of capitalism’s core logics scaled down. The programs are understood as micro-level replications of capitalism’s broader principles. For instance, Davies notes the wellness circuit, a “cocktail of neuroscientific rumours and Buddhist meditation practices” promotes “one ideal form of human existence: hardworking, happy, healthy, and, above all, rich.”39 Such programs help “expand corporate rationality further into everyday life” so “simply going for a walk can be viewed as a calculated act of productivity management.”40 37 Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live. 38 Ehrenreich. 39 Davies, The Happiness Industry, 77. 40 Davies, 78. 19 Davies’s account focuses on mindfulness as an instrument for profit maximization, overlooking the other contextual factors in its adoption. Ultimately, these literatures in religious studies, critical theory, and sociology contribute to our understanding of corporate mindfulness as an institutional project through “entrepreneurs” like Jon Kabat-Zinn, as well as the social and political hierarchies embedded in workplace wellness. Still left unexamined, however, are methods, ideas, and practices through which Buddhist practice was made into a coherent corporate service after the 2007-09 financial crash. The existing focus on profit maximization alone cannot explain its widespread capture. Becoming Corporate This dissertation project examines the multiple, relational processes that stabilized Buddhism inside U.S. corporate life in the twenty-first century. I will argue that corporate mindfulness programs were constructed and legitimized in Silicon Valley in part through the efforts of Google software engineer Chade-Meng Tan. Tan’s internal mindfulness courses at Google evolved into a powerful educational nonprofit called the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) in 2012. I argue that SIYLI served as a powerful site of reconciliation for Buddhism and corporate practice. The curriculum it created was supported by neuroscientists who used brain scanning technologies throughout the 2000s to study meditation. Their work reconstructed the psyche as a complex circuitry of nerve cells that meditation optimized. These constructs helped corporate mindfulness first develop in Google’s local high tech startup culture in the early 2000s, where corporate mindfulness was introduced to enhance creative work among software engineers within Silicon Valley’s flat organizational forms. 20 Following the 2007-09 crash, however, SIYLI expanded beyond Silicon Valley to sectors like investment banking, manufacturing, and retail. Here, mindfulness courses shifted focus: no longer purposed for high tech’s creative demands, it emerged as a market-based technique for employees to cope with precarious working conditions. SIYLI-certified trainers were pivotal to diffusing Tan’s curriculum into a wide range of corporate clients. Finally, through in-depth interviews with SIYLI’s corporate mindfulness instructors, I demonstrate how these trainers adapted, negotiated, and at times contested the standardized curriculum, identifying moments for mindfulness practice to open up democratic possibilities among participants. Why study the corporate elite? What makes Google engineers’ interest in mindfulness worthy of analysis? Examining workplace mindfulness from an anthropological perspective offers a window into understanding evolving corporate forms and work processes in the U.S. As I will argue, corporate mindfulness programs were embedded within the broader shift toward shareholder capitalism, the dominant economic model in the U.S. since the 1980s. This new normative theory of the form prioritized maximizing shareholder value for investors, completely rearranging work organization. Shareholder capitalism is closely related with the rise of finance in the late twentieth century. This took place in the 1970s and 80s, according to Greta Krippner, as U.S. regulators eased federal restrictions, making financial investments the dominant source of corporate activity in the U.S.41 Cultural anthropologist Karen Ho defines as these processes of financialization as the growing translation of financial modes of understanding into other social dimensions like politics, the environment, education, work, and retirement; all of which form in contingent and 41 Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. 21 uneven ways.42 These conversion processes have shaped day to day life—like retirement security—in taken-for-granted ways. For example, retirement security, once sponsored in-house by employers, shifted to individual 401(k) plans, a finance-based form of individual savings, in the 1980s and 90s.43 Due to this financialization, individual 401(k)s were put into serious peril during the financial crash and suffered substantial losses.44 This is part of a broader tension between prioritizing financial dominance over workers’ material security in the contemporary U.S. Today, the U.S. economy is immersed in these processes of financialization that corporate mindfulness emerged within. The shift to shareholder capitalism contributed to historic levels of socioeconomic inequality in the United States.45 In this context, studying corporate mindfulness as a cultural practice offers insight into growing financial dominance and its reconfiguration of work processes in the U.S. As shareholder capitalism established dominance, so too did the “nexus corporation,” a corporate form identified by U.S. business historian Gerald Davis.46 Unlike traditional corporations, which offered stable, long-term employment and comprehensive benefits, the nexus corporation conceived of the firm as a “nexus” of at-will employment contracts. In this model, corporate activities are increasingly attuned to fluctuations in financial markets. Corporations were restructured through mergers, acquisitions, downsizings, and layoffs, all driven by share price valuation. Long-term employment was replaced with short-term, temporary work. In industries like service and retail, unpredictable scheduling and sudden layoffs grew more common, leaving workers increasingly insecure about their futures. 42 Ho, “Anthropology of Finance,” 171. 43 Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America, 133. 44 Munnell, “The Financial Crisis and Restoring Retirement Security.” 45 Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America; Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. 46 Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America. 22 Corporate mindfulness reached its height in 2015 coinciding with this prolonged drop off in job security. Situated in these historical shifts—shareholder capitalism and the reorganization of work through the nexus corporation—corporate mindfulness becomes more than a flash-in- the-pan wellness technique. It serves as a cultural marker of finance’s growing influence over workers’ power and autonomy. Mindfulness Programs as an Ongoing Process How was modern mindfulness, a spiritual contemplative practice, reworked into a sellable corporate service in the 2010s? Existing literatures tend to focus on narratives of profit maximization for explanation, analyzing mindfulness services as a commodified product instead of the associations and processes merging them. To address this gap, I draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives including Jane Bennett’s work on process philosophy as well as insights from constructivist sociology. From this, I build a cultural anthropological approach to study corporate mindfulness as a practice of reconciliation between the heterogeneous life practices of modern Buddhism and financialization. Jane Bennett articulates a process-oriented philosophy in her work Influx and Efflux (2020).47 Drawing from the new materialist tradition, Bennett uses Walt Whitman’s writings to explore democratic practice and culture. Drawing from Whitman, she examines how bodily postures and configurations can generate moods conducive to democratic practice.48 Her work breaks down conventional boundaries between body and mind and, instead, illustrates their borders as porous with fluid movement between them. 47 Bennett, Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman. 48 Bennett, 16. 