What if meditation felt easy? with Naomi Annand

“What’s the point of just sitting with myself?”

This Q&A is part of a series of conversations with people who are forging meaningful lives in a time of chaos and unpredictability. These interviews take time and skill to produce, but I keep them available to all subscribers rather than paywalling them. If you value the themes explored in these conversations, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

When I was 22, a friend in east London told me about a new yoga studio nearby that offered a Wednesday morning community class for £5. That was about the extent of my fitness budget at the time, so I went the first week it opened.

Though I had dabbled in yoga since I was a teenager, I had done so with the mindset of a high school and university athlete, forcing my body to perform some outward version of what I thought yoga was supposed to look like. Yoga on the Lane, in Hackney, was something entirely different — a place where doing less was not only celebrated, but somehow rewarded. It’s the place I first experienced what it felt like to be kind to my body. Slowly, over the next decade of practicing there, I learned how to extend that kindness to my entire self. It’s a lesson that changed my life. 

Naomi Annand is the founder of that studio, a yoga teacher, and the author of two beautiful books: Yoga: A Manual for Life and Yoga for Motherhood. A former dancer for The Royal Ballet who had to end her career due to injury at just 21, Naomi also lives with two chronic health conditions. I think of her studio — and by extension, her online teaching — as a kind of recovery home for over-achievers and former perfectionists like me. It’s full of kindness, and devoid of ego.

First a teacher, then a role model, and now a friend, Naomi is someone I’ve been meaning to interview for this newsletter for a long time. (Fun fact: she provided the inspiration for one of the most-read and popular pieces of journalism I’ve ever written. I still receive emails about more than six years later.) But it’s not strictly yoga I wanted to talk to Naomi about, it’s meditation. 

Meditation is a practice I’ve been trying to re-establish in my life after the survival-mode and mental health rollercoaster of matrescence, or the process of becoming a mother. It feels like I’m emerging from a two year period where I had very little control over my inward or outward experience from day to day. And so, as I start to re-emerge, I’m eager to drop back in there: into the expanse, into myself, into the quality of interconnectivity that I know meditation offers. It feels urgent — not just for me, but for all of us.

I turned to Naomi because she has a real gift at making these enormous concepts feel accessible and relevant to our lives today — without reducing them to corporate-feeling wellness or abandoning their South Asian roots. In this interview we talked about what meditation actually is, how to use it as a tangible tool to navigate a world full of incredible suffering, whether you need to do it every day, and how she answered the two skeptical journalists who once asked her: “What’s the point of just sitting with myself?” 

Naomi Annand

Rosie: I thought it’d be helpful as a starting point to define meditation, what it means to you, what we’re talking about here.

Naomi: For me it’s about being with the whole self. Meditation has an observation, so there’s focus, direction, a one-pointed awareness which is the breath. And then it’s allowing some of what’s happening, the mind churning, the sensations in the body, to actually be at play.

I think a lot of people think meditation is about stopping thoughts. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras he writes something to the effect of “yoga is the calming or the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” The calming of course I agree with, but the total stopping or absence of thought is nonsense. 

R: Yes I think people make a mistake to think it’s about emptying the mind. I think of it as observing the chaos going on in there, with this sense of remove or neutrality. By doing that regularly, you notice this separation between you and your thoughts. You don’t have to indulge every single thought, you can tell some to go away. And that is really a nice feeling – that’s what I’m hoping for when I meditate. 

N: Yeah, that’s the space that opens up. And in that space everything’s possible. It’s full of potential. And I think that’s where you get this sense of being empty and full at the same time — holding those opposites is very tangible in those moments. 

To me it feels really exciting and creative as a practice. It requires an investment of time to get to that. Yes, everyone can meditate, but it requires a bit of practice and commitment to get beyond the frustrations of it. And of course I still get frustrated with it all the time, but also there are these mega moments that open up. 

