Frequently asked questions

Every talk will be slightly different depending on the audience, as we cover material that is most relevant to each group. Common themes are things such as learning how and why we get stressed, how we can begin to calm the stress response down, what different types of meditation you can access and where Beeja meditation fits in.

The sessions are open to all so please do. There are limited places available so simply let us know as soon as you would like to book an extra place and we can reserve that for you.

The session lasts approximately one hour, although sometimes people find themselves asking lots of questions and getting really into it, so occasionally it will last a little bit more. If you have to dash off after an hour, don't worry at all.

There are many branches to the tree of wisdom and no one meditation or mindfulness method can claim complete authority. The main thing is to find a technique that you feel will work best for you.

However, there are a few significant differences. The effortlessness of this practice and its immediate benefits are rarely found in any other form of meditation. Many people who’ve tried other techniques consider this to be the easiest, the most effective and the most enjoyable.

The portability and flexibility of practise also make it much easier to integrate (e.g. being able to meditate on a train) and is another reason why people find it a much more sustainable approach.

The technique is also a powerful healer due to the depth we attain when we do it. In the words of one student, a former monk of 7 years:

“I’ve spent many years in India and have done a vast array of meditative practices in my life, some pretty serious that have involved sitting in mud huts on the banks of the Ganges for months on end, meditating for days and days in Himalayan caves and visiting various ashrams and doing intensive programs there. And none of them have managed to hit the same level of consciousness and depth that this technique does. It is a beautiful practice – it’s the real deal”

Pete, Graphic Designer, London

Simple. It’s all about nourishing your roots, rather than attending to negative symptoms each and every time they surface.

If we want a really healthy plant, we water the roots. This saves us having to run around trying to cure every leaf, branch or bud that develops a problem. This is exactly what this practice does. Utilizing a personally selected mantra takes us to such a profoundly deep level of rest that every fibre of our being is nourished by goodness.

We teach a technique that has been passed down in its pure form from master to student for 5000 years, since it was practiced widely throughout the extraordinarily advanced Vedic civilisation.

Transcendental Meditation is a branded form of Vedic meditation that was popularised by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the ’60s and ’70s. It was originally known by the Sanskrit name of nishkam karma yoga, but in order to give it more descriptive value, it was later called transcendental deep meditation, and finally the abbreviated version TM that we see today.

Fortunately, the organisation’s bid to trademark this ancient technique was rejected in this country and so we can all work in tandem, helping share this incredible wealth of ancient wisdom.

There are of course lots of similarities between Beeja and TM, but there are also key differences. At Beeja we are not constrained by a big organisational structure, so are able to grow and flow organically. We are also very lucky to have access to intermediate and advanced techniques which are not usually taught outside of Beeja.

If you’re unsure which approach is right for you, then it’s well worth popping along to both of our talks to find out more.

The vast majority of mantra meditation practices out there utilise generic one-size-fits-all mantras that are used in a different way than the special class of mantras that we use. There are lots of scientific studies, and anecdotal evidence, that our technique using a personalised mantra is far more powerful.

‘Fearlessness’. Do this for a few years, and you will be completely fearless of yourself, of life, of others. And that is an incredible space to find yourself in. And it doesn’t take that long to find it. You start noticing it in the first few months and it just grows from there. And because you no longer feel stressed of fearful, you’ll feel empowered, with a renewed sense of purpose, to grow and embrace your full human potential.

We all tend to carry more stress than we realise. It’s great if you don’t feel stressed but that stress might be internalised with your body’s cells and organs telling a different story. Even if you already feel great, the beautiful thing about meditation is that it enhances everything you do, helps you feel more creative and inspired, amd become more in tune with yourself and the world. It will also work wonders in warding off stress for the future and forging a resilience for everything life throws at you.

Try and remember that this is a process. Calming the nervous system down, attaining a deep sense of relaxation, and catalysing the healing processes are some of the most important tasks for the meditation during the early days. This doesn’t always lend itself to deep experience, particularly when there’s a lot of overstimulation within the nervous system, which there tends to be with most people.

Also, remember that this is all about bringing your inner richness to the surface so that it can shine in everyday life! That means culturing the ability to be simultaneously deep whilst also being able to process information and activity. From the very first meditation the brain begins re-moulding itself to simultaneously experiencing depth and conscious awareness at the same time. Our brain wants this experience so badly it will rearrange itself to be able to straddle both states. So while your subconscious is deep, your conscious mind is taken up with all of the neuronal excitation caused by the stress release process. The outcome of this process will be superior functioning in your everyday life.

It is also worth mentioning that a lot of beginners think they're being distracted by thoughts or noises throughout the entire meditation, but every study that has ever looked into this has found that there are significant intermittent experiences of transcendence that the participants aren’t even aware of. You simply disappear in what appears to be a mere blink of an eye, but in reality lasts anywhere from 3 seconds to 3 minutes. This experience is part of the cycle of healing and is where your mind, body and nervous system's natural creative intelligence begins digging out the emotional and toxic detritus. The elimination of this leads to the stimulation which you then experience as thoughts or emotions.

