Michael Chaskalson

Michael first encountered Buddhism in 1976 and has been practising ever since.

For thirty years he lived in rural retreat centres and urban meditation centres, studying, writing, teaching, and meditating – sometimes on intensive solitary retreats. 

During this time, he had a spell as a social entrepreneur – founding a fair-trade company that came to have annual sales of £10 million and 200 employees.

In 2002 he joined the world’s first master’s programme, teaching the clinical aspects of mindfulness. He was the programme’s first graduate and subsequently taught on it for several years. 

Increasingly, his work came to focus on mindfulness in organisations and then on mindful leadership.

He is now a Professor of Practice adjunct at Hult Ashridge Executive Education; an associate at the Møller Institute at Churchill College in the University of Cambridge; and contributes regularly to programmes at London Business School.

He is the author of the agenda-setting book The Mindful Workplace (Wiley, 2011) and the bestselling Mindfulness in Eight Weeks (Harper Thorsons, 2014). He co-authored Mindfulness for Coaches (Routledge, 2017) and Mind Time (Harper Thorsons, 2018) as well as numerous articles and co-authored papers.

Most recently, Michael has begun to revisit the Buddhist roots of his mindfulness practice, seeking a universal and non-religious language in which its key insights can be expressed. Awakening, he says, is a natural – not a supernatural – state. It is simply how the mind comes to function under certain conditions. As such, it need not be the sole domain of any religion and the path towards it is available to all.

Michael lives in Cambridge with his wife Annette, and Ruby – a bouncy little dog who never lets anything or anyone get too serious.