Technology & Meditation: Working Together to Create More Peace of Mind
“If we could only get more people to meditate, the world could be a better place.” – Ariel Garten This belief of Ariel Garten’s is the driving force behind her business, Muse. As a lifelong creative with an entrepreneurial streak, Ariel used her talents as a neuroscientist, psychotherapist, and fashion designer to create her budding business. Today, as the co-founder of Muse, she’s using technology to make meditation and better sleep easier for people around the world. In this episode of Lift U Up: Inspiring Health Stories, Ariel shares the inspiration behind the technology and the power meditation can have on your life.
Looking Inside the Mind
Ariel Garte grew up as an artist who was emotionally engaged with the world and its experiences. Her talents were not limited to the creative, but she was also fascinated by science and the human mind. She balanced her career in fashion while going to school for neuroscience – not a very common path, but for the high achiever it was the perfect balance of her skills and interests. After school she worked as a psychotherapist, teaching people the power of meditation and how to use it as a coping tool. As helpful as a tool she knew meditation to be, she saw many of her clients struggle with it – and even had trouble quieting her own mind.
Technology for Good
In 2002, Ariel found an opportunity to combine her scientific talents, interest in meditation, and entrepreneurial instincts. During a collaboration with other scientists, Ariel and others designed a technology that could track brain state and communicate that back through a series of sounds. As impressive as it was in-lab, Ariel saw the potential for it to help the average person out-of-lab. That potential turned into Muse, a company bringing together technology with meditation to help people improve meditation practices and sleep. The technology tracks your brain activity and turns its insight into feedback and guided meditations. Over 400,000 people around the world have used it to start and improve their meditation practice.
The Power of Meditation
Ariel jokes that in meditation you’re more likely to levitate than to stop all your thoughts. It’s less about shutting off your brain entirely, but instead learning the proper ways to observe your own thinking. For her, using Muse was a turning point. Very quickly she went from thinking she wasn’t cut out for a life of meditation to seeing the impact it had on her life. She was more present, calmer in her day-to-day, and had a better sense of her emotions and thoughts. Though never a big fan of technology, she’s proud to be behind a company using it for the betterment of humanity.
What else can you expect in this episode?
- How Ariel struggled with meditation in the beginning.
- How Muse works with different forms of meditation and what the experience of using it is like.
- How meditation (and Muse) impacts your sleeping habits for the better.
- Why meditation can have such a positive impact on the world.
- Ariel’s health tip she practices every morning.
Where to find Ariel Garten and Muse: