Lemondrop

This past Halloween, I didn't dress up as a sexy French maid or, like one particularly creative morning DJ suggested, a sexy bedbug. Instead I spent the weekend in sweats, flat on my butt ... meditating.

Meaning, I got on a plane, flew across the country to Sedona, Ariz., and sat cross-legged for 48 hours on the living room floor of Sarah McLean, a meditation expert who trained with Deepak Chopra.

There were about 12 of us on our "Radiance Retreat" -- moms with kids who were driving them crazy; men going through tough divorces, and icky mid-life crises; and me, who'd been glued to her two BlackBerrys for the past year, to the point where I didn't know where work started and I left off.

The amazing thing was, no sooner did I sit down in my little folding meditation chair (which are so amazing I kind of want one for Christmas) than I felt something other than the ever-present stress I haven't been able to shake in forever.

You know the scene in "Eat, Pray, Love" where she's been sitting in an ashram in India for nearly a year, cursing the idea of having to chant for one more GD morning -- and then she has a breakthrough?

It was kind of like that. But in my case, after sitting there for just one weekend, on Sunday morning my arms and legs went numb. I saw colors. I felt ... things. And sitting there on Sarah's nice white carpet, in the presence of a dozen strangers, to my surprise I started to tear up.

When it was all over, yes, the feeling had returned to my limbs. The only difference was, I felt more blissed out than I do even when I opt for the "special" pedicure.

Afterward, I rushed up to Sarah. What just happened?!

And she explained -- just as she's about to do in the new movie, "Tapping the Source," which premieres this weekend. The movie is about finding the one thing on Earth that makes you happiest.

For Sarah, that's meditation. After the jump, we quiz her on why, exactly, a flat surface and a throw pillow is all it takes to make your life infinitely better.

Lemondrop: What is "Tapping the Source" all about? Does it have anything to do with "The Secret"?
Sarah McLean: It's been said that this is like the sequel to "The Secret." It has many of the same people: Bob Proctor, Michael Beckwith. I got involved because the man who is producing the film is Eckhart Tolle's agent, and he wrote the book called "The Twelve", and he asked me if I'd be willing to lead meditations around the world, for the purposes of the book. He realized that that's the way I tap the Source.

What does "tapping the source" mean exactly?
It means finding your source of happiness -- and it's feeling this connection to everyone and everything. Shaun White, who's in the movie, he's a famous snowboarder, and that's his practice for tapping the source. Mine is through meditation.

How do you know when you're tapping the source?
For me, it's a sensation: an experience of expansion, a feeling of interconnection, of being happy for no good reason, of bliss. There's an absence of anxiety, or depression. It's different every day, but those generally are the markers.

What first led you to meditation?
A sense of not being fulfilled. I grew up in a wealthy community on the east coast, and everybody was really clear in high school that the source of happiness was getting into a good college and majoring in something. That meant nothing for me. I just remember being a sophomore or junior in high school, and everyone's wondering, What should I be? And I thought, in my little world of 20,000 or 30,000 people, how can I know? I felt like I couldn't dream big enough for myself.

I used to pretend to meditate. I used to sit cross-legged and have my eyes closed and do it like a joke with my friends, but on the other hand I really used to wish I knew what I was doing!

That's a good point. I think a lot of people think, Well, If I'm sitting on my floor, with my eyes closed, I must be meditating. What's the difference?
The difference is daydreaming versus meditation. Daydreaming -- exploring your inner world and your imagination -- is great, but it's a different process than meditation, in my mind. What the Beatles were doing, they learned a meditation that helped them transcend the world of their fans, their money, their relationships and their popularity. They went into a world beyond the material realm. The non-space, non-time realm. That's the mediation that I find the most effective.

That sounds great, but how do you shift from just daydreaming to actually transcending?
It's about turning your attention inward. You're never going to stop having thoughts. I spent years in a monastery, and there was still daydreaming that went on. But what you want to learn is called a "mindfulness meditation."

What does that look like?
Focusing on the breath. This is probably the most ancient form of meditation. You want to breathe through your nose. You don't want to control or manipulate the breath in any way. You want to bring your attention back to the focus. Ideally you would be sitting up -- many people think they should be lying down.

But when I try this at home, I always get distracted by thoughts like, I should really sweep up that dust bunny.
[Laughs] Ideally you sit with your eyes closed. You don't look for dust bunnies!