R: It makes so much sense to me that the ancient yogic texts intended the eight limbs of yoga to work as a kind of progression inwards. For example, the asana (physical poses), pranayama (breath-work), pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), and other steps served as preparation before you even attempted dhyana (meditation). Because it’s hard to sit in meditation without any prep. It’s not zoning out or falling into deep rest – it’s actually quite an alert state of mind. 

You mentioned this point of focus or alertness. This is something I’ve been playing with in my practice. Is it the breath? Is it a mantra? An image? What should people focus on when meditating? 

N: In lots of practices or traditions, mantra is very powerful. It can be very simple, something that resonates in your body or in your system. It almost doesn’t really matter what it is though. Love is the obvious thing for me. It’s hard thing to explain, because it is about love, but also the embodiment of this idea that the world is such a mess and I need to also feel like I’m not turning away from that mess. I want to acknowledge the suffering that’s going on in the world, the suffering I feel in myself, and I want to feel connected to that with love and with energy. I don’t want to feel like I’m falling apart. So I’m using the point of focus to tap into that. 

Sometimes I’ll practice metta, or loving kindness meditation, which is a series of statements: “May all beings be happy, be healthy, be free from suffering.” Of course, those are really hard phrases to say right now, when there’s a genocide happening and everything else. But to actually feel that in your body, it does feel like an active thing. It is something I can do in myself. 

R: Yes, it does feel active. It points to this quality of interconnectedness that I believe life has — that we can cultivate that feeling in our own internal experience. It’s quiet, it’s not like loud activism, but the more people that move through the world with that awareness of interconnection to one another, the better, right? 

N: Yes. 

R: In the loving kindness meditation practice you mentioned, you direct those statements — “may you be happy, healthy, free from suffering” — first to yourself, then to someone you love, someone you feel neutral about, someone you find difficult, and then all sentient beings. I once heard the meditation teacher Sharon Salzburg say that if you can only muster the energy to direct those statements to yourself, it’s okay to stop there. That it’s not selfish, that in that moment, on that day, you are the one that’s suffering. And I find that really helpful in the context of the world right now. Like on parenting days where I cannot spare a thought for anyone else because I’m so beaten down by the demands on me, it's still worth practicing. Because then tomorrow, after directing that loving kindness to myself, the hope is I will have that capacity to direct outwards. 

N: That’s really inspiring. It makes me think about agency. Meditation is the place where you can really hold the experience as you need it to be, which is essential to moving through the world right now. Which is why it’s important we keep it inviting. If meditation is taught in this very strict way, like a ten day vipassana meditation retreat on a cold, hard floor — for me that would be very triggering. I would feel terrified. That would not be helping me be of service in any place in my life.

And I feel a bit social media is like that. We can’t filter what’s coming in, there’s a lack of agency in what we’re exposed to. So meditation is a place where you can really find your direction and focus and recalibrate a bit. And regain some agency over the state of your mind. 

Yoga on the Lane, in Hackney, London

R: I’m so interested in this idea of how do I rebuild my inner resources – my literal ability to feel resourced and energetic so that I can do more for other people outside parenting and surviving. It feels so urgent in my life to figure that out, and I know meditation is one way to rebuild that. I guess that’s why I’m eager to do it. 

N: In compassion-based practice, we start with inner resource. That’s all about cultivating a safe place within. That just takes practice, you just need to keep tending that.

I once had three months of deep fatigue after I got diagnosed with type one diabetes and hypothyroidism. I couldn't get out of bed. It wasn’t depression, because I’ve always had this mind over matter thing as a trained ballerina, but I just could not do it. All I could really do was lie down and meditate, and I learned so much during that period. And now I see that moment as a gift but it did not feel like it at the time. 