23 Bennett’s concepts of process apply to the larger social world, where movement or action occur beyond the typical bounds of human-centered agency. She describes the social world “from within an ongoing process,” using what she calls “middle-voice verbs”49 found in Whitman’s work. These verbs represent actions “undertaken within a field of activities, rather than decisions of subjects who enter a field either to do something (active voice) or to be acted upon (the passive voice).”50 This notion of agencies, as neither fully controlled by agents nor entirely passive, directed me away from normative judgments about who or what controlled corporate mindfulness. Instead, I searched for instances of reconciliation in its everyday use where different modalities fused into new forms. Constructivist sociologists Bruno Latour and Michel Callon and their approach to science and materiality, as well, informed my theoretical orientation. My focus on Buddhism and neuroscience, for instance, led me to examine mundane material technologies like electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors used by neuroscientists to document Tibetan monks’ brain wave patterns in 2002. As I demonstrate below, science, technology, and economic production are more actively constructed than static essences. Informed by these processual accounts of social reality, this project defines corporate mindfulness as practices that are contested and constantly in-the-making through multiple relational processes. Studying corporate mindfulness at the local level posed multiple challenges. Firms with high-profile mindfulness programs, such as Goldman Sachs or Meta, showed no interest in my work as a social researcher. Unsurprisingly, these firms were not willing to give me access to private internal memos, observe meetings, or fraternize with their workers. Concerns over 49 Bennett, xix. 50 Bennett, 112. 24 proprietary information, combined with many corporate professionals’ busy schedules, left most managers and human resources departments unwilling to participate. This common dynamic in elite settings involved what cultural anthropologist Hugh Gusterson terms “studying up.”51 In such unwelcome settings, where gaining access proves difficult, gathering data takes place through “polymorphous engagement” from “a disparate array of sources” including “formal interviews” as well as “extensive reading of newspapers and official documents” or “careful attention to pop culture” to “even the balance of power” when direct access was not feasible.52 My research took me to Silicon Valley, the birthplace of corporate mindfulness programs where they took root within Google’s information technology culture. Berkeley and the broader Bay Area, less than fifty miles north of Silicon Valley, have been central to modern Buddhism’s growth in the U.S. since the 1960s. The first Zen Center in the U.S., the San Francisco Zen Center, was founded there by Shunryū Suzuki,53 where Apple co-founder Steve Jobs studied throughout the 1970s.54 Central California’s countercultural elements would make the region’s future fusion with mindfulness make intuitive sense. A corporate mindfulness program originating at Google called the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute became the primary focal point of my research study. SIYLI (pronounced like “silly”) was founded by software engineer Chade-Meng Tan in the late 2000s during Google’s meteoric rise shortly after its IPO in 2004. SIYLI was an ideal case study for several reasons: first, SIYLI is, without a doubt, the largest workplace mindfulness supplier in the United States. Its collaborators and administrators essentially created the industry’s template. 51 Gusterson, “Studying Up Revisited.” 52 Gusterson, 116. 53 Coleman, The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition, 70. 54 Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 74. 25 Smaller certification bodies, like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR program, exist but none were implemented in the corporate world quite like SIYLI’s. Second, SIYLI’s origins at Google have granted it an immense cultural power. Its board members have been well-connected and high-profile. Its current C.E.O., Rich Fernandez, held positions at major corporations like eBay, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America. Its Silicon Valley origins are also a significant part of SIYLI’s self-identity. Google and SIYLI both use the same brand aesthetic of minimalist white, blue, red, green, and yellow graphics. Thanks to these connections, SIYLI has a large digital footprint including a wealth of publicly available documents, curriculums, and information about their trainers, positioning it as a rich site for research. Finally, SIYLI’s significance comes from its work as an educational project. Once spun off from Google in 2012, SIYLI developed a teacher certification program. After being certified, trainers received access to SIYLI’s proprietary materials and taught Tan’s formal curriculum nationwide. This teacher training model diffused Tan’s courses to a broad range of corporate clients after the financial crash including CapitalOne, Comcast, Deloitte, Procter & Gamble, Salesforce, Toyota, and more. To gather data, I consulted a wide range of cultural texts and media sources spanning from 2000 to 2024 to make sense of SIYLI’s formation. Chade-Meng Tan’s 2012 book Search Inside Yourself, which outlines the program’s basic structure, as well as SIYLI C.E.O. Marc Lesser’s Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader, and other works by SIYLI collaborators like Richard Davidson, Mirabai Bush, and Daniel Goleman offered windows into the construction process. 26 Luckily, Tan’s program was widely popular and covered by the media. Media coverage from sources like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and Tricycle helped make sense of the larger social understandings of meditation and mindfulness during corporate implementation. Literature on Google’s company culture, like Planet Google,55 In the Plex,56 and How Google Works,57 provided important insight into SIYLI’s developmental culture. Research on the neuroscience of mindfulness and meditation was consulted as well. A substantial body of literature, including magazine articles, interviews, conferences, and published anthropologies, exists on contemplative neuroscience, produced through organizations like the Mind and Life Institute. In 2022, SIYLI launched “SIY Global,” a public benefit corporation to continue their professional education work on corporate mindfulness. The Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute was redesigned for community-based projects with civil workers, mental health professionals, nonprofits, educators, and more.58 Despite this restructuring, for the sake of continuity I use Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute or “SIYLI” in my empirical narrative to refer to all the organization’s for-profit work. My understanding of SIYLI was supplemented by in-depth interviews with their instructors. They were important agents for how Tan’s courses were enacted on-the-ground. I conducted interviews with several through 2022 to record their direct experiences teaching in corporate workplaces. SIYLI’s large online presence gave me access to the names and contact information of SIYLI instructors based in the United States, focusing on instructors with 55 Stross, Planet Google. 56 Levy, In The Plex. 57 Schmidt and Rosenberg, How Google Works. 58 SIY Global, “Announcing SIY Global.” 27 distinctly corporate backgrounds as opposed to backgrounds in education or psychology. This cold-emailing approach was surprisingly successful. Interviews were conducted via Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic, each lasting between forty-five minutes to an hour. Research questions focused on their perceptions and experiences teaching in corporate spaces. Zoom video conferencing limited my observation of research subjects’ non-verbal cues like body language but nevertheless allowed for in-depth conversations with corporate mindfulness instructors across the U.S. Most SIYLI instructors I interviewed were white, affluent, and well-educated, with backgrounds in finance, banking, software engineering, and psychology. Typically, they were self-employed teaching SIYLI’s curriculum as corporate consultants while others held administrative positions in SIYLI itself. Most showed considerable social and emotional intelligence in our brief interviews, smiling and using my first name frequently in conversation more than a general sample of the corporate world would. Instructors were very enthusiastic to speak with me. Many assumed I shared the same goal of promoting contemplative practice wholesale within dominant institutions despite explaining my perspective as a detached social researcher more interested in contemporary U.S. work culture. Nevertheless, my status as a researcher was valuable in their eyes and helped build rapport. Several informants even requested a digital recording of our interview for their own various projects. Contacts snowballed as SIYLI instructors recruited other subjects for me on their informal social media pages like Facebook. Interviews gave me valuable data on the local cultures of SIYLI instructors and the curriculum design process while also informing my larger conceptualization of mindfulness as constantly in-the-making. 