Mirabai Bush

Bush was raised in a Catholic family in the United States and has recalled that, as a child, Joan of Arc was her hero.^[1][14] According to a later profile, she received a lengthy Catholic education before moving into graduate study in medieval literature.^[15]

After her early schooling, Bush undertook graduate study in medieval literature at Georgetown University and later pursued a doctorate in American literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she completed ABD status.^[15][16] She taught writing and English literature at SUNY Buffalo and directed a program designed to diversify the university and prepare students of color for academic study.^[17]

Before moving into foundation and non-profit work, Bush worked at Cape Canaveral on the Saturn–Apollo moonflight program.^{[1][15][2][18]}

In the late 1960s, while enrolled in the PhD program in American literature at SUNY Buffalo and teaching there, Bush became involved in campus civil-rights work and anti-war activism during a period of political unrest in the United States.^[15] She has said that the intensity of this activism and the difficulty of teaching in that climate led her to take leave from the program and travel abroad in search of a different way of living and being in the world, a journey that eventually brought her to India and to meditation practice.^[15][1]

In the early 1970s, after leaving her doctoral program and campus activism at SUNY Buffalo, Bush traveled to India in search of a different way of living and being in the world.^[1][16] Interviews and profiles report that she became part of the circle around American spiritual teacher Ram Dass, and that through this community she met the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba (often called Maharajji), whose ashrams in northern India became a focal point for Western students exploring meditation and devotional practice.^[1][19][20]

Biographical notes describe Bush as having spent approximately two years in India studying with Neem Karoli Baba and other contemplative teachers.^[15][2][21] Her spiritual formation is said to have included meditation in monasteries with Buddhist teachers S. N. Goenka and Anagarika Munindra, practice with teachers associated with the Insight Meditation Society, studies in the Sufi lineage of Pir Vilayat Khan, and training with Tibetan Buddhist lamas such as Kalu Rinpoche, Chögyam Trungpa, Gelek Rinpoche, and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, along with several years of Iyengar yoga and Aikido practice.^{[15][2][22][23]}

Writers in the Neem Karoli Baba and contemplative-education circles have emphasized that Bush's encounters in India, especially Maharajji's emphasis on seva (selfless service), shaped her later work in social action and institutional change. An Integral Yoga Magazine profile notes that Neem Karoli Baba's focus on service helped inspire her to co-found the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, while her memoir Almost Home: Dharma, Social Change, and the Power of Love traces a trajectory “from NASA to an ashram in India” and on to her later roles in the Seva Foundation and contemplative higher education.^[24][1][25]

Bush was a founding board member of the Seva Foundation, an international public health organization established to support community-based health and development initiatives, including blindness-prevention and eye-care programs. Sources describe her as working alongside co-founders including Ram Dass and ophthalmologist Larry Brilliant in Seva's early years.^[26][27][28]

At Seva, Bush served as director of the Seva Guatemala Project, which supports sustainable agriculture and integrated community development in partnership with local communities.^{[26][2][29][30]} Biographical profiles state that the project integrated work on agrarian livelihoods, health, and community organizing as part of Seva's broader public-health and development activities in the region.^[16][31]

In addition to her administrative role, Bush's work at Seva included co-developing “Sustaining Compassion, Sustaining the Earth,” a series of retreats and events for grassroots environmental activists that explored the interconnection of contemplative practice and ecological action.^[2][29][32] Later profiles note that she has continued to teach retreats and programs for environmental leaders, social-justice organizations, and other activists, integrating meditation and contemplative practices with work on social and ecological issues.^[26][33][34]

After returning from India and working in social activism, Bush co-founded and directed Illuminations, Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based company that produced stickers and other graphic designs drawing on contemplative imagery and themes.^[29][35][31] Later biographical profiles report that the company's business practices and contemplatively themed products were covered in business magazines including Newsweek, Inc., Fortune, and the Boston Business Journal.^[35][31][36]

Bush has said that her experiences at Illuminations—experimenting with bringing contemplative values into business and observing both the possibilities and limits of that work—helped inform her later decision to focus on integrating contemplative practice into institutions more broadly through the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.^[15][1] On Being describes her as working at “an emerging 21st century intersection of industry, social healing, and diverse contemplative practices,” linking this entrepreneurial period with her subsequent roles in contemplative education and organizational consulting.^[1]

