A Canadian Learns to Meditate
Three and a half years ago, I moved from my hometown Toronto to Los Angeles. I was off to attend an acting conservatory program in the land of sun, surf and big dreams. Or so I thought. Shortly after I arrived I kept asking myself, “What IS this place?” I had expected daily beach frolicking a la 90210. I wanted to be Brenda AND Kelly. I expected to drive along the ocean in a convertible, laugh as the palm trees waved in the distance and meet the gang at the Peach Pit.
I especially expected Hollywood to be the epitome of glamour. Unfortunately, I had not done my research. It was no longer the 40s, or an epic 90s television show. Where I looked for glitz and glamour along the Hollywood strip, I found tattoo parlors, stripper clothing stores, head shops and hookah bars. Where I looked for classy historical sites, I found wax museums. And instead of movie stars and directors (calling my name), I found sidewalk-stealing tourists and ‘performers’ dressed in raggedy Spiderman or Michael Jackson costumes. I was confused.
The town that seemed to have invented traffic jams and plastic surgery was incredibly jarring to my Canadian nervous system. Not only had my expectations been shot, I was accustomed to the quaintness of Queen’s University, Toronto Beaches and Camp Wapomeo of Algonquin Park. For the most part, I hated LA, or I should say, LA stressed the hell out of me. I tried everything to like it, to alleviate my stress. No amounts of yoga, tea, or Skype sessions with every friend and family member back in Canada seemed to help.
On my way back to LA from Canada after Christmas, I bought a Vogue magazine for the first time in ages. Canadian actress Rachel McAdams was on the cover. Inside, I learned she was a dedicated meditator. Who knew? She said meditation helped her with the stress of acting. This article about a fellow Canadian actress is actually the thing that inspired me to take a deeper dive into meditation. Yup, of all places, I found the inspiration to take care of myself in Vogue. I found a yoga class focused around meditation in LA, and loved it. I felt blissful. I had energy and drive to take action. I attended classes at least twice a week for four months and continued to feel better every time. I dealt with stress better, performed better at school, and started to enjoy my bizarre walk along Hollywood boulevard. Essentially, I stopped hating on everything and enjoying life. However, I also decided that driving everywhere and not being able to find a newspaper in a coffee shop was not for me. After ten months in the sun, I moved to my school’s New York campus. New York seemed more like Toronto—dirtier, louder and faster—but more north, more east, more familiar.
Washington Square Park, NY, NY
Living in New York was and is fantastic. I love all the people, the old buildings, the walking, the live music in subway tunnels, and the something new at every corner, every day— but there is no question, it is also a very stressful environment. Sometimes you don’t feel like being shoved so close to someone on the subway you can see the individual dandruff flecks on their collar, or having taxi drivers honk at you while you are CLEARLY walking to the subway. And sometimes, auditions, rejections, booking work and then realizing you have to quit your ‘survival job’ to have time for the unpaid acting work, is not the dream lifestyle most of us envisioned when we moved. I knew I needed something. I knew I wanted to continue meditating but didn’t know where to start.
One day, six months after I finished school, I met a woman named Emily Fletcher. She is a meditation teacher and the founder of a company called Ziva that teaches Vedic meditation (more on that below). I met her after she had taken the red eye flight from LA to New York, she didn’t look like she just took a red eye, she looked like she’d just returned from a spa weekend getaway. No stress on that face. No stress in her being. It is something I think we can all recognize when we see, especially when it looks dramatically different from how we are feeling.
In December 2011, I took Emily’s four-day Ziva Meditation course and have been meditating twice a day ever since. Vedic meditation is an incredibly simple, yet powerful, style of meditation. One of the reasons it is so powerful is because it was created for people like us. People who have busy minds and busy lives. You do not have to sit in a cave crossed legged all day. You do not have to take a vow of silence, chant in languages you don’t understand, or pray to thousand-year-old Indian Deities. One of my favourite places to meditate? On the subway. With Vedic meditation, the only ‘rule’ is to sit with your back supported. You can sit on the ground, in a chair, in the passenger seat of a car. And then what do you do? Not much. You sit, with your eyes closed, for twenty minutes, and silently repeat an abstract sound, your mantra, to help your mind relax—not necessarily stop thinking—just relax.
