Gloria Kamler, MA, is a holistic educator and stress relief expert, who has taught mindfulness meditation for the past 20 years. She facilitates all levels of the Mindful Awareness Practices or MAP classes at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC). In addition to teaching at UCLA, Gloria leads mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) classes and retreats in Los Angeles as well as other U.S. cities and internationally. Throughout her career, Gloria has trained with mindfulness leaders such as Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph.D., founder of the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction program (MBSR), teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center as well as Shinzen Young, Ph.D., founder of  Vipassana Support International. Gloria earned her B.S. in education from the University of Michigan and an M.A. in guidance and counseling from Eastern Michigan University.  She has maintained a personal meditation practice for more than three decades, and her dedication to living mindfully is an integral part of her life.

A ruff transcript of our conversation:

Well, hello, I’m here with Gloria Kamler meditation teacher and again in all disclosure. I met Gloria as one of my teachers over at UCLA. So we’re just going to jump in and how are you today before we get started?

I’m happy to be here good curious as to what this is gonna be and it’s very excited about what you’re doing great. I appreciate that.

So the first question is why meditate?

That’s a really good question. One of my teachers who has been shins and young. That’s one of the things he has asked when you first sit down every time you can ask that question and quite often. I do ask that question and I encourage others to ask themselves the same question as to why we do this practice. So I asked myself the question and I get different answers at different times. Definitely when I got interested in meditation. Thirty-some years ago. My reasons for meditating, I don’t know that I had a well-formed reason I just heard it was kind of an interesting thing to do and it was 1969 and I wanted to find some way to bring in some peace. And so I heard meditation maybe could be helpful in that regard. And so that’s what first got me into interested. You know, it’s the time of the Vietnam War and there was a lot of conflict and recognizing that maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s just more about life that I couldn’t see, you know, I sure so that with that’s what got me interested then and then I suspect over time. I got interested more specifically in mindfulness of that approach to meditation. Just recognizing that. I had a very serious meditation practice that was two and a half hours a day. Wow, and I did that for 10 years and that was a very long time to do practice Yeah, and. Over that time I always felt that something was missing for me in terms of the kind of meditation. It was it was it was a mantra focused practice, but for some reason it didn’t seem to be impacting my life in terms of me noticing. How important it was in my life. So I was looking after 10 years I was looking for. Wanting to meditate because I knew it was a good way to help me focus and to calm down a bit, but I wanted something more relevant for how I lived my life. Maybe the ethical way of living my life, right? Not sure what it was, but I knew I needed. Something different plus two and a half hours a day of meditation practice was unsustainable for me. I wasn’t the best meditator. So two and a half hour two hours of day. That’s that’s quite a bit two and a half hours is one-tenth of your day. Yeah, I’ll people tithe a tenth of their. This is a tenth of your time. Wow, and and I did it for a long time. But I never felt like I was very good at it. So I was looking around the last couple of years of in that ten year time of was there something else I could do?