Light Watkins

Light Watkins grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and spent his twenties moving between an advertising job in Chicago and modelling work in New York before a yoga class led him, somewhat reluctantly, to meditation. After relocating to Los Angeles to teach yoga full time, he met a Vedic Meditation teacher in 2003, later travelled to India to train as a meditation teacher himself, and has kept a daily seated practice ever since.

His teaching is deliberately down to earth: short daily sits, little fuss about technique, and a focus on bringing presence into ordinary decisions, relationships and work. He has written five books, among them Bliss More, The Inner Gym, Knowing Where to Look, Travel Light and The Year You Transform, and his TEDxVeniceBeach talk on common misunderstandings about meditation has drawn close to a million views. From 2018 he spent five years living out of a single backpack, an experiment that shaped his ideas about simple, values-led living. Today he gives keynotes on presence to organisations, offers private one-to-one coaching, writes a weekly letter on Substack, and teaches a 21-day meditation course on Commune.