Learning Vedic Meditation with Michael Miller in London
Christine Fieldhouse learns to meditate in Notting Hill and discovers a life-changing tool and a calmer way of being
Michael Miller, Christine’s teacher
I’m sitting in a bright, airy church hall in Notting Hill in London, grateful for the chance to just be. I’ve rushed down from North Yorkshire to be here, bombed across the capital in sweltering heat, even fallen through the door, with five minutes to spare, greeting my teacher Michael Miller with a giddy excitement, which, looking back, might be described as exuberant, but equally might have been construed as slightly manic.
As a journalist for almost 40 years, I’ve felt I always had to do everything immediately. And I am paying the price for my self-imposed deadlines, wearing my shoulders like earrings and living on my nerves.
I’ve always loved the concept of meditating, of rebooting my brain and defragging my mind. And, over the years, I’ve tried, alone, online and in groups. I’ve sat cross-legged with Buddhists and knelt with nuns, teeth clenched and my mouth in a rigid straight line, determined to empty my head. But when random thoughts - like what I might have for dinner – appeared and I didn’t float off to a place of bliss after five minutes, I was convinced I wasn’t cut out for this kind of calm.
Then I heard about London Meditation Centre, which teaches Vedic Meditation, a practice that uses a mantra. One Tuesday evening, I joined an online hour-long, introductory group call, during which the founders Jillian Lavender and Michael Miller seemed like normal people with normal lives and made their technique sound so simple. I'd also read Jillian’s brilliant book, Why Meditate? Because It Works.
As well as residential retreats, Jillian and Michael offer a course that runs for two hours a day over four days in central London. So, with a mixture of hope and excitement about getting my own personal mantra, I booked a hotel in Bloomsbury and headed south. I’d already filled in an online form, which asked some basic questions, including how I slept and what I wanted from meditation. Clarity, I wrote. Less catastrophic thinking. A calm mind. Oh and yes, I sleep very well, thanks. Probably because I’m so knackered, putting out fires that don’t exist and rushing from A to B, when I could just chill out at A.
“My co-meditators are reporting progress. One younger man has stopped doom-scrolling on his phone, an older woman is less angry on the Tube. I find I care less what people think. It’s liberating”
At the first session, which takes place at teatime on Thursday, I’m among about 15 men and women, of all ages – some surprisingly in their 20s (I’ve always thought of meditation as a later-in-life thing). Among us, there’s a film producer, a psychotherapist, a nurse, a hair stylist for film sets and an admin assistant.
Michael starts with a brief ceremony, which he points out is great if you like that sort of thing, and short enough if you don’t. He’s so down to earth I start to think this might not be a cult after all. Just nice, normal people with a genuine love of meditation. My shoulders tentatively lower their first centimetre in years.
We’re taken separately to a room where we’re given our personal mantra, chosen by Michael to resonate with the period of our lives we’re at. I practise the mantra aloud, then I’m urged by Michael to think it, over and over. My initiation done, I go back to the main hall, rolling my mantra around in my head. I’m not 100% sure I like it. There’s an element of it that sounds like an aggressive word, so when we question Michael, he reassures us it’s a vibration. It’s not meant to have meaning. Even if it contains the name of your mother-in-law that you can’t stand, it’s a mantra, and not to be given meaning to, shared, Googled, spoken aloud or written.
The aim is to meditate for 20 minutes twice a day, morning and late afternoon or early evening. Some of the parents with young children among us roll their eyes. Forty minutes a day? They then reappraise Michael, who’s a dad himself. The man IS insane, I see them thinking.
And then we start for real. Sitting upright, in normal chairs, with our bare feet on the floor, we close our eyes, take some breaths and prefer to think our mantra.
During my first meditation I develop the most intense twitching in my right cheek. Then I get tingling in my tongue and fingertips. But it seems easy to sit and think the mantra. Michael reassures us that it’s normal to have other thoughts at the same time as having the mantra. He compares it to being at a party with your best friend, being aware your friend is in the room, yet you’re still talking to other people. And that’s the thing about Michael. There’s no doubt he knows his stuff, but his analogies make it accessible for all of us. I start to feel less guilty for thinking about Hugh Grant (must be the Notting Hill connection, definitely not those boyish good looks and cheeky charm from way back), interspersed with thinking the mantra.
The next day, I sit up in bed in my hotel room, my husband Ian snoozing beside me, and I meditate. There are cars outside, some building work starts, my husband yawns, but I go back to my mantra. At the second session, on Friday evening, we’re a larger group, and Michael talks practicalities – when to meditate, where to meditate and how to know when to stop, always stressing that we mustn’t try – meditation must be easy. We have no end of questions. ‘Is it okay if your mind takes the piss out of the mantra?’ Mine certainly does. Sometimes I sneer or sing the mantra or I use a cartoon voice; other times I develop an American accent like Michael’s, just to entertain myself. I even throw it around my head, in a new sport I call mantra tennis.
By day three, on Saturday afternoon, during meditation I find my attention moves towards the space above my head. I rock slightly in my seat and float off for several seconds during meditation. My co-meditators are reporting progress. One younger man has stopped doom-scrolling on his phone, an older woman is less angry on the Tube. I find I care less what people think. It’s liberating.
On the final day, on Sunday afternoon, we touch on the thoughts that come up when we meditate. Should we analyse them or take them to therapy? Michael explains that just as we don’t go through our bins at home and discuss what we’ve thrown away, similarly, when we’re clearing thoughts out of our minds, they don’t matter. What’s important is they’re gone.
It's been two months since I learned to meditate and I haven’t missed a session. Mostly I meditate at home, in bed when I first wake, and in a chair in a spare bedroom around 4pm. But I have meditated in a car as a passenger, on a train, against a boulder on the North York Moors, in a shepherd’s hut, in the Co-op car park and even in A&E (not my preferred place of calm and serenity).
Over the four days we also met Jillian and assistant Emma, and, along with Michael, they're in regular touch with students, with emails, links to Michael’s entertaining podcasts and invitations to group meditations, which I find brilliant, and Q and A sessions.
And has learning to meditate made a difference to my life? I believe it has. Stressors still happen but I handle them better now. My knee-jerk reaction to annoying things and people has stopped. My sense of urgency has downgraded to important and get-it-done, or not important and sod-it, and I no longer sweat the small stuff.
With better quality energy, my days seem longer and I feel calmer, more in control and less agitated. I also look forward to 20 minutes of peace, especially in the afternoon, when I sit and think the mantra. It’s like a mental chocolate bar for my flagging energy, and I emerge, ready to glide through the rest of the day and evening.
