Dr. John Kroeker

John Kroeker didn’t know it at the time, but a hitchhiking nun in 1978 changed the course of his life.

This doctoral student in neurobiology and behavior at Cornell made an impulsive decision to drive the nun upstate to her ashram instead of going back to campus, and the conversation they had about meditation during that long drive was the impetus for him to travel to India after graduation on his own search.

He landed in Auroville, a utopian community on the southeastern coast. He didn’t stay long (“just a month”, says John) and didn’t find exactly what he was looking for, so he went off to Cal-Tech for his post-doc fellowship work.

But the planted seed bore fruit, and 30 years later Dr. Kroeker , internationally recognized expert on learning algorithms, bioinformatics, digital signal processing and speech recognition (and a co- founder of Eliza Corporation) not only is a long-time student of the Institute of Applied Meditation, but a teacher and mentor of their system of Heart Rhythm Meditation.

Aside from the obvious benefits of having a meditation savant forming best practices at Eliza, employees were the happy beneficiary of his expertise at a recent lunchtime seminar offering. According to research in the field, meditation with the proper breathing technique can have these positive outcomes:

Physical

· Bolsters immune system

· Lowers blood pressure

· Helps with pain management

· Increases metabolism

· Increases oxygenation of blood

· Circulation aid

Mental

· Stress management

· Maximizes concentration

· Develops decisiveness

· Improves creativity

· Improves communication

· Restores optimism

Eliza employees tried this interesting meditation technique as well, which places emphasis on posture, breathing, and connecting with the heartbeat—along with a high-tech computerized biofeedback display for a few folks who volunteered to be hooked up to a monitor.

Eliza likes to talk about getting “soul to soul” with people. That’s not just vendor to client, doctor to patient, health plan to member. We’re actually trying it out on the ground, co-worker to co-worker, starting with the heart.