is a spiritual experience that you can feel in literally seconds.”
In just one second, we can touch our soul, our spiritual
dimension, our eternity.
P: What inspired you to create the short meditation
exercises in your book after studying meditation with
masters for so many years?
MP: I saw day after day, year after year how people were
becoming more and more stressed. The idea to write
Meditation for Daily Stress first came to my mind when I was
in my monastery in the Himalayas. I thought that by creating a
sort of revolution in meditation, I would help to
change the perception of meditation and
invite many people into the practice
who otherwise would never have
considered it. So, I decided to
write this book like a mission to
help all the people I could. I
have seen the results benefit
students, children, prisoners,
political leaders and execu-
tives in large companies. I
see how it can change the
perception of meditation and
help people become calmer and
more relaxed immediately.
P: Can regular practice of these
short meditations train the body’s stress
response in the long run?
MP: It is not a question of quantity but quality,
and where we practice. If we practice relaxation
outside of the stressor, we don’t give our brain
the correct information of how to calm down.
Instead, when we regularly practice meditation
throughout our daily lives we have an
immediate response.
P: Given the epidemic of stress in today’s world, do
you believe that mediation is enough to help mitigate
stress and change habits that lead to burnout?
MP: Of course we need to be physically active, eat healthy
foods, regularly get sufficient sleep without drinking alcohol or
taking drugs, but stress is a neurochemical addiction, probably
the worst one, because we think it is normal to be stressed all
the time. Stress is a major cause of disease and death in our
world.
If we are physically active, but we are feeling stress in our
mind we are destroying the benefit of our activities. If after we
are active our brain is running all the time at the workplace,
there is little or no benefit from the activity.
Same for food. We can eat vegan, healthy, organic, but if we
are stressed, if our brain is running all the time, we create a lot
of acid in our stomach, so the benefit of healthy
food is not able to be maximized by the
body.
So, the highest key is to be
more calm in your daily life,
because if we are calmer we
are less stressed; we are
healthier, happier, more
active, more productive.
P: You mention in your
book that peace is
everywhere, not just in a
two-week yoga retreat. Do
you believe that a person
addicted to a high-stress
lifestyle can find inner peace even
in the most chaotic of situations?
MP: Yes, it is possible, and it is exactly
what I teach every day. It is important for
the brain to understand, to receive the
signal, that to be calm in daily life is
possible. It is a question of our mental
habits, so the cognitive process in our brain
and each of the cells of our body can be
affected. Every cell is like a person, when a cell
is educated with a wrong perception of
meditation, the cell can’t be calm. When the
right information is received, suddenly our office becomes our
meditation center, our subway becomes the place to restore our
energy, and so on. n
July 2017
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