If Ben Turshen had his way, meditation would be just as vital to your daily routine as brushing your teeth. Like him, you’d settle in for multiple daily sessions to ease anxiety and feel more relaxed. And, now thanks to Turshen, it’s easier to learn how to follow in his Zen footsteps. After successfully founding Ben Turshen Meditation studio in New York City, he recently moved to Cleveland—bringing his practice with him.

But Turshen hasn’t always been a meditation expert. He used to be a corporate attorney, before realizing that the demands of a high-pressure career exacerbated his life-long depression, anxiety, and insomnia. His usual coping methods—fitness, therapy, and medication—were no longer cutting it, and his therapist recommended he try meditation.

“I was doing all those other things, and I was still really in survival mode,” shares Turshen. “But what caused me to kind of go over the other side and start to cruise downhill was this meditation technique that I learned.”

Meditating calmed Turshen so effectively that he eventually ceased therapy and stopped taking medication. In 2011, he quit his high-stress job and set out to become a meditation teacher before launching his New York studio in 2015. The practice became so popular that Turshen has even taught Olympic athletes and Fortune 500 executives how to slow down.

Eventually, after multiple visits to Cleveland while visiting his wife’s family in Wooster, the couple fell in love with the city’s slower pace of life and world-class arts and culture. Along with their 3-year-old daughter, they relocated to Ohio City, where Turshen plans on opening a second branch of his studio this spring.

In the meantime, Turshen is hosting classes at the Beauty Shoppe coworking space. The four-hour sessions (spread out over two days) teach students everything they need to practice Turshen’s self-developed style of "Access Meditation" at home.

Launched last fall, Access Meditation combines breathwork and mental techniques, and the method is designed to be more accessible to busy, modern lifestyles than more traditional meditation. The practice is optimally performed twice a day for 20 minutes, but Turshen says even 10 minutes can produce big benefits—from better rest to less stress to keener focus. 

Along with those individual improvements, one's happiness can spill over to others, creating a generally more pleasant society, says Turshen.

“You want to meditate to experience the world that way, but more importantly, you want the world to experience you that way,” he explains. “So this has a far-reaching impact, far beyond the people who actually do it.”

For more information on Access Meditation, click here.