THE SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL MEDITATION

Discover what style works for you

‘MEDITATION WILL BE THE NEXT HEALTH REVOLUTION’

If you didn’t know, you’d never have guessed what brought this roomful of sleekly successful, creative-looking people together. The party – hosted by Stella Mccartney and Liv Tyler – was in honour of their favourite meditation teacher, Bob Roth, and his new book, Strength In Stillness (Simon & Schuster). It was living proof that meditation has finally shaken off its hippy-dippy image and found a place as an essential part of successful mind management. ‘Meditation Bob’, as he’s known, has taught Transcendental Meditation, or TM – to Mccartney, but also to Russell Brand, Gwyneth Paltrow, Oprah Winfrey and Arianna Huffington. TM found fame towards the end of the 1960s when the movement’s founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – you might have seen pictures of him dressed all in white – taught it to The Beatles. If TM was the first modern wave of meditation, in the esoteric 1960s, the second – mindfulness, or an updated version called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) – was more practical. The scientific proof for its mental wellbeing benefits has meant that, over the past 15 years, it’s become normal for everyone – from doctors to employers – to prescribe it.

Now, in the third wave, there’s been a huge explosion of meditation offerings, ranging from the mystical to the medical. Maybe you, like me, are one of the 25 million people who’ve downloaded the Headspace app, launched by ex monk Andy Puddicombe in 2010. Calm, which was named app of the year by Apple last year, has just been valued at $250m (£180m).

Meditation is big business, and it’s growing – probably along with our epidemic of stress, anxiety and depression. ‘I remain convinced it is the next big public health revolution. I think in the not-too-distant future, mental exercise will be considered to be as important and mainstream as physical exercise,’ says Dan Harris, an ABC correspondent and co-author of Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book (Yellow Kite).

And, just as all the various kinds of exercise have different effects, the same is true for meditation. But it’s hard for the newbie to distinguish between the various types – even in the academic world they often get lumped together, so their effects are hard to disentangle. ‘In sum, “meditation” is not a single activity, but a whole range of practices, all acting in their own particular ways in the mind and brain,’ write long-time meditators and academics Daniel Goleman and Richard J Davidson in their book, The Science Of Meditation: How To Change Your Brain, Mind and Body (Penguin Life). Here’s how to make meditation work for you…

1 FIND YOUR PERSONAL PRESCRIPTION

The first thing to know is, just like exercise, you need to find your personal prescription. ‘Different people resonate with different things, have different physiological needs, neurological needs, lifestyles,’ says meditation teacher Will Williams, author of The Effortless Mind (Simon & Schuster).

Keeping the exercise analogy, an app such as Headspace is like going to a studio where you can choose from a whole schedule of varied fitness classes. On the app, you can choose from packs including sleep, anxiety and productivity, for example. Each pack is curated from eight basic meditation techniques, with the main focus on mindfulness, but also including body scan, visualisation and loving kindness. Puddicombe says of the 20 or so techniques he learnt as a monk, there are perhaps two or three more that will translate for Western needs.

2 MASTER MINDFULNESS

Of all the meditation approaches, mindfulness – learning not to get caught up in emotions – has by far the most research behind it, with nearly 10,000 papers. As well as positive effects on mental health, emotional regulation and stress, it may help prevent cravings and improve sleep. After two to three months, people see ‘significant changes in the way they relate to their own mind and to the world around them,’ says Puddicombe. You can feel the difference in as little as five minutes a day, although studies often see greater results from 10 to 40 minutes a day.

Often taught alongside mindfulness, preliminary evidence for Loving Kindness, aka Compassion meditation (see page 164), shows it may be valuable in treating trauma, as well as increasing levels of social connection, kindness and happiness. And according to Harris, it’s going to be the next big thing.

3 KNOW YOUR BUCKETS

Unlike compassion and mindfulness, which have their heritage in Buddhism and/or secular mindfulness, TM comes from the Hindu or Vedic tradition.

Bob Roth believes that all meditation techniques can be put into three buckets: 1) Focused Attention is about clearing your mind of thoughts or calming your monkey mind. It is the kind you may have done in yoga – body scans or visualisation, for example. 2) Open Monitoring is about observing your thoughts as they come and go, and includes mindfulness techniques. 3) Lastly, Auto Self Transcendence, which includes TM and Vedic meditation, is where you repeat your own personal mantra. The teachers I spoke to – Roth is TM, Williams is Vedic – say Auto Self Transcendence takes you much deeper, more easily, into a state of ‘restful alertness’, aka transcendence or flow, like an athlete at peak performance. ‘Inside everyone there’s a transcendent or quiet settled level of being, and TM gives access to that source of thought,’ says Roth. It was noticeable that every single person I spoke to at the TM party was pretty positive, and that all of them credited TM for at least part of this. ‘It gives me the energy I need to get through my 16-hour days,’ one social entrepreneur told me. However, for the busy, there are barriers to TM or Vedic meditation, because you can only learn from a teacher. The course also takes a couple of hours a day for four days, where you’re taught to use your mantra properly, and you must meditate for 40 minutes a day – 20 minutes first thing and 20 minutes in the early evening.

4 DON’T BE EXCLUSIVE

It must be testament to the peace-making, emotion-regulating power of meditation that all the teachers I spoke to were quick to say there is value in all the above approaches. ‘I don’t feel any reason to take an exclusive approach,’ says Will Williams. ‘All of these tools are simply a means towards the ends, not the end in themselves.’ You might even want to vary what you use each day, be flexible, depending on your time, mood and how you feel. ‘I might do a body scan one day, meditate to a rain noise app the next,’ says mindfulness teacher Natasha Brittan. ‘Meditation is about whatever you feel like doing, not what you think you should do.’

Perhaps it’s best to start from a practical level: what can you actually fit into your life? Or would you like a teacher to guide you? (see below). As Andy Puddicombe says: most importantly, it’s about checking the quality of the teaching, who it is you’re going to ‘trust with your mind’, and finding the approach, philosophy and technique that suits you.