In the mid-1990s, Bush co-founded the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (often abbreviated CMind), a nonprofit organization developed to encourage the integration of contemplative practices into secular life and work.^[37][38][3] She served as the center's founding director and executive director until 2008, and later as Senior Fellow.^{[26][33][34][16]}

Under Bush's direction, CMind developed programs that introduced contemplative practices into higher education, law, business, environmental leadership, philanthropy, technology companies, the military, and social-justice activism, building a network of people integrating contemplative perspectives into their lives and work.^{[33][30][39][15]} The Center sponsored fellowships, retreats, and workshops for faculty and professionals and developed resources such as the “Tree of Contemplative Practices”, an illustration mapping diverse contemplative methods used in educational and organizational settings.^[40][41][42] Its reports and projects, such as the “Powerful Silence” study on meditation and other contemplative practices in American life and work, articulated an aim of linking contemplative inquiry with social, economic, environmental, and racial justice concerns.^[43][44]

In 2008, CMind created the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education (ACMHE), a professional association for educators, scholars, and administrators interested in contemplative pedagogy and inquiry in colleges and universities.^[4][45][46] Later biographical notes cite Bush as a co-founder of ACMHE, which has organized annual conferences, webinars, and other events supporting the integration of contemplative practices into higher education.^[47][48][49]

In June 2023, the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst hosted an event titled “Contemplating the End of an Era” to mark the conclusion of CMind's operations and the transfer of its archives to the university.^[50] Bush, described there as CMind's founder and first executive director, characterized the gathering as “a day of contemplation and conversation, inspirational activities and practices,” and speakers highlighted ongoing initiatives in contemplative education and social justice that continue the center's legacy beyond its formal closure.^[50]

Through the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, Bush has focused much of her work on integrating contemplative practices into higher education. As founding director and later senior fellow of the center, she has been involved in initiatives that support faculty and institutions in incorporating contemplative and introspective methods—such as mindfulness, contemplative reading and writing, and deep listening—into teaching and research.^[29][2][3] The Omega Institute describes the center as working to “transform higher education” by encouraging the use of contemplative practices to create active learning environments that look deeply into experience and meaning for students and teachers.^[29]

In her own writing, Bush has described a wider “movement in higher education” introducing mindfulness and related practices into courses across disciplines and institution types, including state universities, liberal arts colleges, and historically Black colleges and universities, often through the Contemplative Practice Fellows program administered by the center.^[51][52]

In 2013, Bush co-authored, with Daniel P. Barbezat, the book Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning, published by Jossey-Bass in its Higher and Adult Education series.^[11][53][54] The book outlines ways that contemplative methods can be adapted for use across academic disciplines and institutional types, offering case studies, classroom practices, and reflections from faculty who have integrated contemplative approaches into their teaching.^[11][55]

Beyond the co-authored book, Bush has written on contemplative pedagogy in journal articles and edited volumes. Her article “Mindfulness in Higher Education,” first published in 2011 in the journal Contemporary Buddhism, discusses courses that incorporate mindfulness and related practices across a range of institutions and disciplines and reflects on how such practices can support students’ learning and ethical awareness.^{[56][57][51][58]} The article is indexed in bibliographic databases and appears in ACMHE's “Bibliography of Contemplative Practices in Higher Education” alongside other key works in the field.^[59][60] She has also contributed essays and talks on contemplative higher education more broadly, including a 2008 paper on “contemplative higher education in contemporary America” circulated through CMind's resources for faculty.^[46]

Contemplative Practices in Higher Education has been reviewed in academic and pedagogical venues and is frequently cited in literature on contemplative pedagogy. A review in the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice summarizes and evaluates the book as a resource for enhancing student learning through contemplative practices “across various fields of study and across universities globally.”^[13][61] The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion notes that contemplative practices are now used “in just about every discipline” and across many institutional types, and describes Barbezat and Bush as “two of the foremost leaders and innovators” in contemplative approaches to higher education.^[62] Columbia University's Center for Teaching and Learning refers to the book as a foundational text for contemplative pedagogy, citing it in its guidance for faculty interested in contemplative approaches to teaching.^[63]