Since meditating, my digestion issues that a doctor had prescribed a lifetime of medication for have disappeared entirely (in retrospect, they were definitely stress induced). I have not taken antibiotics this year for the first time in ten years, I never need to take naps or drink caffeine, and I never feel the need to eat or exercise my way out of stress. Anxiety about work or social situations has dissipated immensely—an especially handy tool as one of the thousands of actresses in New York City. By eliminating the stress, I’ve created more room for the good stuff. Room to get back to my chill Canadian roots, and no matter who honks, or swears, or has dandruff, I can think, “No worries.”
So is meditation only good for us crazy Canadians who leave our cocoon of kindness for stress-filled American cities? Nope. I really can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t benefit from less stress. In the past few years, a widespread interest in meditation has spiked. In January of 2011, Science Daily published an article about meditation’s ability to change brain structure, exploring its effects on the hippocampus, associated with learning and memory, and in the structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.
Read more HERE. Or how about this Ted Talk, “4 scientific studies on how meditation can affect your brain, heart and creativity” given by Andy Puddicombe. In January, The Huffington Post shared an article about meditation being used by big corporations, like General Mills, to increase productivity. You can learn more about HERE. And a similar article was recently published in The New York Times. Read it HERE. And finally, just this past February, The New York Times published an article with studies linking relaxation with greater productivity.
So what is meditation? A time set aside for intense rest and relaxation. The jury is in folks, and the facts are clear— doing as close to nothing as possible works wonders. Or as the Ziva slogan reads: “Do Less. Accomplish More.”
Over my Christmas break in Toronto this year, I decided to share a meditation practice with some close friends one snowy afternoon in front of the fireplace. The friends who came are all on different career paths, and all had varying degrees of skepticism- a doctor, an artist, a publisher, an ad exec and an oilman. I talked to them about meditation, my experience, and the proven benefits and then we all meditated together. After twenty minutes, when they opened their eyes, there were audible gasps that a) twenty minutes felt so short and that b) they felt so blissful and, you guessed it, less stressed.
Group Meditation in NY
Here in New York, and over yonder in LA, there are other Canadians reaping the Vedic meditation benefits. I asked several other Canadians who learned to meditate from Emily, to answer a few questions. Sarah Baskin (SB) hails from Montreal and is now living amidst the arts as an actress in NYC. Tiffany Willson (TW), born and raised in Toronto, is a New York-based interior designer and entrepreneur who recently launched an exceptionally innovative iPhone app called “Room Hints.” Liza Fernandez (LF), a Canadian born- Australian raised actress. And Craig Ramsey (CR) is a celebrity trainer who you may know from his show “Thintervention.”
Here’s what they said:
Did your stress levels increase when you moved to the States?
TW: Yes. Even though there is a strong Canadian network in New York, I was living in a heightened state of ambiguity. Being unsure of my early career path and relationships, stress levels increased.
LF: Absolutely, especially when I moved to New York City! It is vibrant and fast-paced. The city demands a lot from its residents. I remember feeling high one second and then low the next.
CR: I don’t believe my stress levels increased with physically moving to the U.S. I felt the increased strain with growing career pressures and responsibilities, which happened to coincide with moving to New York and then to L.A.
What ‘drove’ you to learn meditation?
SB: I felt like I was living with a baseline of anxiety from morning ‘til night and found myself spending my thoughts, activities and time trying to keep that baseline quiet and under control. It became abundantly clear that this was stress induced and I found that no book, tea, pill, friend or boyfriend could provide me with a solution for my own anxiety. It was a distraction at best and I decided to devote a summer to finding a “cure”. Soon thereafter, I happened upon Emily’s course. Needless to say, I took the course and now find myself living a very different life, one without a baseline of anxiety.
