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I'm not sure what I expected, but what I learned that first evening changed my 
life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The almost immediate improvement in my ability to meditate was sufficient incentive to give up meat.

Geoff Marlow has been attending the Raja Yoga meditation centre in Cambridge for the past 15 years. He also has a busy life as an international management consultant, working with large organisations around the world to help them improve engagement, alignment and agility.

Q: Geoff, how did you discover meditation and the BK’s?

Back in the late 1980’s I was a typical example of Thoreau’s statement that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. After my wife Alison gave birth to our son Alex in 1989, I’d become very much the stressed executive, stretched thinly between wanting to do the best job I could for my clients and colleagues and being a good father to Alex. My stress level grew to the point where I consistently had trouble sleeping and eventually my doctor signed me off work. I had already tried the usual Western remedy of drinking, which only added to the problems. I turned to psychotherapy, counselling and sleeping pills, but all of these felt like they were tackling the symptoms, rather than to root causes.

Then my mother in law suggested I tried yoga, which she had tried in her battle with arthritis and noticed that people often became so relaxed they nodded off in the class. Alison researched yoga classes in the Cambridge area and when she rang the local BK centre to enquire about Raja Yoga we were intrigued at being told it was ‘yoga for the mind, not the body’. Like most Westerners, I guess, my conception of ‘yoga’ was summed up by the image of a wizened old Indian gent in a loincloth with legs crossed over behind his head.

We went along to find out more, with Alison accompanying me to make sure we weren’t getting caught up in something we’d later regret. I’m not sure what I expected, but what I learned that first evening changed my life. Unlike my many visits to psychotherapists and counsellors, that first session gave me a perspective on my self that fully matched and explained the inner experiences I’d been having that had led to my stressed state. What’s more, this was all explained in a rational and logical way that suited my science-based education.

Q: Why do you meditate?

To someone who meditates, that’s a bit like asking someone “why breathe”? When there’s been the recognition of the self as a spiritual being having a physical experience rather than the other way round, meditation is the natural process of re-energising the self.

Q: Could you describe what you are actually doing when you meditate?

It may be helpful to think of meditation in two parts, the practice and the state of being, with the purpose of the former being simply to develop the latter. Like most worthwhile endeavours, rapid progress depends on having at least some structure or discipline to help support the practice. Most serious meditators find that the early morning hours from about 4 am are a good time to sit for meditation practice. The consciousness is fresh and alert at that time as many people who’ve never meditated know from the experience of freshness and newness that accompanies an early start to the day - when going away on vacation, for example.

When I’m in Cambridge or if I’m away on business and close to one of the many BK centres around the world, I like to attend the daily 6am meditation class. When I’m staying in a hotel somewhere away from a centre, I study some spiritual material that’s useful for the self before getting into the day’s activities.

During the day I like to take a few minutes each hour or so to refresh the spiritual awareness created by the morning practice. This is a kind of ‘recharging’ that helps to keep me centred and balanced, when there are multiple competing demands on my attention, which, as for many people these days, is usually the case.

You asked what I’m actually ‘doing’ when I meditate. Actually, the practice of Raja Yoga meditation is about ‘being’ more than ‘doing’. In essence the practice is aimed at strengthening the awareness of self that exists when I do not identify with my possessions, roles, and even my thoughts and ideas. As a professional management consultant who gets paid for advising others, not identifying with my thoughts and ideas has not always been that easy!

Q: What do you get from meditating?

Overall, the practice of meditation develops a resilience of being, where I remain increasingly stable and true to my own values, irrespective of what is going on around me. It leads to an awareness of self that is not dependent on the opinions of others; one grounded in what’s genuinely enduring and real. The main benefit for me, given where I was 15 years ago, has been the development of a stronger inner core that enables me to take on life challenges that would previously have overwhelmed me, to make better decision, to focus on what matters to me - and to recover quickly when life knocks me off my stride.

Q: How has your lifestyle changed since you started meditating?

Like most serious meditators I’m now vegetarian. I have to say that this change was not so much motivated by an improved philosophy of life, nor by the awareness that I was eating the corpses of dead animals (which now does seem rather gross). Actually my reasons were much more prosaic and maybe even selfish - I find that being vegetarian makes it easier to meditate.

When I was first told about the benefits of a vegetarian diet (and avoiding alliums like onions and garlic which also cloud the meditator’s awareness) I tried the change as an experiment. The almost immediate improvement in my ability to meditate was sufficient incentive to easily give up meat. I’ve also stopped drinking alcohol, where I was already aware that I was hitting the bottle quite hard to self-anaesthetise against stress. So no longer needing alcohol to change my inner state was another immediate benefit. It also costs far less to use your own being to manage your state of being than having to pay for alcohol or other drugs to do it for you.

I also wake up a lot earlier and a lot fresher.

Q: How does meditation fit in with your work and family life?

Actually, I wonder how people who don’t meditate cope with the pressures of life today.

Before I took up meditation, I needed at least eight or nine hours sleep a night and then still felt tired when I woke up. The benefits of meditation mean that I can now be well rested with five hours sleep a night. This gives me between three and four hours per day extra – a 25% increase in available life! Some of this time I choose to invest in meditation practice, but the rest I invest in my ‘work and family life’.

So, you see, when you take up meditation, it’s not about finding the time to add another activity – another ‘plate to spin’ as it were – but about investing a little more time and attention to get to know the ‘me’ that does all that spinning. The return on this investment is a lot greater than anything you’ll get from a bank account, a stock portfolio or even bricks and mortar.

Above all, as the resilience of being that I spoke about earlier deepens, I find I’m able to stay clear and focused and therefore achieve greater success with far less stress. I’m clearly not unique in valuing such a shift, as evidenced by the consistent popularity of ‘Success without Stress’ as a topic in the public talks and seminars that I and other BKs present.

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