University resource guides and bibliographies, such as a contemplative-practices resource list from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and reflection/learning guides from other institutions, regularly cite Contemplative Practices in Higher Education as a core text for instructors exploring contemplative or reflective pedagogies.^[64][65] These materials typically present Bush as a leading figure in bringing contemplative methods into mainstream higher education, particularly through CMind and ACMHE.^[3][4]

From the late 1990s, Bush became known for bringing meditation and other contemplative practices into large corporations and public institutions, extending work she had previously done in activist, educational, and nonprofit settings.^[66][67] Biographical profiles describe her as designing and leading contemplative trainings for organizations “from Monsanto to Google,” as well as for lawyers, judges, educators, environmental leaders, activists, students, and members of the armed forces.^[66][6][68]

An early and widely discussed case was a mindfulness program for scientists and managers at Monsanto, then a prominent agricultural biotechnology company. In a 2001 interview in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Bush discussed teaching contemplative retreats to Monsanto employees and the tension between working with a company criticized by environmentalists and the aspiration to “change consciousness inside a corporation”.^[69] A 2019 retrospective in Tricycle described her as “one of the first to bring meditation to the corporate sector” and revisited her Monsanto work against the backdrop of controversies over genetically modified crops and the herbicide glyphosate.^[70] Bush has stated that she understood the work as an experiment in offering serious contemplative practice to individual employees, while acknowledging that structural questions of “right livelihood” and corporate responsibility remained unresolved.^[70]

Bush later focused much of her organizational work on technology and knowledge-sector firms, most notably Google. In a profile for On Being, Krista Tippett writes that Bush “helped create Google’s popular employee program, Search Inside Yourself,” which she characterizes as part of Bush's “fascinating narrative” at the intersection of industry, social healing, and contemplative practice.^[5] In the same interview, Bush recounts being invited to Google in 2007 by engineer Chade-Meng Tan to help design a course that would frame mindfulness practices in terms of emotional intelligence for young engineers, a program that eventually attracted thousands of employees worldwide.^[5]

Multiple independent sources describe Bush as a co-creator or key developer of Search Inside Yourself. Mindful.org identifies her as “a key developer of Search Inside Yourself at Google,” noting her broader work training professionals in law, education, environmental leadership, activism, and the military.^[6] Mindfulness.com lists her as “the author of Working with Mindfulness, co-creator of the ‘Search Inside Yourself’ program, and co-founder of the Centre for Contemplative Mind and Society”.^[71] An Awakin Call biography similarly refers to her as “a key contributor to Google’s Search Inside Yourself Program”, and notes her wider efforts to reform secular institutions through contemplative practice.^[72] An Esalen Institute faculty profile describes her as “a key contributor to Google’s Search Inside Yourself curriculum” in the context of her multi-decade teaching career.^[73]

A Tricycle article on workplace mindfulness notes that Bush became known for her work with “corporate behemoths” such as Google, Monsanto, and Hearst Publications, and that her most recent corporate project at the time involved collaborating with Tan and psychologist Daniel Goleman to develop an emotional-intelligence-based course called Search Inside Yourself for Google employees.^[7] Audio and video materials associated with the program, including an On Being episode titled “Search Inside Yourself: Contemplation in Life and Work” and publisher descriptions of Bush's later audio offerings, likewise present her as a key contributor to the curriculum.^[74][75]

In 2012 Bush released Working with Mindfulness, an audio program of guided mindfulness exercises for the workplace produced by More Than Sound and distributed by Key Step Media.^[76] Publisher and audiobook descriptions characterize the program as a set of practices “for the workplace” designed to help reduce stress, increase productivity, and encourage creative problem solving, and credit Bush as a “key contributor” or “key player” in establishing mindfulness as part of Google's Search Inside Yourself program.^[76][77] These materials note that she has led trainings at organizations including Google, Monsanto, and Hearst Publications, and include an endorsement from Tan describing her as “deeply experienced in creating a mindful workplace”.^[76][77]

