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In 1965, Bob Thurman became the first Westerner to be ordained as a Buddhist monk by HH The Dalai Lama. But he quickly gave up his monkhood and returned to America to spread this wisdom in the West. As early mindfulness adopters in the West wondered about its scientific validation, Bob was one of the key figures in organizing The Harvard Mind Science Symposium, considered as the seminal moment in the historic dialogue between modern science and Buddhism. Hosted in 1991 at the Harvard University’s Mind/Body Medical Institute, the event was attended by the world’s leading authorities in psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, and education, the Dalai Lama, and his group of Buddhist monks who at the event demonstrated physiological feats which at the time were considered impossible by the Western science. This event is beautifully catalogued in the book MindScience: An East-West Dialogue.
Fast forwarded another quarter-century. Mindfulness is now one of the hottest trends in America. Bob and his team arrange an introduction between Sab and Shaun, the two co-founders of Mindwell Labs, at Bob’s 2018/19 new year’s meditation retreat in upstate New York. Shaun earlier was Bob’s Masters student at Columbia University, and Sab is a dear friend of Bob’s.
By the end of that retreat, a new venture that was eventually named Mindwell Labs was born – with the goal to bring the full potential of mindfulness to everyone. This requires that we 1) offer people the most authentic and complete system of mindfulness, and 2) use technology to personalize mindfulness-based interventions uniquely for each person and reach a global audience.
Our mission is to unlock people’s full potential in life by improving their wellness and performance.
Mindwell Labs is disrupting how people live and work. It is building products to offer consumers automated, real-time advice personalized based upon their biomarkers and other inputs from their environment in order to improve their health, wellness and performance.
We launched two consumer apps to test our hypothesis on wearable data-driven wellness and performance. AQ™ was launched as an iOS and Apple Watch app to test and build Attention Quotient, the first real-time wellness metric based on human attention. Thousands of AQ tests have been taken by users from over 100 countries to help us build arguably the most objective global metric on wellness. In December 2023, we launched Peak, an AI coach and chatbot for peak wellness and performance. Our goal with Peak is to understand and test the evolving user need of having a voice-based natural language interface that provides on-demand advice hyper-personalized in real-time using millions of our health data points collected from their wearable device.
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