Mindfulness for Nerds

an 8 week e-mail course by Carl Tashian

I want to help you upgrade the bandwidth on your connection to the world around you.

You don’t need to move to Bhutan and become a monk, nor do you need to wear lifelogging gear or a neurofeedback headset with dozens of sensors on it. All you need is some time each day, and more patience with yourself than you are used to having.

With daily practice, you’ll strengthen the requisite mental muscles; muscles that may have been long dormant or forgotten. You’ll also work on adjusting the external inputs in your life, bringing in more of the good stuff and removing from your life what isn’t serving you anymore (I’m looking at you, Goat Simulator).

Here’s what we'll practice during our time together:

• Building up your concentration and focus until it feels like a laser beam is shooting out of your face
• Strengthening your ability to accept things as they are—no matter how shitty
• Opening up your capacity for total fucking amazingness by giving your imagination more room to breathe

There is no woo-woo in this course. It's a mix of simple meditation and mindfulness practices paired with a digital detox. My goal is to help you bootstrap yourself into a new mindset so that you can make an informed decision about whether this mindfulness stuff is actually worth adopting over the long term.

I’m not a monk, a therapist, or an old Gandalf-looking man floating on a carpet square. I’m a software engineer and a nerd coach in San Francisco. Meditation changed my life, and I wanted to create a practical, non-religious path for other nerds to experiment with mindfulness practices.

If you’re game for this, I want you to be with me for the entire eight weeks. Two or four weeks is simply not enough time to experience the effects. This is an all-or-nothing journey, not a life hack.

So, are you in?