Meditation may be fine for you, but for me? Unlikely.

Something I hear frequently hear is “meditation won’t work for me". I get it. It’s hard to imagine how closing your eyes for 20 minutes while practicing a mental technique is a long-term solution for problems like insomnia, anxiety and a sense of overwhelm. Just last week, someone told me “no amount of meditation will help me get on a plane and fly without freaking out. No amount of meditation will prevent me from taking sleeping pills"

It would be ridiculous for me to say meditation works for everyone. The truth is I don’t know for sure that meditation will work for you.

But what I can say is that I’ve never seen the technique I teach, Vedic Meditation, not work for someone who practices it consistently 20 minutes twice daily.

And I’ve taught a range of people with demanding lifestyles from teachers to athletes, lawyers to incarcerated people, journalists to plumbers. They all reported feeling better, some wildly better, over the four days of the course.

The effectiveness of meditation is increasingly backed by science. A 2015 study by Harvard Medical School shows that within just eight weeks, the brain of meditators begins to change. Brain scans of new meditators showed that within two months, the brain’s fear centre shrank, while the most evolved part of the brain which governs good judgement, increased in size. This is good if you want to be calmer, sharper and smarter.

Some people don't have to wait eight weeks to feel Vedic Meditation's impact. Take, for example, journalist Sarah McVeigh. At the end of the four-session course she was posted on Instagram about her experience:

Instagram post by @rahmcv which reads: I first met Joh working at the ABC in Sydney. Now in Manhattan, we meet again. I’ve spent the past four days coming to her meditation studio in midtown. Amongst the chaos of NYC she’s taught me to meditate and I feel calmer and happier than I have in years. If you are in new York I can’t recommend her highly enough. I’m so excited by what’s to come. Thank you Joh!