A Grand Dîner Silence & Mindfulness in Electric took place on June 30, and we were there.
Mindfulness? Simply paying attention in a particular, deliberate and non-judgmental way to the unfolding experience. Forget your new age clichés: scientifically validated mindfulness meditation is now 2.0. Promoted in France by Coco Brac de la Perrière with her Silence & Mindfulness dinners, hitherto confidential and reserved for the most influential French executives, opened to a wider public on June 30 for an exceptional evening at Electric, the Silence & Mindfulness dinner is the experience of this early summer in Paris, with a menu designed by Thierry Marx.
A unique meal for diners who accept silence in full awareness for the time of a dinner of reconnection with oneself and others. Silence and the table may sound antithetical in the land of good food, but the experience allows you to seize the moment as you’ve never experienced it before, and meet others in a different way at Electric, the alternative cultural center at Porte de Versailles, designed as a bubble suspended above the city. At a time when « Search Inside Yourself », the best-selling book by Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan, is being translated into French, Mindfulness is winning over a growing number of decision-makers in ultra-connected companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, as well as more traditional ones like L’Oréal, GDF Suez and Siemens. A recent article in the French business daily Les Echos points out that « Suppressing negative emotions, reducing reasoning biases, focusing on the present moment… Fifteen minutes of meditation can play on the brain’s plasticity and optimize thinking and decision-making ».
» Our new technologies encourage the illusion of ubiquity by enabling us to do several things at the same time: reading, writing, talking, listening… all our sensors are solicited without our being in a quality of presence. In fact, when you read this text, are you there at 20%? À 80 % ? These constant solicitations, which are both external pollution and internal poison, awaken the need for authentic silence. Perpetual stimulation is a new form of servitude. Based on this observation, I propose a new experience in mindfulness, a silent dinner where thinking becomes more intuitive and non-judgmental, and self-presence denser. « sums up Coco Brac de la Perrière. Coco Brac de la Perrière, a name reminiscent of a novel heroine determined to shake up conventional wisdom. But behind the surname lies a woman with an avant-garde vision of well-being, the emergence of a human bond and connection to oneself, who has been organizing dinners in silence and mindfulness for a year now, long before Google…
The evening passes in silence, interrupted from time to time by our master of ceremony, who invites us here and there to meditative experiences, followed by moments of opera. The awkward silence of the beginning is replaced as the dishes are served, and smiles replace words. Laughter is also part of the moment when the silence becomes too heavy. Everyone leaves sharing their experiences of this timeless event.
