Who is Meditation Magazine made for?

• People struggling with ADHD, stress, depression, anxiety, or just general pissed-off-ness who want to learn meditation in a fun & easy way, without the pressure of lessons, the tech-addiction of apps & websites, or the commitment of reading long boring size-12-font-books.
• Passionate meditators & yogis who want to learn new techniques, deepen their practices, and keep in touch with the global meditation community.
• Bookworms who are into meditation and want more awesome magazines in their shelves.
• Meditation & yoga studio owners who want an awesome magazine to keep in the studio (if you want to sell them in your studio, DM us on facebook).
• Doctors & therapists who want a fun, entertaining, helpful and relevant magazine to keep patients happy & comfortable in the waiting room.

What are the benefits of reading a PHYSICAL PRINTED MAGAZINE, rather than using apps & reading articles on the internet?

Stop reinforcing your screen addiction!

Deepen your meditation practice, learn new techniques, gain new perspectives, be inspired by wisdom teachings & travel stories, deepen & heighten your experience of being alive… all without having to scroll on instagram, facebook, or any other soul-sucking screen-demon.

Share meditation with friends and family!

When you send them links to apps or articles on the internet, it can feel pushy or preachy, and reinforce their screen addictions. And it’s not even very effective — when they get your message they’re already looking at a device that has infinite temptations and distractions. They’ll be thinking about work, or a message they just received, or emails they need to check, or the Top 10 Celebrity Butts article they just saw pop up on the screen, and likely won’t be very interested in your meditation link. Instead, just leave our physical magazine on your coffee table, and your friends & loved ones will naturally pick it up when they’re bored, relaxed, and in an open & receptive mood.

The “curl up on the couch” factor

When we started Meditation Magazine, it was just a blog on the internet. Our articles and tutorials started getting popular, with thousands of people sharing them on facebook, reddit, forums, and other blogs. And then the requests started pouring in… “How can I buy the physical magazine?” We were surprised by this — why would people want to buy a physical magazine instead of just reading articles online for free? We actually started asking people this question, and people gave different variations on the same answer:

• “I just like reading things on paper.”
• “I don’t like staring at a screen.”
• “I like to be able to physically turn pages.”
• “I like reading books and magazines.”

We sat with this for a while, and eventually had a powerful realization. It was one of those “aha!” moments that happens once in a blue moon. It was the “Curl Up On The Couch” factor.

It’s not so comfortable to curl up on the couch with a laptop. It’s kind of depressing to stare at tiny letters on a bright screen and scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

But when you curl up on the couch with a magazine, it’s a whole other world. Maybe there’s a steaming cup of coffee sitting by your side, wafting pumpkin-spice heaven into your nostrils. You sink into the couch with the magazine, unconcerned with how close it is to your eyes, diving into the super-high-resolution images to see tiny details in photos of your favorite gurus that you could never see on a screen, making you feel like they are right there with you, cozy on the couch, relaxing together, falling into peace, love & deep presence.

Fall INTO presence, not out of it!

Computer & smartphone screens take you OUT of presence, while physical printed Meditation Magazines takes you into it. When you’re staring at a screen, even if you’re reading a meditation article, or using a meditation app, you’re just one click — or worse, one notification — away from being pulled helplessly down some random rabbit hole of mind-stuff. Some random website on the wrong side of the internet. A heated, yet ulitmately pointless, political argument, where nobody ends up changing their minds. An email from your boss that stirs up anxiety. A text message that gets you thinking about something else. A phone call that completely interrupts your focused, present experience of reading & meditating. GET AWAY FROM YOUR SCREENS! Dive into a magazine.

Read in bed without light pollution keeping you up at night.

Reading in bed is such a nice relaxing way to fall asleep — but not if you’re reading on a smartphone or laptop screen! The light actually tricks your brain to think it’s day time, and stimulates your nervous system to stay awake. Far from relaxing you and helping you fall asleep, it can actually keep you up at night, for hours, leaving you thinking you have an insomnia problem, when what you actually have is a too-much-light-at-night problem. Take back your relaxing reading-in-bed habit, take back your healthy natural sleep cycle, and take back your life!

