gopi krishnaswamy
{inspiring creativity, leadership & life. through mindfulness.}
Hi! I’m a teacher of mindfulness, a zen practitioner, a life coach and a creative living expert.
I'm super lucky to have actually been able to teach on five of the seven continents. I’m also this ordinary guy who discovered that meditation is not something you do, but it is a state you are in. I discovered that as you learn to spend more and more time in that state (I've easily spent over 10,000 hours there), remarkable things start to happen.
Both to you and around you! The power of presence awakens the self and makes you come truly alive.
A large part of my discovery (that meditation is not just something you do) probably has to do with the fact that I have very little formal schooling.
So what do I do?
In a nutshell, I work in the areas of mindfulness, creativity, leadership and self transformation.
During my stay in monasteries and also later, I had many deep and profound moments. I realized many things including the nature of my monkey mind. I also realized I was not my mind (monkey or otherwise). I had slowly developed a capability to simply rest in awareness and consciousness for long periods of time. And then when the mind did come into play again, it was so much better behaved. Like a trained monkey that would do my bidding (well, at least most of the time!) The thoughts that arose from an underlying healthy mind were so much more useful. One of those simple truths was that life is too important to be taken too seriously. Aha!
At one point, my purpose was revealed to me. I decided to dedicate myself to bringing the power of mindfulness to more and more people.
I had spent almost my entire professional life till then in fairly creative professions and had also been fortunate to work in some leadership roles. I realised what I had been training for all my life.
All this time, Google had been teaching mindfulness to its employees and had goofily called the program Search Inside Yourself (instead of searching on Google). The program had become wildly successful and as they started teaching it to people and companies all over the world, they needed more teachers. They selected a batch of 100 teachers of some 30 different nationalities and somehow, I ended up qualifying (guess they wanted a few goofy people too).
Mindfulness or present moment awareness is by itself a wonderful practice. It is also a wonderful way of igniting creativity (I’ve written a whole book on this) and mindfulness brings out wise and compassionate leadership, the kind of leadership that the world needs in the 21st century.
And oh, mindfulness helps you live. Really live. As in, come alive!
Resumé
Congratulations if you made it this far and still want to know more! You must be a pretty determined person, Why don't you check my resumé out at www.linkedin.com/in/gopikrishnaswamy