When I wrote Mindful Smart Cities, I had a clear mission: to show how the lessons I learned through mindfulness and other intelligence-enhancing practices can help shape the future of technology. My understanding of mindfulness is deeply influenced by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

Rooted in Buddhism, mindfulness teaches that awareness, our most fundamental human capacity, is inherently free from the habits of the mind.

My journey began in 2010, during a 15-day meditation retreat in Kathmandu, Nepal. For the first ten days, nothing seemed to shift. Then, on day twelve, I experienced a moment of profound clarity that transformed my sense of self and direction. That inner awakening gradually unfolded into a full identity transformation, one that began personally and evolved professionally.

Mindfulness-based practices train awareness to disentangle itself from the noise of thought, creating space for genuine transformation. The more I immersed myself in this work, the more I felt compelled to extend this field of awareness into engineering, science, and technology, to design systems that are not only intelligent, but deeply conscious and humane.