28 Rather than evaluating how mindfulness “should’ve” been practiced, I sought to understand what mindfulness accomplished for these instructors, including the meanings they invested into their professional work. Their personal experiences helped translate abstract claims about mindfulness into how these practices were practically used in their day to day lives. Drawing on Lee Ann Fujii’s relational interviewing techniques,59 I approached their various perspectives in their fullness to avoid reductionist interpretations. My analysis was based interpretive research methods, using instructors’ own experiences as the foundation for my analysis.60 With participants’ consent, all interviewed were recorded and fully transcribed. Identifying information was removed and names changed to pseudonyms. Engineering Mindfulness This dissertation project situates corporate mindfulness within a process-oriented framework, drawing from Jane Bennett’s work, to explore how mindfulness emerged as a marketable service in Silicon Valley and beyond. Combining in-depth interviews with SIYLI instructors with analysis of cultural documents allowed for a deeper understanding of how mindfulness was adopted, enacted, and contested in corporate environments. The rest of this project continues as follows, drawing attention to numerous processes in the industry’s creation: in Chapter One, I argue that developments in the field of meditative neuroscience were key to building corporate mindfulness’s legitimacy. Scientists like Richard Davidson conceptualized the brain as a plastic circuitry built with neurons that could be optimized through meditation practice. I analyze several peer-reviewed scientific studies from 59 Fujii, Interviewing in Social Science Research. 60 Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes; Fujii, Interviewing in Social Science Research. 29 2000 to 2020 by scientists later involved in creating SIYLI’s first formal curriculum. There, the neuroscience of meditation helped reconcile Buddhist meditation in corporate spaces. Using neuroscience and software engineering principles, SIYLI’s curriculum stabilized Buddhist practices like lovingkindness into a trainable corporate curriculum. Chapter Two examines corporate mindfulness’s the multiple forms corporate mindfulness took and the different organizational forms it associated with. Here, I argue that mindfulness initially functioned for Silicon Valley’s unique high tech culture that prioritized flat management and teams-based innovation. After the financial crash, however, SIYLI’s courses spread outside of Silicon Valley and into industries like manufacturing and investment banking. There, financial market-based understandings of mindfulness proliferated in the nexus corporation as a reaction to corporate restructurings like layoffs. In Chapter Three I examine the relational processes taking place at the level of SIYLI’s curriculum between instructors and participants. Drawing from political theories of mindfulness and perception and one-on-one interview data collected from workplace mindfulness instructors, I make the argument that SIYLI’s trainers played a mediating role for mindfulness courses on- the-ground, encountering tensions between the standardized course and local classroom conditions. Finally, in the Conclusion, I remark on the political implications of corporate mindfulness, including the shift towards financial market-dominated forms of work organization. I also examine areas for future research, including work on contemplative practice in alternative forms of economic organizations like worker cooperatives, which potentially offers a more democratic application of workplace mindfulness than possible within shareholder capitalism. 30 II. CHAPTER ONE: BUILDING THE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEDITATION Many discussions of mindfulness focus on its medicalization in U.S. culture. Scholars like Jeff Wilson, for example, note how medical technologies such as fMRI contributed to dominant narratives about its effectiveness. Buddhism grew “more enmeshed in medical, psychological, and scientific frameworks” in the twentieth century, according to Wilson, “with correspondingly less stress on supernatural, transcendent, or nirvanic elements.”61 Through this process of secularization, as C. G. Brown notes, dominant discourses increasingly made binary distinctions between mindfulness as a “scientific technology” and as a “religious ritual.”62 Conceptualizing Buddhism and scientific modalities as inherently closed off from each other, however, runs the risk of oversimplifying the work done making them stable. In this chapter, I argue that the cultural work of meditative neuroscience constructed corporate mindfulness’s legitimacy in the early 2010s. Situated in their local contemplative cultures, neuroscientists used laboratory research to construct the psyche as a plastic circuit of neurons optimized through meditation. Neuroscience research played a critical role in the development of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI), the first formalized corporate mindfulness program. There, SIYLI’s courses reconciled Buddhist practices like lovingkindness with corporate life. Its curriculum mediated between Buddhism, neuroscience, and software engineering principles drawn from Tan’s background at Google, making mindfulness into a coherent corporate service in 2012. This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first, I examine how Buddhist modes of consciousness were translated into scientific modalities through the field of meditative 61 Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture, 102. 62 Brown, “Can ‘Secular’ Mindfulness Be Separated from Religion?,” 77. 31 neuroscience. This field, emerging in the early 2000s, used brain scanning machines like fMRI and EEG to measure the effects of meditation on the brain’s neurophysiology. Using constructivist sociological theories, I analyze peer reviewed and popular publications in this field between 2000 and 2015 by scientists in close relation with SIYLI years later. Their contributions represented the brain as a collection of functional parts like a circuit board, turning meditation into a form of mental training to optimize the mind. In the second section, I analyze the use of Buddhist principles and practices in SIYLI’s standard corporate curriculum. Using SIYLI’s promotional materials, interview data, and founder Chade-Meng Tan’s 2012 book, I demonstrate how SIYLI’s formation was a site of reconciliation, rendering mindfulness commensurate with economic activity. The Meditative Neurosciences A formative process for the corporate mindfulness industry was the development of meditative neuroscience, a field that used brain scanning technologies to study meditation as well as contemplative principles like compassion and self-awareness. Two interrelated principles from this field would help build SIYLI’s curriculum: neuroplasticity and the notion of neural circuitries. These insights were not passively discovered by researchers but, rather, created through vast interpretation processes between researchers, meditation practice, contemplative culture, and scientific technology. The Emergence of Meditative Neuroscience Buddhism has collided with medical technology throughout the modern period. These interactions date back to the nineteenth century, culminating today in a large body of literature 32 synthesizing Buddhism and modern science.63 Throughout the 2000s, a group of contemplative neuroscientists, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel Goleman, and Richard Davidson, began configuring radioimaging to observe and record meditation’s effects on the brain. These investments were crucial to making mindfulness culturally acceptable in social sites like Google. A primary institution responsible for this synthesis was the Mind and Life Institute, a contemplative sciences nonprofit organization co-founded by the Dalai Lama and Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela in 1987.64 The Mind and Life Institute merged contemplative wisdom with research, archival work, and think tanks. His Holiness the Fourteenth Dala Lama’s engagement with the scientific community paved the way for more serious dialogues between Buddhism and contemporary neuroscience.65 The Dalai Lama participated in academic conferences and research studies, famously noting in 2005 that “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”66 His enthusiastic stance towards scientific inquiry helped translate Buddhist contemplation into biomedical and psychological frameworks. Contemplative scientists continued integrating meditation into medical contexts. In the late 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, developed his mindfulness-based stress reduction technique (MBSR). This eight-week program was designed to use breath work, yoga postures, and meditation to treat stress and 63 Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living; Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture; Davidson and Harrington, Visions of Compassion; Goleman and Davidson, Altered Traits. 