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Tom Cronin will tell you that thinking is very overrated, and he has 26 years on a trading floor to explain why. He is an international keynote speaker, author of six books, leadership trainer and the producer of the feature-length documentary The Portal, and he has taught meditation to everyone from six-year-olds in classrooms to senior executives at Amazon, Oracle, Qantas and Coca-Cola. None of that was the plan. He spent a decade as one of Australia’s leading bond and swap brokers, starting in the late 80s in a world he describes as very Wolf of Wall Street, and by his late 20s it had cost him chronic panic attacks, anxiety, depression, addictions, insomnia and eventually agoraphobia. He was diagnosed as having a nervous breakdown. Psychiatrists, doctors and medication followed, and none of it felt quite right.
Not a spiritual practice
What changed things was a style of meditation known as Vedic or Transcendental Meditation, in which a qualified teacher allocates you a mantra, a resonance you repeat silently that shifts your brain out of its busy waking frequency and moves the body from the sympathetic nervous system, where we fight or flee, into the parasympathetic, where we rest and repair. Most people assume meditation is spiritual. Tom sees it as physiological. Most of our challenges, he argues, are not psychological at all. They are stresses held in the body, what the Vedic tradition calls samskara, and deep rest is what lets the body release them.
Uncomfortable is not the same as worse
Catherine asked the obvious question: does it get worse before it gets better? Tom reframed it. Stress releasing is not the same as stress inputting. Think of the twitch you feel falling asleep after a frantic day, he says. That is the same process, and it is not a crisis, it is a healthy expenditure of energy. On retreats, where the work goes deeper, tears and frustration do surface, but they are held in a safe space and understood as a good sign rather than a bad one.
What the body does when you leave it alone
His favourite illustration is a broken bone. No doctor, no medicine and no therapist can mend it. All the cast does is create stillness, and the body’s own intelligence does the rest. Cut your arm on a rose bush and the bandage keeps your clothes clean while your body coagulates the blood, grows scab cells and then skin cells, with no instruction from anyone. Meditation, in his view, is simply the same principle applied to the nervous system. He is careful about what he claims. He will not say meditation cures disease. What he will say is that his own biological age was measured at 37 when he was 29, that stress is one of the biggest factors in ageing, and that he stayed in the same high-pressure job for another 13 years and the number went the other way.
The story is not happening now
This is where Tom departs most sharply from conventional therapy. We do not need to regurgitate the story, he says, because the story is not happening right now. What keeps the mind replaying it is the energy of it still sitting in the body. Clear that, and the memory loses its charge. He can retell his own history on a stage, in a book or on a podcast without being triggered by it, not because he has analysed it enough, but because the stress behind it has gone.
The sky behind the clouds
If you have ever said you cannot meditate because your mind will not stop, Tom has an analogy for that too. A fidgety four-year-old will not sit still if you tell him to, but give him something charming to hold and he will. The mantra charms the mind. And beyond the thinking there is a state he calls Samadhi, where the mind trades the charm of thought for the bliss of being. Imagine a lifetime of cloudy days, he says. You would assume the sky is grey. Then one day the clouds part and you realise the grey was never the sky at all.
Tom left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Start the day deliberately, with movement, hydration, meditation and clear intention rather than a scroll and a double shot. End it deliberately too, shutting down technology by around nine, stretching, reading and naming five things you are grateful for. And if you have no teacher and no mantra yet, close your eyes and rest your attention on the cool air at the rim of your nostrils. Three to five minutes is enough to begin slowing everything down.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube
Find Out More About Tom Cronin
Website: http://www.tomcronin.com/ | https://entertheportal.com/
Instagram: @tomcronin
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/stillnessproject
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tomcronincoach
Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/