CONVERSATIONS WITH MICHEL PASCAL
BY KELLY HEITZ
Meditation is hard. Have you ever tried to empty your
brain for 20 minutes? It’s nearly impossible. Plus, who
has the time to sit still for half an hour? You’re bound
to begin thinking about the million other things you
have to do, which will completely defeat the purpose
of taking the time to meditate to begin with.
Michel Pascal, French meditation teacher and
author of Meditations for Daily Stress – 10 Practices
for Immediate Well-being has a solution: integrate
short but effective moments of mindfulness and calm
throughout your daily life. He believes that changing
how we meditate and learning to destress in the
moment can affectively lower our overall daily stress
levels. And you know what, it works. Pascal’s unique
brand of meditation is being practiced at Google,
Harvard University, and many other major organiza-
tions. His teachings have helped everyone from
prisoners at the Amity Foundation to Uber drivers
during rush hour in Los Angeles calm down in their
moments of crises.
In this month’s Conversations, we asked Pascal
about the theory behind his unique brand of
meditation and how his new book will help destress
our world.
PULSE: You provide many solutions and exercises for
meditating in various situations: emergency medita-
tions, solutions for meditating with eyes open in the
workplace, or even ways to meditate with a computer
or phone. Can one reap the benefits of these brief
meditations by choosing even just one style?
Pascal: Yes! For example, my cell phone might be my only
daily practice. Or greeting a person by sincerely asking “how
are you?” This could also be my daily practice. Any situation is
an opportunity to train our minds. In the Tibetan language,
meditation doesn’t mean the meditation that we see every-
where in America, with a beautiful girl sitting in the lotus
position facing a lake. Instead it means to train our minds in
our daily lives. Meditation for Daily Stress is a revolutionary
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July 2017
way of meditating because it is an authentic way. As in a
monastic life, we use any and every situation to train our mind
so we rediscover our life in every moment.
P: What is your suggestion for those who can’t seem
to meditate or focus their mind long enough to see
the benefits?
MP: It can be very difficult to practice the cliché methods of
meditation. How can we say to a head of a company who
works 15 hours every day, “My friend, let go of your activities
now, just focus on your breath?” How can we say this to a child
with ADHD, or to a prisoner? We realize how those techniques
are not suited to the times we live in. My Rinpoche, (spiritual
director) said, “Meditation is not a technique, a tip or advice, it