64 Van Dam et al., “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation,” 37. 65 Johnson, “Dalai Lama Donates to Center in Wisconsin”; Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out. 66 Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom. 33 chronic illness.67 While inspired by works of Buddhist monks like Thich Nhat Hanh, Kabat- Zinn’s approach was grounded in biomedical frameworks and designed for non-Buddhists in secular settings.68 Kabat-Zinn’s work, well-renowned, was associated with the rise of mindfulness in the twenty-first century, where it remains a common part of secular life. According to a 2022 study from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the percentage of U.S. adults who meditated doubled from 7.5% in 2002 to overly 17%.69 The contemplative sciences movement, through the work of figures like Kabat-Zinn and the Mind and Life Institute, set the groundwork for meditative neuroscience to emerge in the 2000s. Brain scanning technologies like electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were adapted to document the effects of contemplative practice on the brain’s neurophysiology. Much like dominant neuroscientific theories of the time, this scientific subculture conceived of the brain as a collection of material, functional components. Human experience was generated through activity in neurological structures like the amygdala and cerebral cortex, electrical signals from neuron synapses, the flow of arterial blood, and the release of neurotransmitters. The brain functioned like a circuit board, according to this conception, and human consciousness was clearly documented through radioimaging. Neuroplasticity Neuroimaging technologies like EEG and fMRI made meditation a favorite object of scientific study. Electroencephalography (EEG), first developed in the 1930s, captured electrical 67 Van Dam et al., “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation,” 45. 68 Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out, 33. 69 National Institutes of Health, “Meditation and Mindfulness: Effectiveness and Safety.” 34 brain waves produced from the firings of billions of neurons. Though used throughout the twentieth century, EEG analysis was computerized in the 1990s around the same time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was developed. fMRI detected changes in iron in the brain’s blood flow,70 giving researchers a “spatial resolution”71 denoting where in the brain these changes occurred. Together, these scanning technologies helped scientists capture the notion of “neuroplasticity,” the brain’s capacity to change over time through practice and experience. Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, played a key role translating meditation into a scientifically legible practice. Born in New York, Davidson received his formal psychology training at Harvard University. He was interested in the contemplative tradition as a graduate student but was dissuaded by peers and superiors from researching it seriously, as it was still on the fringes of Western psychology in the 1970s.72 In 1992, Richard Davidson first met the Dalai Lama, later describing the meeting as a “coming out of the closet” moment of his career.73 The Buddhist leader told him to study positive qualities of the mind like kindness or love that modern Western psychology typically neglected.74 Davidson, a formative member of the contemplative sciences movement by the 1990s, with his clinical psychology training, studied those positive affects stimulated by Buddhist practice. The first high-profile neuroscientific study on meditation happened in 2002. Davidson and the Dalai Lama collaborated to study meditation using EEG technology. Several Tibetan monks were recruited from Nepal to travel to Davidson’s lab in the U.S. They were fit with EEG skullcaps with 256 electrodes to record their brain’s electric currents while practicing a 70 Dorjee, Neuroscience and Psychology of Meditation in Everyday Life, 29. 71 Dorjee, 29. 72 Goleman and Davidson, Altered Traits, 25. 73 Harris, “Neuroscientist Richie Davidson Says Dalai Lama Gave Him ‘a Total Wake-Up Call’ That Changed His Research Forever.” 74 Richie Davidson on Meeting the Dalai Lama. 35 meditation known as lovingkindness.75 Lovingkindness meditation, widely popular in Western Buddhist literature, involves cultivating a deep sense of compassion and love for all sentient beings. For the study the Tibetan monks were instructed to practice an “objectless” form of lovingkindness meditation, where “feeling[s] of loving-kindness and compassion permeate[d] [their] mind[s] without directing attention towards a particular object.”76 Their brain waves were recorded by EEG sensors and later compared to the electrical activity of a non-meditating control group. The results of the study were optimistic. Findings showed the Tibetan monks had more pronounced “peaks of energy” during lovingkindness meditation—specifically, “high amplitude gamma oscillations” in the brains’ electrical currents.77 These “dramatic burst[s] of electrical signal,” characterized by calmness and presence, were much more pronounced in comparison to the non-meditators.78 Davidson’s experiments proved the notion that meditation physically altered the brain but these were not passive discoveries made by him and his team. His immersion in his local, contemplative culture influenced his understandings of meditation and the brain’s plasticity. Davidson’s analysis was also guided by Buddhist theories of the self, which hold the notion of an atomistic individual—a concept common to liberal social theory—as an illusion. Instead, the self was seen as fluid and constantly evolving, a perspective that Davidson’s brain data reflected. Here, new interpretations of meditation were constructed as a form of mental circuit training. 75 Goleman and Davidson, Altered Traits, 115. 76 Lutz et al., “Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation,” 16372. 77 Lutz et al., 16370. 78 Goleman and Davidson, Altered Traits, 168. 36 His research was published in both academic and popular venues, solidifying his reputation as a “celebrity neuroscientist”79 in the United States. Davidson’s findings with the Dalai Lama were covered in outlets like Tricycle Magazine,80 the New York Times,81 and Time Magazine,82 amplifying the notion that meditation was a form of mental training to improve the flow of information in the brain. This narrative would continue to find purchase in industries like Silicon Valley’s high tech region at the turn of the twenty-first century. Neural Circuitries The concept of neuroplasticity was central to neuroscientific understandings in the 2010, especially within the study of meditation, closely linked to the idea of the brain as a network of circuits. Neuroplasticity was an organizing principle for meditative neuroscience following Davidson’s pivotal 2002 study. By 2010, he had established the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin Madison, staffed by over a hundred statisticians, neuroscientists, and psychologists, to continue this work.83 Specialized institutions like this one, along with the related Mind and Life Institute, helped sediment meditation as a scientifically credible, secular practice. This work redefined the relation between spirituality and science. In a positivist paradigm, neuroimaging data, produced through expensive technologies like fMRI, were considered more reliable than subjective, first-person accounts of meditative experiences. Because these technologies were also inaccessible to the general public, researchers could claim 79 Gelles, Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out, 47. 80 Glickman, “The Lama in the Lab.” 81 Gyatso, “The Monk in the Lab.” 82 Pickert, “The Mindful Revolution.” 83 Goleman and Davidson, Altered Traits, 9. 