Book excerpt: The Mindful Geek tells you how to derive the real world benefits of hardcore mindfulness meditation without drinking the metaphysical Kool-Aid. Meditation teacher, Michael W. Taft gives you step-by-step instructions in the powerful and reliable techniques of mindfulness meditation, and outlines the psychological and neuroscientific research underpinning these practices. By treating mindfulness as a scientifically-based, psychological technique, you can keep your atheistic or agnostic secular skepticism and still maintain a powerful, regular, and deeply effective meditation practice. That's because meditation doesn't require you to believe in it to work. Like any good technology, if you use it correctly, it will do the job reliably whether you believe in it or not. And-make no mistake-meditation is a kind of technology; a technology for hacking the human wetware in order to improve your life. This book is a practical, hands-on manual about how to make the most of that technology for yourself. If you are smart, skeptical, technically-inclined, and have a desire to see what meditation is really all about, this book is for you. Michael has taught a lot of meditation programs at tech corporations like Google, so this material has been field-tested on some world-class geeks.