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It was a scene you’d expect at a Wednesday afternoon wellness class in Los Angeles. About 40 people with matching athleisure sets, iced matcha lattes, Salomon sneakers, and at least one Fendi baguette filed into a meditation studio tucked in an alley just off the Venice boardwalk.

Toryo Ito, a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk, was already seated at the front of the room. A sculptural, oblong skylight cut into the ceiling, casting a beam of sunlight onto the floor. He sat cross-legged, wearing a black robe, with a set of small tools laid out before him: an incense holder, a spray bottle, and various blocks and mallets made with metal or wood.

Ito is the vice abbot of Ryosokuin Temple in Kyoto, which dates back over 600 years. His modern approach to Zen has made him something of an ambassador for mindfulness in the corporate world, leading meditation workshops for companies like Meta and Salesforce.

Marc Benioff, Jack Dorsey, Alex Karp, and other business and tech leaders have embraced mindfulness practice. Meditation apps have raised hundreds of millions in funding, and companies are increasingly offering programs to employees to combat burnout and improve performance.

As a business reporter living in California, the wellness capital of the US, my prior experience with meditation mostly consisted of adding it to the list of habits I’d like to start each new year, and then proceeding to complete a handful of five-minute sessions sporadically, primarily as a means to squeeze in a little sun time before a full day at my desk. Maybe a class with a real-life Zen monk would be just the motivation I needed.

What I’d actually find was that my concept of meditation was way off and that it’s a lot simpler — and more attainable — than I’d made it out to be.

Meditation does not mean thinking about nothing

The class was held at the Venice studio of Open, a mindfulness startup, and organized by Tatcha, a luxury skincare brand whose founder has her own corporate-to-mindfulness origin story. Vicky Tsai worked on Wall Street as a credit derivatives trader before quitting to start Tatcha. She met Ito in 2016 during a class at his temple in Japan. He became the company’s first-ever “global well-being mentor” in 2021.

Attendees — Tatcha fans who had signed up for the class through their socials — took photos of the room and spoke quietly to one another. Some set up cameras to record themselves. One attendee took an especially aesthetic flat-lay shot of her Tatcha-branded mat and towel alongside her purple shoulder bag, which matched perfectly.

I was immediately struck by the contrast between Ito and the rest of us.

Ito sat erect but calm, doing nothing. Sometimes he looked around the room and smiled. Other times, he looked ahead or softly closed his eyes. He didn’t fidget. Meanwhile, the rest of us were on our phones, taking photos, scrolling, anything but simply sitting still.

After about 10 minutes, the room quieted, and all attention shifted to him.

He welcomed us and asked if anyone had been to Kyoto, seeming surprised when a good chunk of the room raised their hands. He said Zen emphasizes two concepts: mindfulness and expanding the boundary of the self in order to dissolve it.

Ambitious, I thought, but intriguing.

Ito said that while there’s no perfect meditative state, we should focus on paying attention. The class was broken into three rounds of meditation, each lasting 10 minutes, give or take, during which we sat in silence with our eyes closed.

For the first session, he told us to pay attention to what we heard and smelled: the chime he rang to start the session, the birds chirping on the nature soundtrack playing in the studio, the air conditioner kicking on, the sound of a spray bottle, and the earthy smell that followed. He rang another chime at the end of the session, which felt like it flew by as I tried to focus on my senses.

For the second session, he told us to focus on the sensations in our bodies and had us lift one arm, hold it in place, then the other. Lastly, he asked us to meditate on a series of questions related to self-love: What color do you associate with self-love? “Light pink,” I thought. What drink? “Sparkling water.”

It was more involved than I expected. I thought the point of meditation was not to think about anything. What Ito taught me was that it’s actually about noticing.

“Intentionally disrupt that autopilot,” Ito told me after the class, adding that he prefers dynamic meditation, like walking, where you can feel the grass beneath your feet. He said he’d spent time earlier that day walking through Venice Beach.

For people with high-stress jobs, Ito said meditation can be practiced in small moments throughout the day, for 10 minutes or even just one. He recommends lighting incense and actually paying attention to the smell. When you drink coffee, notice the taste.

Doing these little practices of just noticing things you previously missed can bring the benefits of mindfulness, which he said include stress management, increased creativity, and openness to new ways of thinking.

Small moments of noticing

When the class ended, the first thing I noticed was how different the attendees seemed.

There was a newfound stillness that had previously been missing, and very few immediately reached for their phones. We sat in silence, no one rushing to get up, as several people shared how they felt with the whole class. One busy mom said she felt “at peace.”

I did not become a perfect meditator that day — although Ito would likely say there’s no such thing — but what I learned was that I actually meditate, or practice mindfulness, more than I realized.

Each time I take a walk without headphones and notice the smell of jasmine. Or when I’m camping and zone out in front of the fire, doing nothing but observing the movement, warmth, and sound of the flames.

Which also might explain why, after each of these experiences, I feel some of the benefits that ancient wisdom and modern science have associated with meditation: lower stress, better sleep, and an overall sense of calm.

Since the class, I’ve been a bit more lenient with myself about what counts as meditation, which has helped me prioritize and appreciate these small moments of noticing.

The idea of noticing the taste of your coffee as a mindfulness practice might feel a bit silly. Then again, it’s a bit silly that I’ll weigh and grind my own beans, pull espresso in my expensive machine, and drink it in front of my computer, without even noticing once I’ve finished.