We had a great example of a mother and daughter meditating together recently and the mother thought that her meditation had been completely distracted by noise of traffic on the dual carriageway near their home, and yet when the daughter commented on the noisiness of the two fire engines that went past, the mother’s response was simply ‘what fire engines?’. Don’t be fooled into thinking that your conscious experience of the meditation is giving you anything more than a very incomplete picture of what is actually taking place in every layer of your being.

Finally it’s also worth noting that the harder you try, the less you will find yourself succeeding at getting into a relaxed state. It’s like when you 'try' to go to sleep, it doesn't work. You must simply do your thing and allow it to happen.

The best thing you can do is not to resist them in any way. Allow the natural flow of ideas to take place without blocking their way. Thoughts will come and go. They are not you, they are simply by-products of an over-stimulated nervous system. If you notice yourself resisting the thoughts or trying to focus on the mantra, take a moment to allow yourself to mentally and physically make your peace with the comings and goings of thought stimulations. This will deliver the greatest results.

The most likely issue is that you are placing too much value on perfect pronunciation of the mantra. This won’t be helpful to you as it will cause you to focus your attention and collapse your brain activity into a more local level of patterning. Allowing yourself roll with it; letting it pulse away in the background of your awareness is the most effective way to use it.

It may also be that you are animating the sound too loudly. Often there is a temptation to make it nice and clear in our awareness so that we know we are saying it properly. See if you can allow yourself to let go of the need to make it too discernible. Having it as a faint idea is far more preferable; it will pulse away in the deepest layers of your consciousness, and that’s where we want it.

Not being able to repeat it in your mind as you would when you say it is also not an issue. This is accounted for when we deliver them to you. Simply allow it to bubble away in the most natural, subtle and organic way possible. The agitation you’re feeling is likely to be a mixture of the emotion that you’re processing and frustration about not being able to do it as perfectly as you wish. It is a tendency within our culture to try and be perfect, but in actual fact bringing acceptance to an effortless approach will ultimately serve you much more powerfully than bringing a perfectionist approach to it.

You are of course welcome to check your mantra at a group meditation whenever you wish. That will at least eliminate any ambiguity or worry you may feel.

In short, it is not important at all! In fact, it is uber essential to be as nonchalant and non-attached to the outcomes within the meditation as possible. The mantra will take you into a deep zone which is often at the source of thought. Sometimes you will go beyond all thought but you may not even realise you’re there as it passes by in a flash. Then, during the processing of whatever that experience helped you release, there is going to be electrical excitation of your nervous system and thoughts will bubble up. This may continue for some time before you realise that you are no longer on the mantra. This is absolutely fine. All we need do is return to the mantra in an innocently favoured way as and when it naturally and spontaneously occurs to us. We are definitely not looking to hold on to the mantra, nor are we trying to be vigilant in coming back to it as soon as a thought bubbles up. Essentially, we put our feet up, engage in the process, and go where the meditation takes us. The fact that you are feeling relaxed is a great sign. That is an essential part of helping your subconscious mind relax and repair.

This is because you simply cannot tell from your subjective experience how well the meditation went. Some of the most powerful meditations you may ever have are when you feel really emotional during it, or are being bombarded by thoughts, or you simply drift into deep sleep like state or it gets dreamy. After the initial clearing out phase much of the work is taking place in the subconscious, far beyond the reach of your conscious awareness. Therefore you have no clue about what's happening behind the scenes, except to say that in time life will feel like it's moving in the right direction (all other things being equal). The process of refurbishment is almost always messy, and the amount of internal refurb that most people require is so big that the meditation experience may be distinctly mediocre, and yet the fruits of the refurb will help you enjoy a wonderful internal place.

It's also true to say that our self destructive tendencies, inner saboteur, or inner critic will always be on the lookout for ways to do ourselves down, or indeed, the meditation. So next time the inner voice starts analysing and critiquing the meditation, just remember, 'good things are happening', don't pass judgement on yourself or the meditation. And if you had a super whizz bang experience, that's awesome. Meditation can be really fun and enjoyable. But it doesn't mean the meditation will have done any more for you in the long term than a blazingly mediocre one. So enjoy the good feeling, and then let it go. Good things are happening in every single meditation.

It's fine, it happens, don’t concern yourself in any way. The main thing to do is to not try and force it out of harmony with your breath, let them ride along merrily together. If in doubt, simply allow your mantra to pulse away in the background of your awareness ever more softly. There may come a point where your level of subtlety transcends the linkage to the breath and that will work well. Take the whole experience as it comes and be as effortless as possible.