Meghan Markle Once Revealed Her Secret to Happiness

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 7 August 2022

Before she was the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle founded and ran her popular lifestyle blog, The Tig, where she talked travel, food, and how to live a more fulfilled life.

On the heels of her 41st birthday, a post from the blog has resurfaced, per The Independent, which touches on the former Suits star’s key to happiness: meditation. The post, written in 2015—the year before she met future husband Prince Harry—reveals that Meghan is a practitioner of Vedic meditation, a practice that made her “just happier” and that she learned from a man named Light (“yes, his name is Light,” she wrote. “This is L.A., after all.”)

Meghan met Light Watkins while having dinner with a friend in Santa Monica, California. Watkins turned out to be a Vedic meditation coach and, after initial skepticism about how beneficial daily meditation could actually be (it was “endlessly daunting at first [the thoughts, the distractions, the boredom of it]"), Meghan gave it a try. She wrote it quickly became the “quietude that rocked my world.” After a year, she realized “I am just happier. And meditation has much to do with it.”

The post from The Tig gave advice from Watkins on how to try Vedic meditation, which is non-religious in nature and centered on a silent mantra aiming to “help you find your inner quiet.”

Watkins said that, while meditating, one should “let the act of meditating become synonymous with both noticing your breathing and getting lost in your thoughts,” he said. “Let all of the thoughts come and go—as you forget and become aware that you are meditating, it’s best not to resist any thoughts, including ideas, songs, conversations, images, feelings, or sensations.”

We’d be willing to bet this practice has gotten her through many of the ups and downs of the seven years since this blog post was written—everything from meeting the love of her life, to becoming engaged to him, to marrying and entering royal life, to becoming a mother, to stepping back from royal life, to surviving the pandemic, and building a new life for herself in her old city of Los Angeles.

Meghan encouraged everyone to try it at least once, writing “the worst thing that can happen is that you gave yourself 10 minutes of quiet in an endlessly loud world.”

Point taken.

Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of Podcast Royal, a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts I’d Rather Be Reading, which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more.