This week's show is with Alex Mill, a Zen Life Coach, facilitator, leadership trainer and public speaker. He spent nearly 14 years training in a Zen monastery and is now offering his years of experience to transform people's lives and businesses through mindfulness, meditation and compassionate self-awareness practices.

In this week's show Alex agreed to me throwing questions at him about all things meditation. This is something that I'm on a real personal journey with at the moment - I used to meditate years ago in the hope of calming my mind, and now when I have a calm mind much of the time, I'm interested in discovering whether I can still benefit from meditation and if so, how. I'm inviting you along for the ride with me.

What you'll learn from this episode:

• The benefits of meditation are typically that you're more in the present, more focused, less lost in thought, more able to direct your attention. I loved what Alex said: we are either here or not here.

• Meditation gives the regular practice of noticing that your thoughts are not you and giving you access to the space of insights, peace and connection.

• Take time for yourself to remove the barriers to meditating: just take 5 minutes to sit and focus on the breath.