I Stopped Listening To My Last Meditation App Because I Thought The Instructor Might Kill Me

Earlier this month, I broke up with Tamara Levitt, the softly-spoken mindfulness instructor who guides meditation sessions through the wildly popular app Calm. To invert the regular parlance of the break-up, it wasn’t about me. It was about her.

For those who have never used Calm or the many apps like it, the formula is simple: a soothing voice instructs you to dive deep into your body, accepting your thoughts rather than resisting them, opens up space in your over-addled brain for an important life lesson and then, in the voice of someone drifting away to sleep, gives it to you.

Levitt was good at least 60 percent of that process. She told me to get comfortable. She told me to count my breaths. She had me imagining cool ocean breezes, and clouds floating through the sky. She put me, simply speaking, in a place of calm.

And then she said some absolute motherfucking bullshit.

Levitt’s life messages were, without fail, the kind of thing you’d read on the bottom of a bar mat. She told me that there were plenty more fish in the sea; that life can get pretty crazy sometimes; that putting a sprig of sage in your shoe is an easy way to add a little colour and life to your day.

Then I became convinced that Tamara Levitt was a murderer.

The process was akin to being gently led by the arm into a palace of calm only to find that there was dogshit trampled through the marble floors; that the wellness retreat of my mind had been overrun by a small army of Facebook-addled Aunties tattooing giant Minions memes on each others’ backs.

And then I became convinced that Tamara Levitt was a murderer.

The clues were all there. The unshakeable sense of cold, vicious peace. The surgeon-like understanding of the human body (“consider your left ventricle… then consider your right.”). The more I listened to her voice, the more I imagined being tied up into her cellar, being asked to picture a night sky while she removed my fingers with a pair of gardening shears.

So I got Tamara Levitt out of my life, and I replaced her with Adam from Headspace.

Adam’s real name is Adam Puddicombe, which makes me think of a baker in a picture book for children. His website says only that he “trained briefly at Moscow State Circus”, which is precisely the amount of information I want to know about someone’s time with the Moscow State Circus, as it leaves my imagination some all-important space to do its work (was he a clown? A ring-master? A particularly kindly elephant trainer?)

Adam is a salesman, like all modern mental health gurus are salesmen. But he is a particularly fascinating salesman because he only seems partially interested in what he has to sell. He’s like one of those bored people handing out free samples of expensive cheese in the aisles of a Coles — he knows he doesn’t have to do a lot of work, because life sucks and people want to feel less shitty and all you need to do to get someone to download an app and spend ten minutes a day listening to a soothing voice is to say, “Hey, this will probably make you feel less shitty.”

For instance, halfway through Adam’s TED talk, he juggles. He doesn’t seem very interested in the juggling, or what he has to say. Adam is the kind of person who could witness a multi-car pile-up and stroll over with a band-aid.

He’s chill, is what I am trying to say, in the way that Labradors are chill. And chill in a different way from Tamara Levitt, who is chill in the way that the liquid metal dude in the second Terminator film is chill.

Sure, there are some similarities between the two of them. Like her, he tells me to count my breaths. He sends me somewhere deep inside myself, away from the echoing thoughts, and then he holds a quivering piece of life advice on his tongue, ready for me to take. But rather than fish in the sea, Adam’s stories are always the same: in his deep, booming voice, he tells me to like, chill out man.

That’s not exactly earth-shattering news, I know. But hey, at least I don’t imagine him telling me to close my eyes and count to 12 as he shovels dirt on my cold body, filling up a shallow grave as the starts twinkle above us, tiny pinpoints of light.