'Om' at Home: Expert Meditation Advice

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Richard Freeman, director of the Yoga Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, has created a sacred area for his meditation space. Photo by Povy Kendal Atchison

From maharishis to Madonna, meditation’s popularity has spanned the ages. While there’s plenty of information on why and how you should meditate, there’s less guidance on exactly where you should commune with your inner self. Can you carve out a meditation space in a corner of your bedroom, or do you need an entirely separate room? If your meditation area faces north, will a cold wind blow through your soul? Are white walls and bare floors truly Zen? Will you ever achieve nirvana without the right wall hangings?

We asked meditation and yoga experts for tips on how they created meditation areas in their homes. Here’s what they had to say.

Richard Freeman

Freeman melds his decades of study of various yoga practices—Zen and Vipassana Buddhism, Sufism, and Western philosophy—into a unique teaching style. His videos and tapes on ashtanga yoga and yoga breathing are bestsellers. He’s director of the Yoga Workshop in Boulder, Colorado.

“A meditation room can be sanctified through prayer or chant to mark it as a sacred space,” Freeman says. “In the same way that you create a sacred space, you can create a sacred time for meditation by beginning and ending with a chant or bow. This ritual, done as you enter and leave your space, encourages a fresh look at the thoughts and feelings that arise within it.”

Rodney Yee

With more than twenty yoga videos to his credit, Yee has helped bring yoga out of the studio and into the living room. A former professional ballet dancer and philosophy student, he’s codirector of Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, California.

“Everyone has something that’s special— a picture of a child, an old teddy bear, an old shirt, even a picture of Elvis,” Yee says. “Put whatever’s extremely individual in your meditation place—whatever draws you into a place of healing. I know one woman who collected dirt from every place she traveled and put it in a bowl in her meditation room. Center yourself in a place you’ve made your own.”

Deepak Chopra

Chopra, an endocrinologist and former chief of staff at Boston Regional Medical Center, founded the Chopra Center for Well Being in 1995 in Carlsbad, California, to integrate Western medicine with the natural, traditional healing methods of the East. He’s one of the world’s best known advocates of the theory that mind, body, and spirit must all be involved in any healing process. Chopra has written more than 35 books and recorded more than 100 audiotapes, videos, and CDs on mind-body medicine.