37 authority over their scientific interpretations of meditation. By following positivist norms and conducting research controlled, laboratory settings, institutions like Davidson’s helped distance meditative neuroscience from New Age metaphysics.84 The discourse of circuits mediated between scientific technology and dimensions of human consciousness. Neural circuits first came from scientists Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943 who used computer technological principles like binary logic to describe the brain’s functions.85 As the quality of radioimaging improved throughout the 1990s and 2000s, however, “neural circuits” were visualized with greater clarity. The brain, now seen as a dense web of millions of neurons transmitting information, was researched using fMRI. It was used in research to record the brain’s activation during task performance like learning to play the guitar or sitting through a sad movie.86 In 2008, Davidson used scanning technologies to record what he called the brain’s “empathy circuitries,” a functional representation of the brain while experiencing the emotion of empathy. In 2008, his lab studied the effects of long-term meditation on a person’s capacity for empathy (Figures 1 and 2). According to meditative neuroscientists, empathy as a dimension of human behavior had received little attention. Like his 2002 study, expert and novice meditators were compared during a lovingkindness meditation. Subjects’ brains were observed via fMRI while distressing sounds were played, like the sound of a woman screaming.87 The scientists hypothesized that lovingkindness meditation would “enhance” a person’s affective response to people in pain. The results found greater activation in the insular cortex region, an area of the 84 Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out, 79. 85 Borck, Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography, 248. 86 Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, 74; Borck, Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography, 16. 87 Lutz et al., “Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation,” 2. 38 brain associated with empathy, in the group of expert meditators.88 Compassion meditation, Davidson concluded, optimized the brain’s “empathy circuitries.”89 Figure 1. Richard Davidson (right) and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (left) participating in EEG tests at University of Wisconsin.90 Figure 2. SIYLI collaborator Ricard monitoring brainwaves during lovingkindness meditation.91 88 Lutz et al., “Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation.” 89 Lutz et al. 90 Miller. 91 Miller. 39 Meditation as a Cultural Phenomenon The brain science of meditation took to public life as well. The findings of Davidson and other scientists were publicized in academic journals but also in mainstream media and national publishing houses, cementing meditation’s status as a scientifically validated and culturally acceptable practice in the U.S. Other studies associated Buddhist lovingkindness meditation practice with physical changes in gray matter volume in the brain92 or a reduction in the sensation of physical pain.93 Mindfulness, the peer reviewed psychology journal, was launched in 2010. In 2014, Time Magazine’s cover story “The Mindful Revolution” outlined meditation’s popularity among corporate executives, Pentagon chiefs, and U.S. Congresspeople like Tim Ryan as a form of self-improvement or attention training.94 Davidson and his lab played a key role in shaping public understandings of neuroscience and meditation, as research continued linking mindfulness with structural changes in the brain. This strengthened the cultural acceptance of neuroplasticity in the U.S. In a 2014 article in Time Magazine, Kate Pickert noted that “Brains can change based on experiences and are not, as previously believed, static masses that are set by the time a person reaches adulthood.” Citing Davidson’s research with Tibetan monks, Pickert continued: “A growing field of neuroscientists are now studying whether meditation can counteract what happens to our minds because of stress, trauma and constant distraction.”95 At the same time, funding for mindfulness research surged. Between 2000 and 2010, funding for research on mindfulness from the National 92 Leung et al., “Increased Gray Matter Volume in the Right Angular and Posterior Parahippocampal Gyri in Loving- Kindness Meditators.” 93 Zeidan et al., “Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation.” 94 Pickert, “The Mindful Revolution.” 95 Pickert, “The Mindful Revolution.” 40 Institutes of Health increased from 2 to 128 grants.96 The U.S. Federal government spent almost $51 million funding research on meditation between 2008 and 2009.97 The development of meditative neuroscience by well-connected professionals, specifically their findings on brain plasticity and circuitries translated Buddhism into a form later associated with Silicon Valley’s high tech culture. Meditation’s effects on the brain were not out there waiting to be uncovered. The work of contemplative practitioners like His Holiness the Dalai Lama and neuroscientists like Richard Davidson transformed them, building new hybrid forms. Search Inside Yourself Radioimaging of the 1990s helped form the brain sciences of meditation and give it social purchase. How did it enter into the corporate form? I argue that this stabilization work happened at Google, at the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. First developed among software engineers, SIYLI spun out as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2012, providing mindfulness programming for for-profit firms across the U.S. SIYLI’s formal curriculum emerged from multiple processes of reconciliation that integrated Buddhist and corporate modalities. In the analysis that follows, I examine the formation and design of SIYLI’s curriculum. I examine how these reconciliation processes are manifested in the course’s lectures and exercises, which drew on neuroscience and software engineering principles to embed mindfulness within corporate contexts. For example, SIYLI’s lectures incorporated color fMRI images from neuroscientific studies on meditation, 96 Gelles, Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out, 52. 97 Hickey, “Meditation as Medicine: A Critique,” 170. 41 presenting these visuals to participants as a form of “nonjudgmental awareness.” These processes helped stabilize mindfulness practice inside the unique culture of Silicon Valley. The Formation of Corporate Mindfulness Multiple attempts to establish mindfulness in the corporate world failed before SIYLI’s neuroscientific approach. Monsanto, the agrochemical firm, piloted a short-lived meditation program in the late 1990s.98 The first successful program emerged in 2007 at Google. Chade- Meng Tan, a Taiwanese immigrant and Google employee #107, began teaching mindfulness to his colleagues around 2008. He called the courses “Search Inside Yourself” as a playful reference to Google’s search engine. Tan’s status as a Google employee was enough to embed him within the powerful social networks permeating Silicon Valley: Tan had previously rose to fame in a 2007 New York Times article for capturing photos with the many celebrities and elites who visited Google like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Gwyneth Paltrow, and George Soros.99 By 2012, over a thousand Google employees had taken his mindfulness course,100 prompting Tan to launch the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) as a nonprofit. It spun out of Google and developed mindfulness programming to teach in other corporations. During this period, Tan standardized his original courses with the help of meditative neuroscientists and contemplative leaders. In a 2012 New York Times feature celebrating the program, Google engineer Bill Duane described the courses as “organizational WD-40, a necessary lubricant” between “ambitious employees” and Google’s “demanding corporate 98 Van Biema, “Buddhism in America.” 99 Lohr, “Hey, Who’s He? With Gwyneth? The Google Guy.” 100 Kelly, “O.K., Google, Take a Deep Breath.” 