If you want something done, give it to a meditation teacher.
The fact that Jillian Lavender, co-founder of the London Meditation Centre, has managed to find time to speak to me is perhaps testament to her practice. She tells me that ‘you gain time… everything I do is more effective. I get through my to-do list in a very different way’. I immediately want in.
When we speak on the phone, she is heading to class on foot after dropping her daughter at school. Michael Miller, her partner and co-founder, is in India and the duo split their time between London and New York, where they also have a centre. So it seems CEOs have options other than black coffee and burn-out. Jillian would know, as that’s what brought her to Vedic meditation in the first place.
In the past, trying to empty my brain has sent me into a sweaty spin, but this is a mantra-based practice which Jillian says feels ‘yummy’.
‘If you're doing something that doesn't feel easy and enjoyable, it's going to be a lot harder to maintain', she tells me.
Many people come to her having tried (and failed) on an app. ‘I think the watch-out is that someone will come away thinking that they were the failure’. I breathe a sigh of relief and sip on my tea, immediately feeling guilty about the caffeine and extra sugar and wondering how on earth I would find 20 minutes in the morning and afternoon for the practice. But Jillian initially felt the same: ‘I went into a mild state of panic. Where is that going to come from? I’m already chasing time’.
The language she uses is relaxingly blunt. ‘We often think of meditation as being very monastic, for the monk in the mountain top’. But this is, she tells me, simply not the case and she has been at the forefront of bringing meditation into the mainstream.
‘When we were going into corporates it was like pushing on a closed door. They weren’t really talking about stress in the workplace or mental health… I remember walking down the street and seeing a guy in a suit carrying his yoga mat and you’re like ok, that’s interesting. This has moved on! Meditation is doing the same thing.’
So is it true that when you sit down and meditate, you’re resting your nervous system 5 times deeper than sleep? And that the healthy glow purloined by my meditating friends is actually real?
‘Having taught thousands of people, I’ve never had anybody who’s not noticed a change in those first four days. And often what they will notice is just how tired they are. Because once you strip back that stress, excitation chemistry and all that cortisol… then what is sitting right underneath the surface is a lot of tiredness.’
I’m just glad I’m still awake to hear this.
I ask Jillian if it’s part of the move towards being kind to ourselves – she pauses. ‘Yeeeeah… I mean… For me, meditation is up there with eating and sleeping. It is a non-negotiable. It’s not just something nice I do to myself, for myself, it is absolutely the key tool that I have in my tool-kit to ensure that I feel well and I am available for the demands of life in a way that I want to be.’ I’ve signed up to the course.
August, 2023
