Why I charge to teach meditation

In February 2003, I paid a guy $400 to show me how to meditate properly (which was all the money in the world to me at the time).

This was after several years of struggling to meditate and feeling like I couldn’t overcome my monkey mind and all the other excuses I now hear other people use (“I don’t have time,” “It doesn’t work for me,” “I tried but I’m too fidgety,” etc).

After paying to study with my teacher, I got enough personal meditation instruction to make meditation easier and more enjoyable than I ever imagined. I was also invested enough into my own experience to practice as instructed. I finally felt like I was optimizing the time I spent meditating instead of wasting it by using shoddy guesswork.

If you’ve never worked with an expert who has an in-depth understanding of the mechanics of meditation, and you don’t have a structured practice, it’s almost guaranteed that you are working harder than necessary to meditate and that you likely are not optimizing your experiences—which is the meditation equivalent of driving with your emergency break on.

”If you value your time the way I do, then know that the least expensive way to optimize meditation (by far) is to pay someone to personally train and support you in your practice. You’ll have their full attention and, more importantly, they will have yours.”

If you look at it through the lens of a week-long training, it may seem expensive (at first). But if you look at it in the context of a lifetime practice and consider all of the millions of life decisions that will be positively influenced by the clarity you derive from your meditation practice, paying to learn properly will be like investing in Apple back when Steve Jobs was just starting out in his garage.

— Light