You know how people say ‘It was the best money I ever spent’? well for me it was the $200 I spent on a meditation course about 15 years ago. Talk about life-changing.
I became interested in meditation after a particularly troublesome period at work in 1997. I was working as a producer on a late night music TV show on and it was a really difficult working environment, really toxic. The office was filled with people overloaded with stress, ambition and – quite often – cocaine. Cut throat, ruthless and back stabbing are three words which could characterize my experience!
I realised I needed a tool to cope with stress because I felt constantly anxious, which is how I came upon meditation. I honestly can’t remember how I came around to this conclusion but one day I found myself looking it up in the phone book. I went and did a course and that was the start of the rest of my life!
I always say that learning to meditate was like being introduced to myself, like saying ‘Yasmin, hi, meet Yasmin.’ When you meditate, you gain an insight into who you are and what you do. For example, about two weeks into meditating (twice a day every day for twenty minutes), I noticed my anxiety levels plummeted while I was driving. Whereas before I would go from relatively relaxed to red-faced with road rage in 10 seconds, now I could step back and see that getting angry with bottlenecks or other drivers was pointless and the only thing to do was stay calm.
Even just writing about it is calming. Meditation is like the big sigh of relief you give once you realise you are safe and all is well, to paraphrase Louise L. Hay.
For a while I was so passionate about meditation that my late beloved Dad (a psychiatrist) worried that I had actually joined a cult. To me now, that seems like a silly thing to think. But he was not a silly man by any means. Apparently I evangelised so long and hard about the difference meditation was making to my life that he just couldn’t help but wonder if I had been brain-washed!
In an effort to appease his fears, I did some proper research, regarding how and why meditation made me feel SO much better than I had ever felt. Even my mother could tell if I had missed a few days, because I was more antsy with her.
In a nutshell, I think meditation helps partly because when you meditate, you set aside at least 15 minutes a day that is dedicated to your own well-being. That in itself is a big thing. It’s really like saying “I’m worth it.” We all have such busy lives that many of us never take time to put ourselves first. But meditating is “Me Time”. I care enough about myself to do this, is the message we give, when we turn off our phone for 15 minutes to just say Om.
More than this, though, I was able to tell my science-loving Dad some actual facts about the benefits of meditation. Because the practice has been mainstream for so long now – thanks to the 1960s hippies – medicine can actually measure its benefits based on long-term studies of regular meditators.
For example, an 1970s study of health insurance statistics on over 2,000 people practicing a form of meditation known as Transcendental Meditation program over a 5-year period found that the devotees of Transcendental Meditation consistently had more than 50 per cent fewer trips to the doctor than did other groups with comparable age, gender, profession, and insurance terms. The same study found that these meditators had 87 per cent less heart disease and 55 per cent less cancer than their non-meditating counterparts.
And all this from simply sitting down once or twice a day to breathe.
The mantra I’ve totally adopted in my daily life was given to me by my Indian spiritual teacher Narayani Amma. You can use it too, if it feels good. It’s “Om Namo Narayani” (pronounced na-RY-an-ee).
It’s Sanskrit for “I surrender to the Divine” or even more specifically “I surrender to the Divine Mother”. It doesn’t mean “I give up!” It means “I trust that the Universe has my best interests at heart.” It’s very life-affirming! Ideally I sit and silently recite it every day before starting work. I usually say it 108 times, but if I’m really pressed, I just say it nine times. The idea is to connect with Spirit.
If you want to meditate but you don’t know how, ask around. Word of mouth is always best!
