Mindfulness is quite the buzzword these days. Especially within Silicon Valley, where many tech workers have been known to seek out guidance and spiritual direction in Eastern practices. HBO’s Silicon Valley parodied the trend with a tech company CEO who seems to be attached at the hip to his spiritual advisor. 

Putting fiction aside though, we’ve talked a lot about information overload and our addiction to our gadgets. We’re living in a world where it is challenging to be mindful. And, well, we all can’t afford to have a spiritual guru following us around non-stop.

So, we brought in an actual spiritual adviser from the actual Silicon Valley to help bring us more kindness, compassion, and happiness (especially during this election season). His name is Chade-Meng Tan and he’s a former Google software engineer where his job title was, “Jolly Good Fellow.”

After retiring from Google in 2015, Chade-Meng began focusing on bringing mindfulness to the masses. “I’m calling it transformational philanthropy, which is to try to transform human beings. Make peace, joy, compassion the default state of all human beings,” he says. In his quest, he recently wrote Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within.

And he stopped by N2S to share some simple exercises for us all to find more joy and happiness. Step one: take one very long inhale in and then slowly exhale, listening to the sound of your breath as you do so. Then hit “play” above to find some serenity now. 

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