How To FINALLY Start Meditating, Stick With It, And Enjoy It Too!

You know it’s good for you.

You know it will make you feel better, be more effective at work and in life by reducing stress and anxiety.

You know it will make you happier by improving your relationships.

You know it will give you peace of mind – which is what we all want!

You might even know that all of this is backed up by research done at Harvard, Yale and UCLA.

But you’re still not doing it.

When I first started teaching meditation I struggled with getting clients to stick with meditation.

It wasn’t easy.

Everyone was busy, they were barely keeping up with their already packed schedules and getting them to add meditation in there was a real challenge. Even though this is desperately what they needed!

I tried different ways to get them to do it.

Some things worked and some things didn’t.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was missing.

Teaching people to meditate is not hard, but doing it in a way that helps them stick with it is really hard.

I didn’t want to just teach them to meditate only for them to abandon it two weeks later.

What’s the point in that?  It’s like giving you the greatest tool in the world that will help you solve all your problems, improve your relationships, be more peaceful, and then saying “but you can’t use it!”

Hi, I’m Meredith Hooke, founder of ZenSmarts and creator of the Peaceful Minds for Busy Lives course.

When I first started meditating I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.  

I was so desperate for something to help relieve me of my constant stress and anxiety I jumped right in, not really understanding what I was jumping into.

From the very beginning, meditation helped me to feel calmer and less stressed.

To this day, I don’t know why I was able to stick with it. I can only think that my depression and anxiety prior to meditation was so deep that I just couldn’t imagine going back to living like that!

After a few years of practicing, I did notice that as good as I felt most of the time, I hadn’t completely shed all my bad thought habits. With enough pressure and challenges my old thoughts could get ahold of me for a while. I didn’t like the reminder.

That’s when I discovered what had been missing from my practice.

Meditation is the tool, it is not the answer.

I didn’t realize that meditation was really only half of the practice – one wing.

The other wing is Wisdom – the teachings that should be taught side-by-side with meditation. Having an intellectual discussion about the ways in which we mentally torture ourselves and then using the meditation practice to absorb that information.

For example, intellectually you know jealousy causes more harm to you than anyone else but do you really know it to the point that it never traps you? Using both wisdom and meditation is how we root out the really emotionally sticky habits.

That was the secret sauce that made my practice even more compelling and interesting… and it is a HUGE reason why so many people get bored and fail at sticking with meditation.

It’s when I started meditating for longer periods of time, going on retreats, and getting deeper into that sense of peace that stays with me through the ups and downs.

I had been for the most part a very nervous, anxious, and insecure person most of my life. So I wasn’t surprised when I’d meet people and they would comment on how calm and peaceful I was.

I didn’t turn their compliment away because it was true. I was calm.

They just had no idea that I hadn’t always been like this!

Eventually I decided to leave my career in the financial industry and start teaching this practice to others.

(There was a slight detour through a Buddhist monastery where I was going to become a Nun – but that’s another story!)

I teach for some very simple reasons:

I want to help people.

I want to change people’s lives.  

I know that these practices can help you find more peace and wisdom within yourself and give your life more meaning.

If meditation could take me from the worrying, stressed out, insecure person to the one I am today, I knew it could do it for anyone!

But how do I get people to stick with it?

At times I was a little bit concerned – Was I going to be able to do this or not? And the answer was not with the results I was getting.

Then came along my most challenging client.  She was stressed, anxious, and (we finally discovered) that she lived mostly with a great deal of fear.

She had tried meditating before she began working with me and was even upfront about “just how difficult a client she was going to be.”

But I assured her that everyone could meditate – it was just a matter of finding the right practice for her.

Whenever I’m asked to identify the best meditation practice, my answer is: the one you’ll do.

The fact is if you don’t like the practice, you’re not going to do it.

After a few weeks of working together I started to wonder if maybe she was one of those rare individuals that just wouldn’t be able to do it.

I pulled out every practice I knew but she just couldn’t stick with it!

She had the desire and motivation to want to do it, but for whatever reason none of the practices was working!

Then I remembered a practice I learned in India while on a silent meditation retreat.

The lightbulb went on in my head and I had an idea!

While the practice that I learned was good, there was a reason I no longer did it – it was missing something.

Something critical.

What could I do differently that would make it more effective?

Drawing from many traditions that I have practiced over the years, I created something that really got to the heart of what we’re trying to do in meditation.

That not only made meditating more interesting, so people were more likely to want to do it, but the benefits were pretty much instantaneous – more incentive for people to want to keep coming back to it!

I think I found my answer!

The next time we met I introduced this new practice to her and she immediately loved it.  

A week later, she e-mailed me that she was sticking with it and seeing benefits.

A few weeks later, she was still enthusiastic about her meditation practice.

This was the most success she’d ever had with meditation and she was really excited.

I was excited too as it was giving my own practice a massive boost.

By this stage I had been meditating for about 15 years and I had already seen enormous improvements in my life.

But these new practices were a game changer!

Although my idea originally came from ancient Indian practices, I completely flipped them around and married them with modern-day neuroscience.

The result has been a program that has been enormously successful with people that thought they would never be able to stick with meditation!  

It was also an unexpected surprise for those who already did meditate but were feeling like they’d plateaued.

Now you have the opportunity to access this exact meditation technique that I teach all my clients, along with the wisdom teachings surrounding it, online at home anytime that’s convenient for you.

I’ve filmed the whole 8 weeks – it’s ready and waiting for you!

Introducing “Peaceful Minds for Busy Lives”

“Peaceful Minds For Busy Lives” is an 8-week, multimedia online training that teaches you how to lower your anxiety and increase your happiness through meditation and mindfulness training. I’ll use HD videos to walk you through 8 class modules.

By the end of it, you will:

• Feel more at ease and in control, regardless of what is going on around you.
• Worry a lot less and spend more time feeling content and peaceful.
• Be more productive with a greater ability to stay focused and filter out distractions.
• Be kinder to yourself and others.
• Reduce stress and anxiety.

Here’s a complete breakdown of what you’ll learn in each class…