Search Inside Yourself to Serve the Planet

You advocate, organize and serve the needs of our one Earth. We create programs to support resilience, leadership and well-being, so you can keep showing up for this important work.

The interactive and transformational Search Inside Yourself program shares immediately applicable mindfulness, emotional intelligence and self-compassion tools, enabling you to both practice self-care and build your influential skills so that you can do what’s needed to protect life on earth.

The customized Search Inside Yourself program for Environmental Activists is coming to the Bay Area! We're excited to host this program for the first time in person in September! And if you can't make that one, we have online programs as well. Join us and fellow Earth advocates, to learn skills for well-being and collaboration, have space to both rest and talk about the challenges in a community of like-minded people.

This program is open to environmental advocates, organizers, conservationists, scientists, volunteers and anyone involved in local or global environmental movements. Attendance is on a sliding scale to meet you where you are.

Meet your teachers and register below.

Meg Levie

Meg is an executive coach and ordained Zen priest who helps high-performance leaders and teams work with greater clarity, purpose, and impact. Meg began teaching the SIY program in 2011 at Google and joined SIYLI soon after its founding in 2012. As a member of the leadership team, she helped grow the organization and most recently served as VP of Teacher Development. She has designed and led extended SIY teacher trainings as well as multiple internal train-the-trainer programs at Google and SAP, facilitating scaling of the SIY program to thousands of people worldwide. Meg began practicing Zen in 1991, and in 1994 left a doctoral program in English literature to devote herself full-time to monastic practice. She received ordination as a Zen priest in 2003 through the San Francisco Zen Center and authorization to teach in 2007. Currently Meg leads programs internationally, from Shanghai and Tokyo to San Francisco, London, and Sydney. She enjoys working with leaders and teams from companies ranging from growth to Fortune 500. She is certified as an executive coach from New Ventures West in San Francisco and holds an AB with honors from Stanford University and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin. She loves exploring new cities and taking long walks in the hills near San Francisco.

Val Tan

With a background steeped in ancient traditions, and a lifetime of practicing mindfulness to support her modern (ultra busy) mind to perform in the modern life—Val is fiercely committed to helping visionary leaders and their teams navigate transformations, build a thriving culture, and create meaningful impact. Val grew up in a traditional family temple in Singapore, where meditation was a mandatory practice. “I had to sit up straight and try to be still and quiet for what feels like forever. But my mind _never_ shut up.” As a young adult, Val learnt to adapt this practice to help her cope with the stresses of the hyper-competitive environment in Asia. Today, Val runs a global modern practice, [M Meditation](https://www.m-meditation.com/). At M, mindfulness and meditation is never about sitting straight, being still, or asking your mind to shut up. Instead, Val teaches in an accessible and approachable manner—through science and storytelling; and makes sure that everything you learn can be applied #IRL (in-real-life). As such, M went on to become a strategic partner for organizational wellness initiatives with companies such as Amazon, Expedia, Airbnb, WeWork, and more. Val is also a [5th generation spiritual advisor and success strategist](http://www.taynval.com/) for frontier companies around the world seeking to actualize their next-level purpose and potential. She’s helped hundreds of executives, investors, coaches, doctors, and founders embody and set in motion their legacies—with clear-eyed vision, upleveled leadership, and a deep sense of purpose. Val graduated magna cum laude from the Singapore Management University whilst running 2 businesses and completing a student-exchange program at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In 2010, Val left her award-winning advertising and media career to travel the world by bicycle on a [documentary project to inspire dreams](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=539OJypQxag&list=PLSPeXMv49hV3sZerE6bpNTiaQuzwod2cG). 5 years, 3 continents, hundreds of media appearances including 2 TEDx talks later—Val splits her time between Seattle and Singapore, where she enjoys long walks, reinventing her grandmother’s recipes, and seeking out good matcha with her work and life partner, Tay.

Join us Live

So many have said how important it is to come together in community. We hear you! Join us for two days in-person in San Francisco Sept. 9-10.

Join in San Francisco!

Of course, accessibility is critical so that we can support this movement globally. You can join us online from any location on October 16-18, 2024.

Join Online!

What Past Attendees are Saying

“In the 12 hours of training, as we learned and applied practices, I felt immediate relief from the harmful stimuli of my everyday world and work, and I sensed how I would benefit if I made the practices part of my everyday life."

-Climate Activist, 2022

Part of what drives me to do climate work is grief... there are really deep emotional currents to this work. The standard approach is just to push those feelings away, [but] I’d like to strike a balance for myself integrating the emotionally challenging side at the same time as doing the actual important work--to acknowledge these emotions in productive ways.

-Conservation Advocate, 2023

“SIY was a great way for me to reset and understand where my mind and body are at the moment. It was a relaxing experience, but also an eye-opener on how I have been dealing with my own challenges. Or how I have been ignoring them.”

-Climate Scientist, 2022