Suuniai — Why deep Listening
Deep Listening is The Skill in the Digital Age
This is the first chapter in the founding story of Suuniai, a space where I integrate my experiences and knowledge from yoga and business, design and academia. Discover the profound power and importance of deep listening in a noisy era, its connection to my personal journey, and how it can bring more well-being and meaning to your life.
Listening Deeply in an Era of Permanent Distraction
May we, as a species, find as many ways as possible to wake up and come to our senses for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the world. (Kabat-Zinn, 2021 - professor and founder of the renowned MBSR degree)
I am writing these lines at the end of 2024. We live in transformative times of multiple crises. Climate emergency, an ongoing war in Europe, escalation in the Middle East, a second Trump presidency ahead, the growing social divide fuelled by digital capitalism, the mental health crisis in Western societies. Before you understandably go bury your head in the sand, listen up: all this upheaval also brings opportunities for an urgently needed paradigm shift. This is also a unique chance to redesign unsustainable systems, to recreate the way we live integrating our attained knowledge about the interdependencies of complex systems and the deeply social nature of the human species. Naturally, this shift will require effort, individual and collective. Suuniai is here to support and inspire you to contribute to positive, healing transformation, for yourself and the world.
Suuniai is a meaning and mindfulness-driven business in every regard. It is closely tied to my personal story. To tell this story, really, I need several chapters, and I have to start at the end. For the past two years, I have studied digital systems as a key driver of change. For better or for worse, I am convinced, is still in or hands. In the summer of 2024, I wrote my Master’s Thesis on digital well-being — the academic field researching how pervasive digital technologies affect our well-being. I came face-to-face with a prominent paradox in our modern lives. Digital technologies have unlocked unprecedented opportunities, yet they’ve also plunged us into an attention economy, a culture of hyper-connectivity and constant distraction (Vanden Abeele & Nguyen, 2022). Ironically, the more connected we are online, the more disconnected we become from ourselves, our surroundings, and nature.
If you want to learn more about how the advertising business model of big tech threatens democracy, watch the recent ARTE documentary ‘The Click Trap’ here: https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/109029-000-A/the-click-trap/
Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer identifies this state of mindless disconnection from being present in our real lives as a root cause of many global challenges, from personal crises to systemic dysfunctions (Langer, 2019). I align with her and many other experts like Jon Kabat-Zinn, who argue that cultivating mindfulness, through practices like deep listening to ourselves and our environment, is central to humanity's survival and flourishing.
Mindfulness, which originates in Eastern Buddhist traditions, is a healing way of being in the world. It teaches presence, humility, and compassion — antidotes to the ignorance and hubris driving much of our current crises (Bristow et al., 2022).
The Political and Personal Relevance of Mindfulness
On an individual level, carving out conscious offline time and connecting with our immediate surroundings, people and nature alike, has become a matter of survival for our mental and physical well-being. Collectively, adopting mindful habits, especially when engaging with digital media, is a political act. Without efforts to counter the harmful mechanisms of digital capitalism, we risk a dystopian future where power becomes concentrated in the hands of tech giants, who profit from our data while amplifying hatred, misinformation, and societal polarization (Zuboff, 2019).
This was inconveniently corroborated to me during my visit to Silicon Valley earlier this year. Together with my colleagues from my Master’s degree in Management, Communication & IT, I had the chance to interview one of Google’s leading software engineers at their headquarters in Palo Alto. When asked by us about the secret to her successful 20-year career at Google she succinctly summed it up as: “First Google, then myself.” To me, this unsettling statement epitomizes the distorted values we have come to adopt with digital capitalism, values diametrically opposed to human flourishing, mindful leadership and sustainable success.
Mindful Leadership: A Path Forward Based on Inspiration and Connection
“The greater the urgency, the greater the need to slow down and tune in to real-time information, values, and intention” (Bristow & Bell, 2021).
The need to develop inner competencies in order to handle the complexities of our time is particularly pressing for decision makers. Today, the single most important quality of a successful leader is authenticity, which can be defined as knowing yourself and acting according to your values (Marturano, 2011). In practicing mindfulness techniques such as meditation and yoga, we can learn to be fully present with our spirit, emotion, mind and body (Ehrlich, 2017). This is the foundation not only to live a fulfilled life for ourselves, but to form meaningful connections with others. Only if others feel related to a leader, they are open to being positively influenced and inspired by him or her. Inspiration then leads to change – personal and collective – and potentially to transformation. As the spiritual teacher Krishnamurti said, “Transform yourself, and you transform the world”.
I will get back to the topic of mindful leadership in a later post. For now this is your takeaway: Whether you are a leader, aspiring to contribute to sustainable change, or simply want to live a healthy, fulfilled live in these transformative times, establishing a mindfulness routine will support your success and well-being.
