Almost Home: Dharma, Social Change, and the Power of Love

by Mirabai Bush

This memoir tracks the author's remarkable life across several tumultuous decades, from NASA to an ashram in India and finally to the foundational role she played in the establishment of Eastern spiritual traditions in North America. Raised Catholic with Joan of Arc as her hero, Mirabai is among the most influential people who brought Buddhism to the West from India in the 1970s. Her life tells a fascinating narrative of our the rediscovery of contemplative practices, in many forms and from many traditions, in secular modern culture.“In 1972,” Mirabai Bush writes, “I was a 30-year-old American traveling in India, with the smell of incense in my hair and mantras repeating in my ears. Back then, if you had told me that I would someday be training employees of corporate America to apply contemplative practices to help them become more successful, I would have said you’d been standing too long in India’s hot noonday sun.” Yet as soon as Mirabai Bush returned to the U.S. in 1973, she started a company called Illuminations and was featured alongside a young Steve Jobs in Fortune magazine.

More recently, she helped create Google’s wildly popular employee program, Search Inside Yourself. Mirabai Bush is called in to work with educators and judges and social activists and soldiers. Her odyssey from India to now tells a defining narrative of our time, and it’s not just a story of tools that help us be more successful. It’s a rediscovery and reclaiming of contemplation as a vital practice in our modern lives.

Mirabai is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and served as Executive Director until 2008. Under her direction, The Center introduced contemplative practices into education, law, business, environment leadership, the military, technology companies, and activism.

She has been teaching workshops and courses on meditation and contemplative practice in life and work for many years. She co-developed the curriculum for Search Inside Yourself for Google, the first program in mindfulness-based emotional intelligence; it has been attended by tens of thousands of Google employees. A founding board member of the Seva Foundation, an international public health organization, she directed the Seva Guatemala Project, supporting sustainable agriculture and integrated community development.

She is the author, with Ram Dass, of Walking Each Other Conversations on Loving and Dying and Compassion in Setting Out on the Path of Service. She is co-author with Daniel Barbezat of Contemplative Practices in Higher Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning and editor of Contemplation How Ancient Practices Are Changing the Way We Live.

She was Chairperson of Love Serve Remember Foundation and has been a board member of Lions Roar, Omega Institute, Seva Foundation, Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, Military Fitness Institute, and the Dalai Lama Fellows.

410 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 9, 2025

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful memoir, highly recommended for anyone interested in the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st. In other words, if you are awake now, there's a good chance that this will be a good read for you. Because who can't benefit from reading about the power of love?

I may be slightly biased, since I had the good fortune to meet the author when she was writing the book "Contemplative Practices in Higher Education" with Dan Barbezat, back when I was an editor at Jossey-Bass. She has had such a full life, I don't think that particular book even gets mentioned in her memoir, but as an editor, I am well aware that you can't cover every little detail or nobody will be able to lift the book, much less want to read it. It just occurred to me as I'm writing this that I should find out if Mirabai narrates the audio version of this book, because it would be great to hear her tell all these stories. That's how good this is, I've just read the book and I'm already thinking about another way to experience the world the author shares in it. Thank you, Mirabai, for writing this!

When I was a teenager, my older brother had the book Be Here Now by Ram Dass, and I don't remember if it was actually in that book, but somehow I learned that Ram Dass was a gay man, as well as an early experimenter with LSD. I wanted to transcend gayness by being holy, which thankfully did not work out at all. But I always had a soft spot for Ram Dass because he was an early queer role model for me, however impossible to imitate. So I was pretty tickled to meet Mirabai, who had been his friend ever since the early days in India, before he had written Be Here Now.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Uplifting. Feels like home.

I like the ease of reading about the adventures. Navigating the soul experience of those times was uphill and Mirabai put one foot in front of the other and saw it all through. I can feel the love. Thank you for sharing, Mirabai, this was wonderful.