Resources

Meditation Trainer Stuart Mackay chills out with Julia Newbould

On the record with Julia Newbould

IFA Magazine September 2006

It can sometimes be difficult to maintain the level of focus necessary when dealing with other people's money. Meditation is one path that may be taken and which corporations such as the Bank of Queensland and Video Ezy. Julia Newbould talks to Stuart Mackay about how he established Peace at Work to help others in their path to greater clarity and focus.

How do you define what it is you do?
I'm a corporate meditation trainer with the objective to have staff clear, calm and focused. The benefits of this are extraordinary.

How did you get to where you are? Did you have a particular defining moment?
I spent many years in manufacturing commercial and interior designing offices, boutiques, salons and pubs. In 1979 I fired a guy who was really calm. I found it very annoying because I wasn't calm. I found ways of getting rid of him and picked fault with him until he left. When he came to pick up his final pay, I asked him about his meditation, which I knew he was into. He said meditation was like a window in his mind and when you meditated you were cleaning the windows and after while you start to see more clearly. He said to me, you could try it, not ‘should' but ‘could'. After he was out of sight, I looked up meditation in the Yellow Pages but with the philosophy and doctrine I was sceptical.

In 1981 I had an epiphany, I had a fight with the meditation teacher. He had a room of women in a room and took us on a mental journey - each woman seemed to go on a mental extravaganza but I saw only black. I told him. He said to move on as different people see different things. This is when I developed a programme called access track which demystified meditation through a non-philosophical, non-doctrine form of inner peace. What was the success of Access Track was the practicality to practice inner peace.

Was the road to success difficult for you?
One of my gifts is that I have dyslexia and that was one of my filters of not being influenced in what I'm writing. I had an intuitive understanding of what I had to write, what I saw in the fight [with the meditation teacher] is that I was going to popularise inner peace. I had success in the US before I had success here. I went to Toronto and used Austrade to write telexes to the US - I flew to NY and a guy there said I can't help you but I know someone who can and the next day I was published by someone who ran his own publishing mail order list. I took the book to the UK, and the English didn't want to know about it, so I came to Sydney in 1985 and worked in healing through meditation for 20 years. I published another book in 1995, then 1998 and 2003.

You work with many corporate businesspeople, what kinds of issues do people in financial services and generally share?
It's pretty much the same - as leaders all we do is say yes and no to things, and something between yes and no. It's having the clarity to make micro-decisions - the divine is in the detail - to make decisions on things having a clear mind.
You can't train people without a clear mind.
Peace at work is a strong form of release. But it's only about releasing tension. It's not relief or management. The release is like clearing a swamp.

What sorts of things compete with meditation in achieving the same or similar effects?
To me [meditation] is paramount. It's my lifeline. For others it's a choice. Yoga, tai chi, sport, TV, cocaine... all compete with meditation. But what I see is a lot is dipped in philosophy and other beliefs and doctrines and that comes with them.

What are examples of some of the most amazing effects that you've achieved with people over the years?
Working with cancer patients and HIV-positive patients in the 80s, the programme won't heal people, it's the work they do themselves that helps with the healing. There's been success in different forms of people dealing with their mine. There have been examples of people extending their life. I saw people with various cancers and they got through it by meditating, dieting and beat it. I've seen so many people get well. At the Albion Street Clinic there was no shortage of funerals but people died peacefully rather than kicking and screaming.

How do you do what you do? What does it involve in terms of commitment?
Some people need as little as 10 minutes a day and a willingness to do day to day work. I get up early, meditate for an hour and have my first session at 6.30am and then visit and present meditation to leaders who have an open mind.
For conferences we present meditation to eight at a table for between 10-200 people at each session. At conferences people find it confronting and dramatically effective.