Alongside the audio program, Bush co-authored a companion volume, Working with Mindfulness: Research and Practice of Mindful Techniques in Organizations, in which she discusses applying workplace mindfulness research and practice with collaborators such as Jeremy Hunter, Daniel Goleman, Richard Davidson, and George Kohlrieser.^[76] Her institutional bios and interviews further note that she has designed and delivered workplace mindfulness and contemplative trainings for a range of sectors, including finance, media, philanthropy, environmental organizations, and the military, often emphasizing emotional intelligence, ethical reflection, and compassionate communication in organizational settings.^{[66][6][78][73]}

Bush's corporate work has also featured in scholarly and journalistic critiques of “corporate mindfulness”. In the Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement, Alex Caring-Lobel's chapter “Corporate Mindfulness and the Pathologization of Workplace Stress” cites Bush's Monsanto program, alongside other corporate initiatives, as an example of mindfulness interventions that may reframe worker stress and ethical tension in psychological terms without directly addressing underlying organizational structures.^[79][80] A chapter on “Awakening at work: introducing mindfulness into organizations” in the volume Mindfulness in Organizations draws on research conducted by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society between 2000 and 2004, using corporate case studies—including Monsanto and Google—to analyze how contemplative programs are implemented within organizational cultures.^[81][82]

Journalistic coverage has raised related concerns. Commenters and writers in venues such as Tricycle have questioned whether introducing meditation into corporations risks helping employees adapt to ethically problematic work, or allowing “bad people to do bad things better”, even as they acknowledge that individual participants may experience greater self-awareness and moral unease.^[70][7] In response, Bush has argued that well-designed, in-depth contemplative programs can support critical inquiry and ethical reflection among participants, while maintaining that questions about right livelihood and the systemic effects of corporate mindfulness initiatives remain open and need ongoing examination.^[5][70] Subsequent scholarship on corporate mindfulness and neoliberalism has cited Caring-Lobel's analysis in broader critiques of how mindfulness is deployed within organizations.^[83]

Bush has taught meditation and contemplative practice at retreat and education centers in the United States and abroad for several decades. Faculty and teacher biographies note that she has led workshops and residential programs at institutions including the Omega Institute, the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the New York Insight Meditation Center, and the Insight Meditation Society.^{[29][34][30][33][18][84]} An Awakin Call biography records that she has organized, facilitated, and taught “workshops, weekends, and courses on spirit and action” at venues such as Omega, Naropa Institute, Findhorn, Zen Mountain Monastery, the University of Massachusetts, San Francisco Zen Center, the Buddhist Study Center at Barre, and the Lama Foundation.^[16]

Beyond residential retreats, Bush has led public workshops and courses on contemplative practice in “life and work” for professional and community audiences. The Wellbeing Project describes her as having taught workshops on meditation and contemplative practice for leaders in education, law, business, environmental leadership, the military, technology companies, and activism.^[26] Mindful.org notes that she “has led mindfulness training for lawyers, judges, educators, environmental leaders, activists, students, and the army,” while serving as senior fellow at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.^[85] These public programs have included courses and talks on topics such as contemplative pedagogy, mindfulness in organizations, and the relationship between spiritual practice and social action, as documented in CMind resources and event listings.^[3][86]

Bush's work has been closely associated with that of American spiritual teacher Ram Dass for several decades. Profiles and reviews describe her as his “longtime friend and sometime co-author” and note that she first met him in India in the early 1970s in the community around Neem Karoli Baba.^[87][1][15]

Bush and Ram Dass co-authored Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service (1995), a book on integrating spiritual practice and social service, and later Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying (2018), a volume of dialogues about death, dying, and spiritual friendship that has been reviewed in outlets such as Publishers Weekly and Spirituality & Practice.^[88][89][87]

In the 2010s Bush frequently taught alongside Ram Dass at the Love Serve Remember Foundation's “Open Your Heart in Paradise” retreats on Maui, leading guided meditations and discussions with him and other teachers such as Krishna Das and Trudy Goodman.^[90][91] After Ram Dass's death in 2019, Bush has continued to teach at Ram Dass Legacy retreats and related events organized by the Love Serve Remember Foundation.^[92]

Bush has also hosted the podcast Walking Each Other Home on the Be Here Now Network, a series of conversations with activists, teachers, and cultural figures that extends themes from her work with Ram Dass on love, service, and mortality.^[20][93]

