Joshua Pollock has always sought the meaning of life in music and meditation, but these days, his focus is on the latter. Mr. Pollock has toured nearly 40 cities across the U.S. and Canada in recent weeks, and is now hitting Europe to promote The Heartfulness Way , a book he has co-authored with his mentor Kamlesh D. Patel on the increasingly popular form of meditation. Heartfulness is a heart-based meditation system.
Stress is all around us and trying to escape it by running away cannot be a viable option, Mr. Pollock told a group of heartfulness enthusiasts at the World Bank recently. A Western classical violinist, Mr. Pollock worked as instructor in A.R. Rahman’s KM Conservatory in Chennai from 2008 to 2010. He also worked with Mr. Rahman on several films, including Ghajini , Delhi-6 and Raavan .
Mr. Pollock recalled how his parents tried to escape the busy life of New York in the seventies. “They wanted a much simpler life. They were from Manhattan. That was sort of the movement of that time; a lot a people were doing that. My point is that regardless of whether you are living in a wilderness or living in a city, the challenge is in dealing with stressful situations, they just take a different form. Anyway I grew up like that. We didn’t have a toilet at our house until I was nine, and no tap water until I was 14. It was a bit of a rustic lifestyle.”
Unique features
Mr. Pollock is now trying to spread heartfulness system, which, he says, is a unique route to meditation. How is it different from other forms? “Very generally, the effect that it produces — that is something that we can experience for ourselves. In terms of the features of heartfulness — it has two very unique features. One is called yogic transmission. It is something you won’t find in other systems. That is what does everything in this system. When you meditate along with yogic transmission, the effect is extremely profound. And that is something that we experience only when we mediate along with a trainer.”
The trainer is a key element in the whole experience, and Mr. Pollock was quick to remind that the whole movement is not commercial. “It is freely given. It can be accessed remotely and digitally through an app,” he said.
But a practitioner can grow in the system. “A time should also come when we will be able to receive what we do without a trainer also. We should be able to graduate to that level.”
Mr. Pollock’s own discovery of the system happened in 2002, as a 23-year old in Cleveland, Ohio. “I had meditated before, and in fact, I had experimented with a variety of methods. But I found great difficulty. It was a almost a chance encounter that I had with heartfulness. I just ran into a stranger who meditated, and that turned out to be this one, and he put me in touch with a trainer. When I did sit with that person, I found that immediately, there was a deep effect. The things that I had been seeking for previously, I was finding within a few minutes. I came back three days in a row. And I thought, let me continue this. This is taking me somewhere.”
Mr. Pollock lived in Chennai, where he could get by with only English and hence never got on to learning Tamil. After his Europe tour, he will return to Delhi by August end where he is based now. Among his plans for the coming months is learning Hindi.