42 culture.”101 Tan’s book overviewing the course, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), was endorsed by everyone from Jimmy Carter to the Dalai Lama,102 solidifying its cultural status. Building the Curriculum The development of SIYLI’s curriculum was an achievement through the work of different group members, closely connected, many from the neuroscience and contemplative tradition. To scale the program, Tan standardized his courses to make them adaptable to other workplaces while retaining the same core elements from his original course. The first transcripts of his courses were revised by contemplative practitioners Mirabai Bush and Norman Fischer, both of whom had deep-rooted Buddhist practices.103 Bush was a well-known contemplative practitioner who had co-founded the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society in 1997 and had also piloted Monsanto’s 1990s meditation program. The program was embedded in networks of contemplative researchers and scientists. To shape the curriculum, Tan also consulted Daniel Goleman, a Harvard psychologist introduced to Tan through Mirabai Bush.104 Goleman had become an academic celebrity in psychology and business circles for his 1995 best-seller, Emotional Intelligence. As a Harvard graduate student alongside Richard Davidson, Goleman studied under Ram Dass and wrote about meditation’s impact on consciousness in his first book, Varieties of Meditative Experience.105 Bush had 101 Kelly. 102 Giang, “Inside Google’s Insanely Popular Emotional-Intelligence Course.” 103 Lesser, Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader: Lessons from Google and a Zen Monastery Kitchen, 27. 104 Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out, 60. 105 Goleman, The Varieties of Meditative Experience. 43 previously worked with Richard Davidson on integrating mindfulness into the U.S. Army.106 Tan also collaborated with Nepalese monk and neuroscientist Matthieu Ricard (pictured in Figures 1 and 2 from the previous Chapter), formerly a French interpreter for the Dalai Lama and translator for Davidson’s research with Tibetan monks. Neuroscientist Philippe Goldin from the University of California, Davis was another known collaborator. In designing SIYLI’s programming, staff openly acknowledged the complexities involved in merging Buddhist practices with corporate norms. As one SIYLI staff explained to me, “the program was inherently a new thing. Now there’s a bit more of a template for how this is done…but [SIYLI] was one of the first in the business world on a larger scale.”107 Asked if there were conflicts during the curriculum design, one of SIYLI’s program developers laughed, responding, “That was my entire job. Managing conflict.”108 He described the tensions as inevitable, explaining “You had people involved with 40 years of Buddhist meditation training” and then, “on the other hand, people from the business world.” They also had “a number of scientists that were involved in the beginning of the program.” Each approached the curriculum from wildly different perspectives, resulting in “so many different tensions.”109 Contemplative practitioners like Mirabai Bush saw corporate mindfulness as a potential avenue for enacting larger social change, though her engagement was not without ambivalence. Reflecting on her time teaching meditation at Monsanto, a controversial U.S.-based agrochemical firm, in the 1990s, Bush noted: ‘I thought I was so compassionate, and I was comfortable no matter who I was with. But when I went to Monsanto, I realized, ‘Oh my God, I 106 Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out, 68. 107 Klein, Interview with Jonathan Klein. 108 Klein. 109 Klein. 44 had this whole category of people qualified as the ‘other.’”110 Bush was ultimately persuaded to work within corporations due to their significant influence. She noted she was “persuaded to work with Monsanto because so many people work inside corporations” and because of their “increasing power.” However, Bush noted “I would not enter a corporation that is doing things that are not within right livelihood, such as making weapons or mining coal. But after that, it’s a difficult ethical matter.”111 Bush’s ambivalence and selective involvement working within firms is a tension SIYLI’s instructors must navigate in their courses—a dynamic discussed in Chapter Three. Despite these tensions, SIYLI’s collaborators reached a consensus on a standardized format. The developer explained the importance of “finding the center where you can incorporate and adapt as it needs to be adapted, but also hold together the network of people that have supported the program.”112 These processes of adaptation and integration were fundamental to SIYLI’s success. While neuroscience lent scientific credibility to SIYLI’s curriculum, Buddhism’s influence is unmistakable. Key SIYLI collaborators like Mirabai Bush and Norman Fischer brought decades of Buddhist practice to the program. Tan’s 2012 curriculum overview referenced Asian and American Buddhist figures like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Lao Zi while including quotes from classical Buddhist scripture. Traditional meditation practices, such as sitting meditation and metta bhavana or lovingkindness meditation typical of a traditional Buddhist center, were incorporated alongside neuroscientific validation from figures 110 Gelles, Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out. 111 Asgar, “Revisiting Corporate Meditation.” 112 Klein, Interview with Jonathan Klein. 45 like Davidson. 113 The curriculum also incorporated traditional sitting meditation instruction as well as includes metta bhavana or lovingkindness practice typical of what one would see in a traditional Buddhist center.114 Tan’s accessible language, pairing with its scientific backing, stitched together these heterogenous elements into a cohesive program that resonated with Silicon Valley’s corporate environment. After becoming an independent nonprofit, SIYLI formalized its offerings, starting with a teacher certification program. SIYLI’s teacher training program helped diffuse Tan’s curriculum across the U.S. For a fee of $12,000 USD, applicants underwent six months of training, gaining access to SIYLI’s proprietary materials, including Tan’s standardized curriculum and detailed slide decks.115 The certification model guaranteed that SIYLI’s curriculum was delivered consistently and uniformly regardless of instructor, firm, sector, or country. Certified SIYLI trainers typically operated as fee-for-service instructors, hired by corporate managers or human resources departments looking to solve staff burnout or improve employee well-being. SIYLI’s most common corporate offering was their two-day course. These were led by two certified instructors, either in-person or virtually, for groups between 20 and 80 people. The two-day course was structured around six key modules: mindfulness, self-awareness, self- management, motivation, empathy, and leadership. Each module combined formal lectures with experiential exercises and partner activities like body scans, mindful walking, and lovingkindness meditation.116 SIYLI also offered shorter versions, including one-day and half- day programs, as well as their “Adaptive Resilience” program, which consists of three 90-minute 113 Kucinskas, The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out, 92. 114 Kucinskas, 92. 115 SIYLI, “SIY Organizational Teacher Certification Applicant’s Guide,” 21. 116 SIYLI, “Search Inside Yourself Program Guide.” 46 sessions. Additional services include keynote talks and pro bono courses for nonprofits with fewer than 500 employees.[1] After a company’s workforce completes the course, workers receive weekly emails with mindfulness resources and daily exercises like “take three mindful bites of your next meal” for a twenty-eight-day follow-up period. Neuroscience as Cultural Translation How was neuroscience stabilized in courses on mindfulness and emotional intelligence? In SIYLI’s curriculum, neuroscience was more than a cosmetic supplement. It helped translate emotions like stress or anger into biological brain processes. This was done through SIYLI’s formal lectures which taught participants how mindfulness “worked” at the neurological level. In SIYLI’s classrooms, neuroscientific data was integrated into lectures, using colorful visual aids like fMRI and EEG scans from contemplative research showing workers how mindfulness alters the brain. These images encouraged participants to adopt a detached, meta- cognitive perspective of emotional life, observing these thoughts and sensations without labeling them as “good” or “bad.” Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, a critical scaffolding for SIYLI, applied a bio-evolutionary perspective to conceive of emotional life in the same detached manner. Goleman’s concept of the “amygdala hijack” from his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence featured prominently in Tan’s curriculum: stress, Goleman argued, trigged the amygdala, almond-shaped brain structures responsible for processing emotional memories. A flood of hormones like adrenaline are released in the body that override rational thinking, located in the prefrontal cortex.117 “In modern life stressors are mostly psychological, not biological,” 117 Goleman, Emotional Intelligence. 