American Actress and
British-Royal-to-be Meghan Markle Reportedly Combats Stress with
Meditation
BD Dipananda Buddhistdoor
Global | 2018-03-15 |
Meghan Markle, American
actress, humanitarian, and fiancée of Britain’s Prince Harry,
meditates twice a day—20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in
the afternoon, according to her former meditation instructor. Years
before her royal engagement, Light Watkins, an American meditation
teacher and author of the book Bliss More, taught her the
mindfulness practice, which she quickly adopted into her daily
wellbeing routine.
“I met Meghan through a
mutual friend of ours about five years ago,” Light Watkins told
women’s fashion magazine InStyle. “This friend of ours is in the
wellness space, and I think she had been working on some diet stuff
with him. She’d been obviously familiar with the practice [of
meditation] and had been doing it on her own and she was really
intrigued by the fact that I was a meditation teacher and I do
these trainings.”
At the time, Markle was
portraying Rachel Zane on the popular American drama series Suits,
when a friend introduced her to Light Watkins. Already familiar
with meditation, she decided to follow one of Watkin’s meditation
courses to receive further training and structure for her
practice.
Mindfulness is an ancient
technique used in many contemplative spiritual traditions,
especially Buddhism, and is has been rapidly growing in popularity
among modern physiologists, neurologists, and physicians. Many
recent studies demonstrate that even secular versions of
mindfulness offer numerous well-being benefits, such as stress
reduction, deep relaxation, and more positive states of mind. Many
organizations, particularly in the West, are adapting
mindfulness-based meditation programs to high stress environments,
aiming to help practitioners better cope with the stressors they
encounter on a daily basis.
Markle was reportedly
already well versed in wellness practices and followed a very clear
diet with a regular exercise as part of her daily self-care
routine. “I think she just saw meditation as just another tool that
she could use because she has the resources and I guess the time to
explore,” said Watkins. “I think it ended up being a lot more
profound than she originally thought. It seems like she was in a
relatively good space beforehand and in a better space
afterward.”
Markle was so inspired by
Watkins that she mentioned him in her now-discontinued wellness
blog, The Tig. She reportedly observed to Watkins: “Hey look, I’ve
got this news wellness blog and I want to introduce more people to
the things that I’m benefiting from and one of the key components
to my wellness program is meditation.”
Watkins says that he
teaches very simple meditation techniques that can even be
practiced on a bed: “When you close your eyes, your mind is going
to be incredibly busy. [My] technique is based off of an acronym:
EASY. Easy stands for embrace, accept, surrender, and yield. And
what I’m referring to are the very things that people tend to
resist in meditation. It’s very counterintuitive.”
A couple of years ago,
Watkins said, he was contected by Markle, who noted that she was
meditating twice a day. With the royal wedding scheduled for later
this spring, Watkins added, Markle is surely extremely busy, but
still at times responds to the inspiration emails that he sends out
every day: “I’m pretty sure she’s still meditating.”