TW: My friend Ashley Peoples. I met with her for dinner and she had this calm nature and glow around her. I had seen her three months before and she was like a totally different person. I had always had a curiosity and I was going through a lot of changes at the time, so I thought, let’s do this.
AP (that’s me): Thanks Tiff! “Spa weekend getaway glow”? Check. At that dinner, I had been meditating for nine months.
LF: I was having constant mood swings; I would be up one minute and down the next. I was a new actor in the city and working hard on planting seeds. I had been practicing yoga for eight years, but felt I needed something different, like a meditation practice…and a few months after having these thoughts, a friend referred me to Emily.
CR: Emily Fletcher and I were in the Broadway Musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang together. Here’s something I will share with my fellow Canadians… the Emily Fletcher I remember was always pulled to her limits! To her defense, so was I, and so were the majority of performers. When I saw Emily in the early months of 2012, I was shocked at her calmness, patience and the beautiful way she seemed to put confidence over panic. I was so intrigued by this transformation I made it a priority to find out her secret. I had been teaching the art of slowing our bodies down through stretching and felt my mind’s desire to have the same kind of balance and bliss. I have ADHD and never considered meditation an option for my overactive brain.
Do you feel that meditating helped you get back to your chill Canadian roots?
SB: It helped me get back to myself. Which, at my core, has a calm centered quality, that some might call Canadian.
LF: Absolutely!
CR: Vedic meditation techniques and practices help people find a greater understanding of who they are and what they have to offer. For me, it’s helped guide me to how I should offer my expertise. I have already put the wheels in motion to be more invested in fitness and wellness in L.A. where I live and do more on television in chilled out Canada.
What is the biggest benefit or change you have noticed in your life since you started meditating?
SB: I no longer wake up with that unquenchable anxiety. I now wake up well rested and ready to greet the day.
TW: This might be over sharing…but if it can help someone else, here it goes! I suffer from IBS (Irritable Bowel System) and was constantly seeing a nutritionist trying to understand what stress was triggering my stomach to bloat like a basketball and feel like a herd of elephants was stomping inside me. Meditation has done wonders in regulating my personal stress levels and in return, has helped my IBS. When I was stressed, I would crave the things that were the worst for my stomach: coffee, alcohol, sugar, cigarettes and white starches. I was poisoning myself. Since meditating, I no longer crave these items. A few of them, such as coffee and alcohol, now have a very strong effect. It’s weird. A cup of coffee and I am wired and I’m back to being a super cheap drunk :)
LF: More time in my day! I wake up at 7:30am (I never used to) and am out and about all day with enough energy to do it all over again the next day. I also feel more at ease with my career.
CR: It feels like I am always in the right place at the right time with the right people— in a way I never experienced before. Small things can become important happenings if you pay attention and listen.
A Canadian has learned to meditate, and discovers that she (and Rachel McAdams) are not the only ones.
I’ve also learned that it’s not just up-and-comers who are on the meditation bandwagon. Canadian actor/ activist Jim Carrey and Canadian resident and author/ spiritual leader Eckhart Tolle both practice meditation and are strong advocates of its wide-ranging benefits. As honorary founders of GATE, the Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment, both have served as keynote speakers at the annual GATE events since 2009. This past February was no exception, and this time, Emily joined them in advocacy.
GATE panelists (from left to right): Allison Miller, Emily Fletcher, Anthony Meindl, Laura Benanti
Canadians living in the US are enjoying the benefits of mediation, but I don’t think you have to cross the border to do so. Until I meet someone who says, “But I love being stressed!” I think all people, including chill Canadians, can gain from meditating.
Footnote: Guess who is moving back to LA in March? Yup, Me. Living with so much less stress in my day-to-day life, I feel ready to take on what I wanted to (but was too overwhelmed by) two and a half years ago. THE INDUSTRY: Here I come.
Second Footnote: If you are interested in Ziva Meditation, Emily will be giving a free intro talk in Toronto on June 12th, and offering the four-day course June 13th-16th. For more information, or to sign up for the newsletter, visit www.zivameditation.com
