March 29, 2018

Beginners Guide to Meditation & Mindfulness with Meditation Teacher Sarah McLean

1 hour 12 minutes

Sarah McLean has been teaching meditation for over 20 years. I first met Sarah in Sedona this past winter when I visited her at the McLean Meditation Institute. There was an instant connection and I had even more respect for her after she guided my husband and I through a meditation. I discovered that she is the author of 2 books, The Power of Attention, and xx. Sarah has had an amazing and interesting life, dropping out of high school at the age of 17 and going homeless, to joining the army where she first learned about meditation. She also has traveled the world with her bike riding in places like Turkey, Pakistan, and Greece and her tremendous life experience has given her insight for her sense of purpose on the this earth. Sarah is incredibly approachable and has worked with everyone, from Fortune 500 companies, Olympic Athletes, to small families.

She worked with Dr. Deepak Chopra in Lancaster, Massachusetts for 8 years at the Ayurveda Health Center, a Transcendental Meditation community. After Deepak moved to California, Sarah became the Program Director for the Chopra Center for Wellbeing. With a hunger for knowledge and personal truth, Sarah took a sabbatical to seek the origins of meditation. She lived in a traditional ashram in South India for six months, and was a two-year resident at a remote Zen Buddhist monastery for two years. She founded the McLean Meditation Institute in 2001. Her Institute offers meditation and mindfulness classes, weekend meditation retreats, and a 200-hour teacher training program so if you are curious about becoming a meditation instructor, you can work with her.

Personally, I enjoyed this conversation because we discussed a lot of things I'm curious about. We are familiar with the idea of meditation, but the truth is that here are many different ways to do it so if one way doesn't resonate with you, there are other methods to experiment with. Sarah takes us through the 3 key ingredients to any meditation practice, different types of meditation and where to find resources to actually do it, tells us about the changes that are physically occurring in our brain, the difference between mindfulness and meditation, and even has a few short guided meditations interlaced into the podcast episode!

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