Cory Muscara

In 2012 Cory Muscara spent six months in silence at the Panditarama Forest Meditation Center in Burma, practising Vipassana fourteen to twenty hours a day, ordained as a monk under the late Sayadaw U Pandita in the Mahasi lineage of the Theravada tradition. Almost everything he does now comes out of that half-year, and almost none of it looks like it.

He teaches mindfulness in ordinary language to a very large number of people. His meditations have been listened to more than twenty-five million times in over a hundred and fifty countries; he hosts the Practicing Human podcast, wrote the bestselling Stop Missing Your Life, and has taught mindful leadership at Columbia and positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He also works with companies — Bank of America, Johnson & Johnson, BlackRock — which is a room most contemplative teachers never enter.

The training behind it is unusually broad: a two-year Spirit Rock Community Dharma Leader programme, extensive MBSR training, certification with Mindful Schools and the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, Breathworks chronic-pain training with Vidyamala Burch, Bessel van der Kolk's trauma institute, and a relational practice called circling. He is also a hatha yoga teacher and an integrative health coach.

What he is after, in his own framing, is to make wisdom teachings practical and usable — the thing a six-month silence gives you, said in a way someone can take into a Tuesday.