Aimee Groth, Business Insider: We recently learned that Business Insider program director Arden Pennell is an avid meditator.

Since we’ve heard of all the amazing ways meditation can change your life — some CEOs swear by it — we asked Arden if she’d be willing to share how she has the discipline to meditate every morning for 45 minutes, and what it does for her productivity at the office.

She says meditation can be tough — and even grueling or simply boring — but she’ll never start a day without it.
Below is a lightly-edited transcript of our conversation:

ON WHY MEDITATION IS BETTER …

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Jhaneel Lockhart and Melanie Hicken, Business Insider: CEOs have stressful jobs, and some have taken to intense hobbies to find solace from the daily grind.

Some practice meditation—or even Transcendental Meditation, a mantra-based technique derived about 50 years ago from ancient Indian practices.
We’ve compiled a list of leaders who say that meditating gives them an edge in the competitive business world. Some have even built it into their company’s culture.

Hedge fund manager Ray Dalio uses Transcendental Meditation to check his ego

Dalio — founder and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund — has built many of the TM principles …

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Jessica Stillman, Inc.: A new study shows even small amounts of meditation relieve stress and boost health. No wonder many business bigwigs turn to it.

Science and religion are often at odds, but at least occasionally there is convergence. Buddhist monks and devoted yogis have long contended that meditation reduces stress. A recent study agrees, even if the practice is stripped of any particular spiritual belief.

The randomized, controlled study was carried about by a team including a Duke university psychologist and an Aetna executive among others and was recently published in Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. The research assigned 239 employees to either weekly …

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Naazneen Karmali, Forbes: Every day busloads of tourists arrive in Gorai, a seafront suburb of Mumbai, and head to Esselworld and Water Kingdom, two popular theme parks built by Indian billionaire Subhash Chandra’s Essel Group.

Since 2008 the traffic to Gorai has jumped several-fold. Around 10,000 of those people are seeking something other than a ride down a water slide. They are going to the giant golden pagoda. You can see it from miles around rising from the trees in a sharp fingerlike spire aimed at the clouds.

The people are going to the pagoda to sit in Vipassana, an ancient Buddhist meditation style seeing …

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The Harbus: What do Steve Jobs, Ray Dalio, Bill George, Marc Beinoff and Phil Jackson have in common? They are visionaries, have been known to lead and inspire teams, and have achieved significant success in their professional lives. They have one more thing in common – meditation. Could their focus on contemplative practices have something to do with their huge successes?

Suken Vakil & I (Nikita Singhal), both OG, are looking to answer that exact question, and we’ve designed an independent study under the guidance of Prof. Sandra Sucher, titled Meditation & Business Leadership.

How did we get interested? This past summer, I …

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On Feb 1, Wildmind is moving to a new office in a converted mill building on the Main Street of Newmarket, NH, right next to the waterfall that runs over the Macallan Dam.

The place is still a building site, as you can see below, but you can also appreciate how lovely it’s going to look.

Grab the picture with your mouse and drag to move around inside the panorama.

We’ll post further news and photographs as things progress.

Entrepreneurs are significantly more likely to pray several times a day or to meditate, says sociologist Kevin Dougherty, a co-author of the Baylor Religion Survey.

The survey can’t answer whether prayerful, peaceful folks are more likely to take a business risk or whether the stress of a start-up drives folks to their knees or to the lotus position, Dougherty says.

Either way, 34% of entrepreneurs say they frequently look up to the Lord, compared with 27% of non-entrepreneurs. Nearly as many, 32%, say they look inward in meditation while just 22% non-entrepreneurs say they practice any of the eight forms of meditation…

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Dominique Haijtema: Your mind is like a wild buffalo.” This comment from a Buddhist meditation leader in Sri Lanka struck a chord. When I first heard it years ago, though, it didn’t work for me to sit still and concentrate on my breathing. And today, I still can’t calm my head. The thoughts tumble over each other. Did I call back the client? Have the invoices been sent?

I sit in an uncomfortable chair in a beautiful classroom in Amsterdam’s center. It’s the first day of a 10-week course, “Resilience for Managers,” in which meditation exercises play an important role. The group of managers is diverse and comes from the business world and the government sector. The motivation for attending varies …

In the days of the Buddha, people generously supported monks and nuns. They gave them food, clothing, medicine, land, and buildings. And the monks and nuns taught — freely. Many people nowadays, thinking back to that arrangement, say “meditation should be free” or “it’s wrong to charge for Dharma (Buddhism) classes.”

Of course the Dharma was never free! It was free at the point of delivery, in that monks didn’t charge for classes. But enough people supported the monastics for them to be able to do that. It’s that half of the equation that gets forgotten when people are saying, in effect, “give me meditation — and don’t charge …

Can anyone access inner wisdom? Do you have to be a meditator or a spiritual person? Business trends consultant and founder of Piatkus Books, Judy Piatkus, asks inner wisdom coach, Srimati.

Srimati is a freelance spiritual teacher, writer and co-founder of Thrivecraft Coaching, and a former member of the Western Buddhist Order.

She is currently engaged in publishing her whole body of work via books, articles, CDs, films, and the internet. Her aim is to contribute accessible and relevant spiritual intelligence to mainstream modern life and business. Srimati’s CD, Answers: Finding Wisdom from Within, is now available from her website, Thrivecraft.