Integritus Prime

At Alchemus Prime we are often asked why meditation is part of our model. Our answer is typically something like this: leading thinkers across generations, including Steve Jobs and Einstein, attribute their creative leaps to their meditation practice. In our own experience, meditation is too important not to bring to our clients. Clearly, meditation has powerful benefits.

These days, meditation is being applied in various settings. We apply it in our workshops and retreats. Our last retreat was held in Joshua Tree, and we took our client through a daily meditation for all 4 days. She began to see the correlation between meditating and a decrease in her stress levels; research confirms her experience. Our client also sought to reduce her tendency to overthink matters and overcome mind chatter – she experienced benefits here too, and this is also proven by science.

Recently mindfulness meditation has become popular in schools, with promising results. The Mindful Life Project teaches mindfulness meditation at the West Contra Costa Unified School District on a weekly basis to third graders. There appears to be a correlation between meditation and a drop in behavioral issues and suspensions in the school.

Visitacion Valley middle school in San Francisco, a very troubled school, is also benefiting from a meditation program called Quite Time, which uses Transcendental Meditation (TM), a technique I swear by and practice twice daily. Here, the results are stunning, according to this article from The Guardian:

In the first year of Quiet Time suspensions at Visitacion Valley – which has 500 students aged 11-13 – were reduced by 45% (pdf). By 2009-10, attendance rates were over 98% (some of the highest in the city), and today 20% of graduates are admitted to the highly academic Lowell high school – before it was rare for even one student to be accepted. Perhaps even more remarkable, last year’s California Healthy Kids Survey from the state’s education department found that students at Visitacion Valley middle school were the happiest in the whole of San Francisco.

It’s time to pay attention to this powerful method for addressing challenges at the root level. Meditation allows us to connect to our inner selves, and to acknowledge and release pain and trauma. This makes room for the true self to emerge, and to thrive. Leading from the true self, we become aligned with our purpose, and simply, unstoppable. It’s heartening to see meditation becoming popular in the workplace and in schools.

 

 

With thanks to Deb for one of the sources for this article.