47 Davidson and Goleman wrote in their co-authored book, “like a horrific boss or trouble with family.”118 Such stressors trigger the same primal biological reactions. SIYLI’s courses used these insights to demonstrate to participants that these ancient brain mechanisms could be managed, or “hacked,” through mindfulness. SIYLI’s curriculums presented Buddhism and neuroscience as compatible modalities. Using scientific language and visual evidence like fMRI brain scans, SIYLI facilitated mindfulness’s cultural translation to the corporate firm. Engineering the Mind Tan used software engineering metaphors while designing the curriculum to appeal to Silicon Valley’s local culture. Using these analogies translated mindfulness practice into language familiar to the tech industry. Tan, a Google software engineer, described emotional awareness, a key practice in the contemplative tradition of learning to read or understand one’s emotional and sensory landscape, as “perceiving the process of emotion at a higher resolution,”119 much like increasing the pixel density of an image, letting engineers “see” emotions more vividly. Like Davidson, Tan’s course presented mindfulness as a form of “circuit training,” 120 suggesting that the brain, much like an information system, could be rewired for optimal performance. This reinterpreted mindfulness not solely as a spiritual practice, but a method of cognitive enhancement grounded in the principles of brain plasticity. Daniel Goleman cemented these synchronicities in his 2007 talk at Google on social intelligence shortly before he was brought in to collaborate on SIYLI’s curriculum. Addressing 118 Goleman and Davidson, Altered Traits, 47. 119 Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World) Peace, 14. 120 Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World) Peace. 48 an audience of software engineers, he used similar circuit-based metaphors, describing the brain as a piece of “elegant machinery” shaped for survival.121 Such circuits could be disrupted by stressors like an “amygdala hijack.” This hijack, Goleman explained to the crowd, produced a “very fuzzy picture of what’s going on,” disrupting the way “the brain prioritizes information,”122 much like a bug disrupting an otherwise efficient piece of software. Both Tan and Goleman’s use of metaphors like “circuitry,” “memory,” and “information processing” constructed mindfulness as an opportunity to reshape brain circuits in ways as methodical as coding or debugging software. By aligning mindfulness with software engineering principles, the programs were reframed as a way to reprogram one’s neural circuits. Tan’s approach extended into his practical applications like “mindful emailing.” Recognizing that emails often lack essential non-verbal cues, Tan articulated how the brain can “fabricate missing information about the emotional context of the sender,”123 leading to potentially disastrous emotional misinterpretations. His curriculum outlined actionable steps to improve the quality of email interactions: “begin by taking one conscious breath” and “mindfully reflect that on the receiving end, there are one or more human beings. Human beings just like me.” After typing the e-mail, Tan suggests putting oneself in the receiver’s shows to “revise your email” to make sure the emotional context is unambiguous and clear.124 After taking another conscious breath, the sender presses Send. Mindfulness helped upgraded the brain’s “operating efficiency” during these day-to-day work practices by “increasing the bandwidth” 121 Goleman, Daniel Goleman on Social Intelligence. 122 Goleman. 123 Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World) Peace, 226. 124 Tan, 226. 49 between emotion and regulation “so that we get better information flow between them.”125 Through this configuration, mindfulness was a tool for engineers to optimize their own neurological “code.” The concept of brain plasticity—that millions of neurons could be reshaped through sustained mindfulness practice—paralleled their jobs optimizing information systems for greater efficiency. Buddhist Lovingkindness While neuroscience lent SIYLI scientific legitimacy, Buddhist principles of compassion were equally foundational. Its partner exercises aimed to foster positive social relationships in the workplace. This was stabilized by employing neuroscientific constructs related to the “social brain.”126 According to Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached, theories about the social brain gained prominence in the late 1990s. This research claimed a capacity to locate humans’ “capacities for sociality” in specific regions like amygdala or prefrontal cortex.127 While some of the foundational research, such as that on “mirror neurons,” has been debunked, neuroscientific understandings of social connection helped bolster the credibility of SIYLI’s program. Social brain theories, according to Rose and Abi-Rached, broke down the human capacity of intersubjectivity: When I observe your actions, or the visible signs of your inner states, areas of my own brain activate that enable me to understand the intentions or feelings that lie behind those observable features, and hence to feel a tiny trace of what it would take…for me to act or feel that way myself.128 125 Tan, 115. 126 Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, 143. 127 Rose and Abi-Rached, 143–44. 128 Rose and Abi-Rached, 147. 50 SIYLI’s founder, Chade-Meng Tan, asserted that this capacity for intersubjectivity, or what he termed as “empathy”—the ability to share in another person’s feelings—was “an ability we were born with” as part of the “standard package…installed as part of our social brain.”129 This organic capacity that could be enhanced through mindfulness. “Mirror neurons,” his curriculum explained, were a brain cell response when someone performs and watches someone else perform the same activity.130 He argues that the brains were “pre-wired for empathy and compassion,”131 using a scientific authority to advocate for pro-social behavior. Goleman echoed this perspective in his 2007 talk at Google, where he described empathy as “intimate brain to brain connection”132 through the synchronization of two people’s heart rates, their autonomic responses, and other biological markers. This neurobiological view that compassion are innate, physiological functions made it more acceptable for corporate contexts. Exercises like the “Just Like Me” lovingkindness meditation were incorporated in the curriculum to cultivate compassion at work, using neuroscience to contextualize the practices. After the curriculum explains the scientific underpinnings of empathy using Goleman’s framework of emotional intelligence, participants are led through a “Just Like Me” lovingkindness meditation in its two-day course. In this exercise, participants sit face to face with a partner, maintaining eye contact while silently sending “metta,” or lovingkindness, to each other. A leader guides the meditation with phrases designed to emphasize shared humanity, such as “this person is a human being with a mind and body, just like me,” and continuing with “This person wants to be happy and lead a good life, just like me, this person wants to be loved, just 129 Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World) Peace, 239. 130 Tan, 160. 131 Tan, 161. 132 Goleman, Daniel Goleman on Social Intelligence. 51 like me.” It concludes with a wish for others-well-being: “As much as I can I wish that this person be happy, be able to do good work in this world, have the support that he needs in order to be happy.”133 The practice lasts around fifteen minutes. The practice reconciles a traditional Buddhist meditation into a trainable workplace curriculum with the help of the neuroscience of meditation. To actualize these theories of social connection, SIYLI designed exercises that generated compassionate and empathetic interactions. One core exercise from their two day course is “mindful listening,” where participants take turns speaking for three minutes while their partner listens attentively without interruption.134 The listener refrains from asking questions or interjecting, instead offering nonverbal cues like nodding or facial expressions to demonstrate their engagement. Guiding participants through empathetic reflections reinforces the neural and emotional connections in social brain theory. Doing this repeatedly “create[s] the mental habit of kindness,” according to Tan,135 suggesting that much like physical exercise strengthens one’s muscles, lovingkindness meditation strengthens neural circuits responsible for compassion. These neurobiological framings of contemplative values like compassion helped build their compatibility with workplace trainings. Conclusion Critics of corporate mindfulness often focus narrowly on medical technologies like fMRI as explanatory factors, which can obscure the complex processes of mindfulness’s scientific validation. Cederström and Spicer, for instance, contest the Search Inside Yourself’s 133 Bush, Working With Mindfulness, 45. 