Bush's teaching and views on contemplative practice have been the subject of public interviews and media profiles. In 2015 she was featured on On Being with Krista Tippett in an hour-long episode titled “Mirabai Bush — Contemplation, Life, and Work,” which explores her life story and the application of contemplative practices in education, activism, and organizational settings.^[1][94] On Being introduces her as someone who “helped create Google’s popular employee program, Search Inside Yourself” and whose life “tells a fascinating narrative of our time” concerning the rediscovery of contemplative practices in secular culture.^[5]

Mindful magazine and Mindful.org have featured Bush in multiple roles, including as an advisory board member, interview subject, and event leader. A 2019 Mindful.org event announcement described her as a “mindfulness pioneer” guiding an online gathering of “mindful women leaders.”^[95][96] Articles and profiles in Mindful and Tricycle often situate her work within broader cultural shifts around meditation and mindfulness and use her projects as examples in discussions of the promises and limits of contemplative practices in institutions.^[85][7][79]

• Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service (with Ram Dass, 1995). A guide to integrating spiritual practice with social and political service, drawing on Ram Dass's teaching and Bush's experience with the Seva Foundation and other forms of engaged spirituality.^[8][88][97]
• Contemplation Nation: How Ancient Practices Are Changing the Way We Live (editor, 2011). An anthology in which religious teachers and secular leaders from fields such as law, business, health, and education reflect on the growth and application of contemplative practices in contemporary American life.^[98][99]
• Working with Mindfulness (audio program and related print materials, c. 2012). A workplace-focused series of guided mindfulness exercises and commentary developed and narrated by Bush, aimed at reducing stress and supporting creative problem-solving and interpersonal awareness in organizational settings.^[100][101]
• Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning (with Daniel P. Barbezat, 2013). A handbook on contemplative pedagogy in colleges and universities, presenting theoretical background and case studies of classroom practices such as mindfulness, contemplative reading and writing, yoga, and deep listening across multiple disciplines.^{[11][55][102][103][104]}
• Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying (with Ram Dass, 2018). A book based on extended conversations between Bush and Ram Dass about death, dying, and spiritual friendship, framed as guidance on accompanying others and oneself through the end-of-life process.^{[105][106][89]}
• Almost Home: Dharma, Social Change, and the Power of Love (2025). A memoir and reflection on Bush's journey from Catholic upbringing through her time in India with Neem Karoli Baba and subsequent work bringing contemplative practice into social activism and institutional life; published as a trade book in 2025.^[25][107]

• “Mindfulness in Higher Education” (2011), a peer-reviewed article in Contemporary Buddhism that surveys the introduction of mindfulness practices into university courses across a range of disciplines and institutional types.^[56][51][57]
• Contribution to “Right Speech” (Spring 1999), a symposium in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review presenting classic and contemporary perspectives on right speech as part of the Noble Eightfold Path.^[108]
• “What’s It Like to Take Google’s Mindfulness Training?” (2014), a Mindful.org article in which Bush, as co-developer of Search Inside Yourself, describes the structure and atmosphere of the program for Google employees.^[109]
• “Why Listening is the Most Radical Act” (2019), an essay on listening, meditation, and compassionate action, published by Mindful.org and subsequently reprinted or adapted on other platforms such as Grateful.org.^[110][111]
• “The heart is where we experience connection” (2020), an interview-style piece in Heartfulness magazine in which Bush reflects on connection, guidance, and contemplative practice over five decades of work.^[112]
• “Teaching Meditation Techniques to Organizations” (2013), a New York Times opinion piece describing Bush's work bringing contemplative practices into corporations and other secular institutions.^[113]

Bush has held a number of editorial and advisory positions connected with contemplative practice and media. Mindful magazine lists her as an advisory board member and notes her role in designing contemplative trainings across sectors.^[96] A biographical note for Kripalu/Union states that she has served as chairperson of the Love Serve Remember Foundation and as an advisor or board member to organizations including Mindful, Lion’s Roar, the Omega Institute, the Seva Foundation, the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, Military Fitness Institute, and the Dalai Lama Fellows.^[30]