Navigating between yoga and business — Left: Graduating from my first yoga teacher training in 2022. Right: In conversation at the Google headquarters in Palo Alto in April 2024
Integrating Yoga and Business – A balancing Act
After the pandemic, while I was diving deep into the dire implications of digital capitalism as part of my academic endeavours, I also accomplished two yoga teacher trainings, finding stability and personal growth through establishing a daily yogic practice. I literally needed to balance my head-heavy occupation with digital business with embodied yoga practice to maintain my well-being.
While, after many years of practicing, yoga truly became my anchor during this period, with experiences in both the business and yoga world, I couldn’t ignore its growing commercialization. With mindful messages screaming at us from Yogi-tea labels and social media posts, and a flood of self-proclaimed experts and gurus broadcasting creative categories of enlightenment, I couldn’t help but wonder — Are these messages truly inspiring change or are they rather holding us captive as (un)conscious consumers in the capitalist ideology of self-optimization and thereby fuelling the very system they claim to overturn?
Being both criticized for and accredited with bringing Mindfulness to the mainstream, the American professor and founder of the popular MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) program, Jon Kabat-Zinn has meditated with the leaders of the world, latest at the World Economic Forum in Davos. If capitalists believe to be simply using mindfulness as a remedy to better cope with the misleading, stress-causing system, as a tool that makes us work more efficiently, they underestimate the healing and transformative power of mindfulness, he explains (watch an interview with him here, SRF Kultur Sternstunden, 2016). Put simply, the spread of mindfulness reflects its immense relevance in addressing our era's challenges.
Suuniai: A Space for Mindful Transformation
I created Suuniai to share the embodied mindfulness techniques that have profoundly shaped my journey and continue to sustain me in the balancing act of creating a purpose business and a life that I enjoy, that feels meaningful and light. With Kundalini Flow Yoga, my unique teaching style, we practice reconnecting with our peaceful, radiant essence — a crucial antidote to the challenges of modern life, and an empowering, embodied spiritual practice helping us to cultivate inner peace and access our creative potential.
Here at The Business of Meaning blog, I explore the challenges and inspirations of shifting from a money to a meaning-driven society. We navigate the delicate balance between purpose and profit, self-care and self-optimization, personal growth and collective well-being. Join me as we delve into the complexities of the yoga and mindfulness world, uncovering pioneers, projects, and ideas that align with humanity’s innate capacity both for connection and self-actualization.
I invite you to embrace both ancient wisdom and contemporary science to cultivate healing transformation. Tune in. Listen deeply. Transform yourself and together we transform the world. Thank you for being here. Welcome to Suuniai!
Sat Nam,
Susanne
Read my academic Master’s Thesis on Digital Well-being here.
References
arte (Producer). (2024). The Click Trap—How Online Advertising Threatens Democracy—Watch the full documentary | ARTE in English [Video recording]. https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/109029-000-A/the-click-trap/
Bristow, J., & Bell, R. (2021, February 15). New Framework Shows Why Mindfulness is a Foundational Capacity for Meeting the Challenges of Our Time. Mind & Life Institute. https://www.mindandlife.org/media/mindfulness-as-a-foundational-capacity/
Bristow, J., Wamsler, C., & Bell, R. (2022, May 1). Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out. The Mindfulness Initiative and LUCSUS. . www.themindfulnessinitiative.org/reconnection
Ehrlich, J. (2017). Mindful leadership: Focusing leaders and organizations. Organizational Dynamics, 46(4), 233–243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2017.05.002
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2018). The Healing Power of Mindfulness: A New Way of Being. Piatkus.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2021). The Liberative Potential of Mindfulness. Mindfulness, 12(6), 1555–1563. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-021-01608-6
Krishnamurti, J. (2018). What Are You Doing With Your Life? Rider.
Langer, E. (2019, March 7). (43) Uncertainty and The Power of Possibility | Ellen Langer | Talks at Harvard College—YouTube. https://youtu.be/UoapzkeWnko?si=sRzdzim7PIM0w-0C
Langer, E. (2023). The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Lasting Health. Robinson.
Marturano, J. (2011, June 13). What is Mindful Leadership? Mindful. https://www.mindful.org/what-is-mindful-leadership/
SRF Kultur Sternstunden (Director). (2016, February 15). Jon Kabat-Zinn: Ist Achtsamkeit die neue Glücksformel? | Sternstunde Philosophie | SRF Kultur [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNi5m14QMFU
Vanden Abeele, M. M. P., & Nguyen, M. H. (2022). Digital well-being in an age of mobile connectivity: An introduction to the Special Issue. Mobile Media & Communication, 10(2), 174–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579221080899
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (1st ed.). PublicAffairs.