R: Meditation in the way we’re talking about is this deeply human experience. There are no frills, no distractions to make it easier. Then you have the entry of VR and all these things we’re on the cusp of. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was recently quoted in Vanity Fair saying the Vision Pro is really good at helping with meditation. It’s part of how Apple is marketing the product. My immediate reaction to that is like “no, absolutely not, if you are using a $3,500 Apple device to meditate, you are not meditating.” So what do you think? 

N: I had my first VR experience last week through a piece of art created by one of my students, who is an artist and quantum physicist. The piece of work is called Heartbreak and Magic, and the artist, Libby Heany, explores how she is holding grief in her body. She creates this world for us to go into. The thing that I found incredibly interesting is that in yoga and meditation, I talk a lot about having roots and wings at the same time, this quality of being grounded and floating simultaneously. And in her piece, it was quite wild because we’re in this other universe and I had that physical feeling of being both rooted and floating.

I do think VR could be really interesting in terms of thinking about less- or differently-abled bodies having an experience of being in a body in a different way. Having seen that piece of work, I’m interested. I can see how it could work for some people.

But for people that haven't really meditated before, using something like VR is probably a bit of a shortcut. Possibly the same could be said for all kinds of things. I’m a big believer in doing things in a slow, incremental way, so I shy away from shortcuts in my own practice.

R: Okay let’s do some rapid fire questions about meditation. People are really into daily streaks when it comes to meditation and other habits. How important is it to do this every day no matter how you feel? Does that matter? 

N: No. My husband and I are doing Duolingo to learn Spanish and he is obsessed with the streak. I am not that person, I will get to it when I get to it. I don't feel like I'm learning less than him. 

R: Does time of day matter? 

N: Not important. I mean, yeah in the days of pre-kids when you’re sleeping reliably through the night, if you can get up in the morning when there isn’t a hum of activity inside or outside — there’s something very soothing about that. But I don't think it matters at all. I really like meditating at night when everyone else is in bed. But often I’m locking myself in a room saying “just give me 20 minutes everyone!” 

R: Guided or not?

N: I used to be quite judgemental about that because you never learned to take yourself through the process. But yoga nidra is guided and it’s a great place to start. I think if you practice yoga nidra with someone who is skillful, then once you feel that inner restful position lying down, then when you sit up it’s easier to go there. 

R: Seated versus another posture? 

N: I think that it shouldn't be hierarchical. So just be comfy. Either lying down or sitting. 

R: You’re really good at making these expansive topics and practices accessible for people. And there is this narrative that “meditation is so hard, there’s nothing harder than sitting with your thoughts! It’s like torture!” So can you make the case that meditation can be easy and accessible?

N: One of the first yoga retreats I ever ran had two journalists on it. And they asked me “what’s the point of just sitting with myself? I could be doing so many other things.” I was so intimidated by the question but really wanted to answer it. 

I think the answer comes down to friendliness. If you can do that inwardly, you can do that outwardly. Surely the whole point of being on this planet is to think about connections, whether that’s with the ground, the planet, our relationships with each other.

Meditation also taps into this paradox, which is that you are nothing – a drop in the vast ocean – but you’re also an essential drop in that vast ocean of awareness. When you practice you are becoming aware of you, the tiny little self, but also you in the majesty of it all. 

When I think about it, it’s such a gift. Every breath is a gift. If all you have to do is sit or lie down and think about breathing, rest awareness on the breath, and be grateful for the breath and so much comes from just that. I think that’s a great place to start

R: Framing it as this friendly practice immediately makes it feel more inviting. There’s no striving in it. It’s just that experience of aliveness you’re giving to yourself. 

N: It’s like the Duolingo streaks, or the cold water swimming trend – everything seems to have to have this kind of hardness these days. But in my experience, the things I want to do more of are not hard. I want to make it more friendly. I want more ease. 

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You can find Naomi on Instagram, book her online Zoom classes via her studio or join her subscription platform. You can find her books here.

She’s also teaching a yoga retreat on March 18 - 20th at West Lexham estate in Norfolk. Spaces are still available.

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