Rudite Emir

Rudite Emir, a California-based business consultant, combines Western business experience with Eastern wisdom. As a consultant, she focuses on helping managers create vision and strategy, build effective teams, and help guide executive and middle management through multidimensional change while keeping focus on tangible business results. Projects have included: implementation planning for a $50M information technology upgrade and process improvement program; change management of an enterprise-wide reengineering initiative targeted at $20M in savings; and program planning, coaching, and team facilitation at a cost-reduction program that yielded the enterprise 15 percent savings in external expenditures. Before beginning her consulting career, she spent about ten years in senior management positions in several computer companies in Silicon Valley.

Ms. Emir has followed the system of self-development known as Vedanta since 1966, when she met her spiritual teacher, Swami Chinmayananda (1916-1993). Under the guidance of her teacher, in 1978 she founded a quarterly journal of Vedanta called Mananam, which is still being published today and enjoys worldwide readership. Over the years, Ms. Emir edited a number of Swami Chinmayananda¹s books, in particular for publication in the West, among them: Meditation and Life, an introductory text for meditators; Self-Unfoldment, a basic introduction to Vedanta; and My Children, a photo essay picturing Swami Chinmayananda with children, accompanied by quotations from his texts.

In addition to publishing numerous articles on Vedanta and the application of Vedanta to business, in 1994 Ms. Emir published her first book, Undoing: Returning to Simplicity, which provides a down-to-earth introduction to Vedanta for the Western reader caught up in the stresses of modern life, with particular focus on the busy professional. In 1999, she published her second book, At Every Breath, A Teaching, which is a collection of stories about the life and teachings of Swami Chinmayananda, offering many practical guidelines for life in the modern world.

Since 1994, Ms. Emir has held lecture series on Vedanta in Latvia, her country of birth. She has also lectured in the Bay Area as well as led many Vedanta study groups for the past thirty years, introducing many new students to Vedanta. Several such groups have been aimed at introducing Vedantic concepts to professionals in Silicon Valley to ease their work lives and improve their efficiency.