134 Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World) Peace, 52. 135 Tan, 227. 52 neuroscience backing, contesting that the neuroscientific data created by Richard Davidson merely “feels true” by having “the aura of science.”136 This may be true but top-down accounts like this neglect the significant investments and cultural work put in by scientists, Buddhist practitioners, and software engineers at Google who collaboratively crafted them. In this chapter, I argued that the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute functioned as a powerful site of reconciliation between Buddhism and corporate practices. Central to its curriculum was the creative integration of findings from neuroscientists like Davidson, who re- interpreted the boundaries between technology and spirituality by studying Buddhism’s effects on brain function. Neuroscience was more than a backdrop but a vital site in building corporate mindfulness’s legitimacy as a workplace technique. At SIYLI, Buddhist principles were made coherent through neuroscience and software engineering concepts that deeply resonated with Google’s employees. For instance, the contemplative practice of emotional awareness was understood as a means to “enhance the resolution” of one’s emotional landscape, drawing technological notions of image resolution. These processes let participants perceive mindfulness not just as a spiritual or wellness practice but as a way to enhance cognition. In the next chapter, I examine SIYLI more broadly as a historical and cultural institution, delving deeper into the resonances between software engineering culture and the mindfulness program that grew at Google in the 2000s 136 Cederström and Spicer, The Wellness Syndrome, 24. 53 III. CHAPTER TWO: ADAPTING MINDFULNESS OUTSIDE OF SILICON VALLEY In the previous chapter, I argued that meditative neuroscientists like Richard Davidson were pivotal in legitimizing the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) by offering a scientific foundation. Neuroscience and software engineering principles were recruited in SIYLI’s formal curriculum to stabilize Buddhist practice inside corporate cultures. These constructs of the brain’s plastic circuits would become crucial cultural resources in Silicon Valley and help corporate mindfulness diffuse across the U.S. In this chapter, I argue that corporate mindfulness took on multiple forms. In Silicon Valley, mindfulness emerged to enhance collaborative, project-based work. Immersed in this culture, Chade-Meng Tan, SIYLI’s founder and software engineer, built mindfulness as a tool for engineers to collaborate on large projects. After the crash, corporate mindfulness was redirected within the nexus corporation. There, mindfulness functioned as a financial market-based practice in sectors like manufacturing and investment banking. Within this context, corporate mindfulness can teach us about processes of financialization in the U.S. and their effect on the organization of work. In sectors like manufacturing and financial services, were layoffs and restructurings were more prevalent, mindfulness shifted from a tool for creativity for a mechanism to manage job insecurity. This broader understanding challenges dominant critical literature’s portrayal of corporate mindfulness as a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, I demonstrate below that its forms were contingent on the social and economic contexts in which it was situated in. This chapter continues in two parts. First, I trace the emergence of corporate mindfulness within Silicon Valley’s high-tech culture. I use software engineering manuals from the 1990s as 54 well as material on Google’s formation to make sense of SIYLI’s situatedness within this culture. In the second section, I explore the diffusion of SIYLI beyond high tech. There, mindfulness programs were adapted to serve as personal investment techniques in industries facing employment conditions increasingly determined by financial market fluctuations. At sites like Amazon’s warehouses and General Mills, I argue that the political potential of mindfulness programs there were ultimately constrained—not due to mindfulness in and of itself, but due to workers’ lack of power and autonomy within the shareholder corporation. Twenty-First Century Silicon Valley Mindfulness originated in Silicon Valley, associated with high tech’s organizational form and cultures. There, mindfulness was envisioned to optimize emotional attunement between engineers. In the early twenty-first century, Silicon Valley, located south of the San Francisco Bay Area, was revitalized. Traditionally recognized as a hub for information technology since the 1960s, the region experienced a resurgence fueled by the dot-com boom of the late twentieth century. The period attracted an influx of venture capital and skilled labor not only from the U.S. but Asian and European countries.137 This led to the rise of high-tech firms like Google, Meta, and Apple, which either established or relocated their headquarters to the region. What set Silicon Valley apart from other industrial centers beyond its technological innovation was its unique organizational culture. Unlike traditional corporate hierarchies seen in post-war industrial corporations like General Electric, Silicon Valley had developed through 137 O’Sullivan, Contests for Corporate Control: Corporate Governance and Economic Performance in the US and Germany, 226–27. 55 dense, informal networks of relationships.138 Engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors often convened in casual settings like coffee shops or co-working spaces which served as “creative nodes”139 for peer collaboration. These decentralized forms of interactions created an open flow of ideas. The emphasis on informal, network-based collaboration paved the way for mindfulness to eventually become an essential component of Silicon Valley’s workplace culture. As companies like Google rapidly scaled up in the early 2000s, managing their increasingly complex projects became a significant challenge. These projects often involved hundreds of highly specialized workers across multiple departments, requiring entirely new approaches to management. In distinction from the top-down, centralized innovation processes of major post war industrial corporations,140 Silicon Valley startups adopted flat organizational structures. These structures gave engineers greater creative autonomy be decentering the work process into specialized “teams” or “projects” that cut across traditional firm boundaries. This flat structures rarely granted workers profit-sharing or formal decision-making power, but they did encourage greater employee participation in innovation. The emergence of self-managed, informal teams within Silicon Valley not only helped with its rapid growth, but also shifted the skill set required of engineers. In this production culture, technical proficiency was insufficient. Engineers needed to be able to navigate these complex, interpersonal networks. The ability to maintain these rich connections became a managerial skill in its own right. Prior to Google’s founding, influential software engineering management manuals from the 1990s, such as Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister’s Peopleware,141 138 Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, 30. 139 Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, 319. 140 O’Sullivan, Contests for Corporate Control: Corporate Governance and Economic Performance in the US and Germany, 152. 141 DeMarco and Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. 56 advised managers on building close-knit teams. Effective management, they claimed, was fundamentally about “sociology:” optimizing the type and quality of one-on-one human interactions by experimenting with, for instance, an office’s furniture layout. These approaches were a sharp divergence from traditional hierarchical management, which was criticized by such texts for stifling creativity and collaboration. DeMarco and Lister cautioned against “teamicide,”142 managerial practices like excessive bureaucracy and paperwork, rigid control over work hours, and physical separation of workers that constrained team formation.143 Instead they argued for a warm, supportive work environment where motivation sprang from emotional attunement,