rare air 34 | tom cronin

I’d finish on a trading room floor after trading billions of dollars of swaps and bonds and then go to a studio in the city and start teaching people how to de-excite their mind through meditation…and over time there was a strong compulsion to do that full-time and to find a way to scale that in a big way…

Can meditation really save the world? Tom Cronin thinks so.

Big ideas and the people who chase them are captivating. Tom Cronin’s big idea is to bring an ancient practice, meditation, and sweep the message of it's benefits across the globe using the even more ancient art of storytelling.

The practice of meditation is tens of thousands of years old and of everyone who takes it up, relatively few become teachers. For many, personal enjoyment of the multitude of benefits is enough.

And of those who become meditation teachers, no matter the strength of their personal practice, or conviction that meditation improves wellbeing, even fewer feel compelled to reach a global audience.

At 29, as a stressed-out bond and swap broker, Tom Cronin took up meditation. As he developed his practice, he’d work days on the trading floor, and over time, nights as a meditation teacher. The transformation for Tom was extraordinary, but can be illustrated like this. At 29 his biological age was measured as 37. With the help of meditation, by the time he was 42, his biological age was just 34.

Tom became so passionate about the profound change meditation could effect, that he built a new career taking this information to the world, hosting retreats, mentoring, speaking publicly, and in 2019, releasing a book and a film, both entitled “The Portal : how meditation can save the world”. The book and film use the stories of a wide range of people whose lives have been utterly transformed by their meditation practice.

In this episode of Rare Air, Tom explains how meditation changes a human being, and how it has the power to defuse the tensions affecting humanity today.

Can meditation really save the world? Tom Cronin thinks so. Big ideas and the people who chase them are captivating. Tom Cronin's big idea is to bring an ancient practice, meditation, and sweep the message of it's benefits across the globe using the even more ancient art of storytelling.

This conversation was recorded at RTRFM, Mount Lawley, Western Australia. October 18, 2019
Mixed by Adrian Sardi at Sugarland Studios
Music "The Summit" by Blue Dot Sessions from freemusicarchive.org