By AJ Bicât
By the age of eight I had read the Tanakh and the ‘New Testament’; by the age of sixteen I was smoking and drinking at school and well on the way to making an academic cockup so comprehensive I had would have to retake my exams, merge my results and beg for a year to get into the second worst University for humanities in the country.
Swapping ‘boffin social outcast’ for ‘rebellious lady’s man’ felt great, but my future lay elsewhere. On finishing school, I went to London, Nepal and then to Tibet. If I’d stayed in the East just one day longer, I wouldn’t have come back.
No matter what happened in my life: university, multiple relationships, casual drug and alcohol use, tens of thousands of miles of travelling, real life fairy stories involving princes and princesses and a highly successful short film career; I always retained an interest in religious and tribal philosophy and psychology from that tender age of eight.
I’m extremely grateful for this because our schools seem Hell-bent on sending our children into the world mistakenly believing that it is bad to be wrong and that one’s intuitive feel for the truth is inferior to the ‘schooled’ version of ‘fact’.
At the age of twenty-seven a serious injury forced me to reframe the way I viewed myself and the universe.
My next set of journeys took me deeper and deeper into the oldest philosophical and psychological ideas in an attempt to find the very first instances of these thoughts. While finalising a romance in Australia, I was to be found in the National Library reading up on obscure Aboriginal tribal customs. While making movies in California I became a member of an indigenous Chumash community. I photographed Polovtsian native tribal sculptures in Russia while working as a private tutor. The list is endless.
No matter what I studied, no matter where I studied it, I found that all creeds show great interest in altered states. Any radical change of perspective renews self-awareness.
If there is a Holy Grail of altered states, there is no doubt in my mind it is meditation: zero side effects, zero paraphernalia and zero negative impact on those around you.
Altering states isn’t the only thing creeds agree on. They also boil down to the same two most important truths on earth:
- Do no harm
- Everything’s connected
It often makes me think of the theosophists favourite statement:
“There is no religion higher than the truth.”
After a failed marriage and a professional career in Hollywood I returned to the square mile of London. For reasons too long to go into I’m introduced to the world of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of what we call mindfulness. As usual I’m highly sceptical, but I read Full Catastrophe Living and it becomes increasingly clear: here is a man who is codifying the uncodifyable.
In his heavily peer reviewed environment, Kabat-Zinn proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Integrative Medicine (i.e. meditation and medicine) makes Western medical science twice as curative.
At the same time the appetite for wellbeing in the corporate world increases, after all productivity, staff turnover and absenteeism have an enormous effect on the bottom line.
I learn quickly that corporate L&D isn’t engaging and doesn’t have a lasting impact. Within two years I find myself creating MEQ® (corporate training imagined and delivered through the prism of mindfulness and emotional intelligence). The statistics go through the roof. “Really great experience - actually life changing,” doesn’t even come close to doing it justice.
I suppose some might think that teaching people to meditate in the City of London is incongruous or perhaps even ironic. But if you think about it; meditation is a hard skill just as learning how to use Excel is a technique, and vice versa. Of course, meditation is different because the technique leads to the routine and the routine leads to a way of life. It’s also a fact that meditation will improve your efficiency with Excel, but both start the same way.
Put simply, if you want your company to function better, if you want your employees to be more bonded, work happier and more efficiently; there is no better, no longer lasting way to do this.
I feel very humble and proud to be able to say, “I’m teaching the world to meditate one corporation at a time.”
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About AJ Bicat
AJ Bicât is one the world's top corporate MEQ® instructors. He has taught in hundreds of organisations including Penguin Random House, M&C Saatchi, Mind Candy, The Department for Work and Pensions, Rothschild & Co. and Cisco.
AJ was born in London, raised in the Cotswolds and then travelled extensively studying tribal and religious philosophy all around the world including: Nepal, Tibet, Australia, Russia and North America.
He built a 20-year career in education, film & TV working for Buena Vista International, BBC TV, Paramount, Artburst and Channel 4 as an actor, teacher, producer, director and writer.
On returning to live in the UK he became a Qualified MBSRTM Facilitator under the tutelage of Jon Kabat-Zinn's world leading mindfulness training organisation The University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Centre for Mindfulness.