But traditionally, this is called the monkey mind. We have 60,000 thoughts a day, and they get a little bit louder when we close our eyes, because the world isn't overshadowing them. When the mind drifts away to a thought about dust bunnies or what's for lunch or how many emails you have to send off, once you realize it, you gently and sweetly turn your attention back to the breath. It's the opposite of being tough on yourself. You have to be gentle with yourself.

The mind's nature is to think, and if you're having a thought, you just return your attention back to the focus of your meditation: the breath. It doesn't matter how many times you need to do that. What we're really doing in meditation is to train the awareness to be in the present. Tapping the source -- all those mystical experiences you hear about -- can only happen in the present moment, not the future or the past. It's that intuition, that connection with life. When we focus on the breath, we're in the moment.

I liked what you had to say about how thoughts about "shoulds," or feeling guilty, mean we're living in the past.
Yeah. When I "should" do something, or "should have" done something, you can just notice the tense that they're in. When you're in the past a lot, it usually indicates a sense of shame or depression, and when you're in the future, it's usually anxiety or fear.

Like yesterday, I was talking to a woman who was so riddled with anxiety. How was she going to meditate? When was she going to do it? And I said to her, right now, how are you doing? And we kept breathing together on the phone, and I said, is everything OK in this moment?

I told her to take her cues from her dog and her 5-year-old son. Kids and animals are always in the moment. Think about it: I want to find my bone. I am trying to find my bone...

I think one of the most relatable meditation moments we know of is Liz Gilbert in "Eat, Pray, Love." She really, really wrestled with meditation: It made her angry! Is that what it's really like when you sit there trying to do it all day?
I visited the ashram she was in; my husband actually lived in that ashram. I ended up living in one in south India for six months, and it was very different practice from what I was used to. We were on the cement floor, and it was hot as could be! There were hours of seated meditation, and east Indians have a different sense of personal space, so where you and I might sit next to each other -- for them, that's room for three!

I would sit all day, all night, in this place, and yes, it was extremely frustrating. But I think of the saying, "wherever you go, there you are." I was in India, in this very spiritual place, with Amma, the hugging saint, and I still had to deal with thoughts like, does my boyfriend love me? Does my hair look good? The same old story that I had in America, I would have over there.

Whether you're in India in an ashram, or you're in your apartment in New York, the main obstacle of meditation is the mind.

But, if it's this awful struggle, why do it?
How is your life after meditation? In her case, in "Eat, Pray, Love, she tapped into her source. The universe began to support her in her knowledge, in her creativity -- obviously, she's a best-selling author. Meditation is the quest for having a better life.

Better how?
The benefits range from the physical to the emotional to the spiritual. I hear from people who come in because they have high blood pressure. Not only is their blood pressure reduced, but they discover a new passion in their lives.

Or they're going through a divorce, and they discover that their creativity has skyrocketed. Or someone comes in because their wife makes them, and he discovers that life is much more magical than he thought ...

And then some people come because they're totally stressed out, and they feel a sense of spaciousness and inner peace that they didn't even know they could.

There's a cultivation of the beginner's mind: You see things with more curiosity, and without judging. People begin to appreciate their lives. One of my friends said, "It's like seeing the world through really clear glasses you didn't even know were dirty."

You start to be in the flow, really experience synchronicities.

Can you explain what those are?
Yeah, things happen like, you think of someone and they call. That's a simple one.

Recently -- OK, well I'll just give you an example: I wanted to do an eating meditation with my group that I was teaching in Scottsdale this weekend. There are 30 people in my meditation group, and this woman shows up with a box of 30 chocolates. I wasn't planning on buying any chocolate, but she showed up and I got to walk in and hand out this chocolate.

Or, my birthday was on a weekday, and I love to watch old foreign movies -- I have to watch them alone because my husband hates anything with subtitles. I put the movie in, and then I put it on pause because the phone started to ring, and I thought, I know it's my birthday, but I should really get back to work. And I looked up at the TV, and there on the screen was this subtitle saying: "Take it easy today."

With meditation, we're removing the veil of stress from our senses, and what happens is that we have the support of the intelligence that underlies everything. I started to feel this subtle but powerful sense of support from the universe. I didn't even plan on having faith, but suddenly I had this sense that I am loved.

Einstein said: ""I think the most important question facing humanity is, 'Is the universe a friendly place?'" And meditation makes it a friendly place.


Sarah McLean is the founder of Sedona Meditation. "Tapping the Source" will premiere in L.A. this weekend and is also available in book form. Check out the trailer below.