Instead of competing for your attention with other apps, browser tabs & notifications, Meditation Magazine competes with your devices (computers & phones) themselves!

Did you ever try to dive into meditation, on a website or an app, and find yourself quickly sucked into something else? Social media, games, messages, random clickbait articles — these are all candy for your attention. Meditation is more like fruits & veggies — healthy, natural, but not nearly as addictive. Given the choice, your attention will gravitate toward candy over fruits & veggies, pretty much every time.

It takes conscious control, effort & willpower to stay focused on a meditation article, when there are a dozen other tabs, clickbait links, notifications and sexy photos trying desperately to distract your attention. That’s what we realized, when we found that people were much more likely to click on pictures of butts than on our meditation articles — even though the meditation articles were actually better for the reader’s happiness in the long run.

So, we stopped trying to compete with pictures of butts. It’s an uphill battle, a fool’s game. Instead, we decided to compete with laptops and phones. If you see three things on a table: a laptop, a phone, and a beautiful, colorful, Meditation Magazine, you end up choosing the magazine a decent percentage of the time. And when you do, you’re not “half-there,” reading half an article and then jumping into another browser tab, or skimming an insta caption and then scrolling through a hundred other posts. You’re fully present, absorbed in the moment, absorbed in the beauty and wisdom of the articles, tutorials, and inspiring images. The mind settles down, and it actually brings you into a meditative state. How often does your laptop do that?

Even when it’s closed, lying on your table, Meditation Magazine serves as a POWERFUL REMINDER to come back into the present moment.

Does your phone do that?

When you see your laptop or your iPhone sitting on your coffee table or nightstand, what happens in your mind? “Oh yeah, I need to send that email.” Or “I need to check my notifications.” Or worse: “I wonder what’s going on in my phone right now!” In contrast — what happens when you see a big, bold, colorful MEDITATION MAGAZINE sitting there on the table? BOOM! Presence. Meditation. Zen. It reminds you to come back into the moment. Every. Time. You. See. It. Even when it’s closed — it serves as a reminder, to come back into meditation.

What issues have we published in the past, and what issues are coming up?

Meditation Magazine was founded as a simple blog website in 2010, and we started publishing physical, printed magazines in Autumn 2018!

Issue #1: We published the Autumn 2018 issue, with sound healer Ekaterina Ket on the cover. We printed 1000 copies and distributed them for free, by hand, around New York City! That was fun! We spent a lot of money, but we learned a lot, and people were so enthusiastic about our magazine that we ended up getting picked up by Whole Foods, Barnes & Noble, Sprouts, and a bunch of other chains nationwide, across all 50 states of the USA!

Issue #2: Our first national issue featured dual covers, with Trevor Hall and Wim Hof, two of our heroes! It was on shelves in hundreds of stores across all 50 states in the USA!

Issue #3: Our Apocalypse Issue, our first international issue, was published in the midst of the Covid Pandemic, featuring Yoga Girl Rachel Brathen on the cover! This issue was on shelves across the US and Canada!

Issue #4: Our Guru Issue was on shelves in thousands of stores across 20+ countries around the world, featuring Deepak Chopra and Sadhguru on the cover!

Issue #5: Our new issue will hit stores on the Autumnal Equinox (September 21st) of 2021! It is called The POWERFUL WOMEN IN MEDITATION issue, and will be on shelves around the world!

Issues #6, #7, #8, and #9: As our subscriber base grows, we are able to publish more issues per year. These four issues will be published in 2022. We are aiming to increase the diversity of our covers by featuring more South Asian meditators & meditators of color, as well as improving the quality of our magazine with each and every issue ❤️

Here are screenshots of all of the issues we’ve published so far 😃