The meditation coach
Vedic meditation requires its practitioners to focus on a mantra until they reach a state of mental stillness. Light Watkins, the 46-yearold meditation coach best known for teaching the Duchess of Sussex in her acting days, calls this stillness “getting to the bottom”.
“It feels amazing when you get there,” he tells me. We’re sitting at an outdoor table by a café in Hyde Park. It’s a sunny, busy day, but we’re secluded from the crowds and the heat by some well-placed trees.
“And once you’re there,” Watkins continues, “it starts feeling amazing. You make the time, happily. It’s like masturbation.”
He laughs. Am I … sold? If he’s as good a coach as he is a salesman, I can see why he’s worth thousands of dollars for private sessions and hundreds of pounds for places on the course he’s in the UK to teach. Though of course he might be seeing the Duchess while he’s here. Like any former client, Meghan (who reportedly meditates with Prince Harry every day) has Watkins’s email address and phone number. Oh, and Watkins’s suggested meeting point for our interview was suspiciously close to Buckingham Palace. Hmm. He won’t say anything beyond speaking very highly of her (she did the same in her former blog). “She was great,” he says of working with her. “This was before all this princess stuff.”
Watkins has undergone a transformation of his own. He grew up in Alabama, became a model in New York, taught yoga in Los Angeles, and then became the apprentice of a meditation guru, Tom Knoles. He changed his first name to Light (he doesn’t say what his old name was), sold his possessions, and now lives out of a carry-on bag, travelling and teaching.
Students come to him for various reasons. He gives them all a mantra and teaches them to meditate. He tells them to do it twice a day, 20 minutes each time. If a student perseveres, they find the peace of getting to the bottom, but “the benefits extend into your day. You have more energy, more clarity, you can adapt to more change. You just feel like a better version of yourself.”
Watkins, eating cherries, quotes some sound science about the enviable neurological improvements bestowed by meditation. Habitual
‘Meditation helps to relieve the body of stress, which makes the mind more focused’
meditators, as suggested by neuroimaging studies, become more mentally flexible and better able to regulate their emotion. He invokes the occasional bit of lesssound science too (saying that we typically use less than 10 per cent of our brainpower and can bump that up, via meditation, to, um, 100 per cent), but there’s no doubt that meditation is good for us, and I suspect Watkins is a good teacher, calm and charismatic.
I already enjoyed meditation – albeit using the Headspace app, which Watkins says interrupts you too often – but I left the café resolved to do it more regularly. Maybe you’re interested too, in which case bear in mind Watkins’s advice to look for a coach who can refer to their teaching lineage, just as he can. Endorsements are probably helpful too – especially from you-know-who.
Light Watkins is holding meditation classes in London on Sept 12-16. You can book via beginmeditating.com