Madonna's former PA launches Mindful Nation mindfulness app
It's got the thumbs up from the music industry but will time-poor PRs take to its guided meditations?
If you had to rate the most stressful jobs in entertainment, then being Madonna’s personal assistant is probably one of them.
Niamh McCarthy worked for The Material Girl for a few years in her early-20s but has since reinvented herself as a wellness guru and set up her own “meditation meets music” app: Mindful Nation.
However, she learned about meditation the hard way.
When she was 20, Niamh McCarthy landed a job working for the Maverick music management group, a role that entailed working on tours for U2 and Madonna.
By the time she was 24, the rigours of touring meant her “dream job” was soon imploding: McCarthy was suffering from burnout and regular panic attacks. After collapsing in Germany, a doctor told her that she needed to change her lifestyle.
She moved to Los Angeles and started studying meditation, breathwork and yoga, eventually creating the Mindful Nation app.
Initially a hit with music industry execs in LA (entertainment giants Live Nation are among the app’s investors) who typically didn’t have time to meditate. Today its fans include illusionist David Blaine and Irish TV presenter Laura Whitmore.
The Mindful Nation app has more than 1,000 sessions, most of them three-to-four-minutes guided meditations led by different trainers including Marlyn Ortiz (Madonna’s former personal trainer), ‘Eugene’ (who gives sessions on breathwork and drums) and ‘André’ (a vipassana-trained conscious chef).
Users can select the ‘vibe’ of their daily classes, whether it’s Powerful, Calm, Grounded, Focused, Positive and Elevated. There are also curated playlists spanning everything from ‘Anxiety Goodbye’ to ‘Self-Love’ through to ‘Sleep’.
Mindful Nation was road-tested at the heavy metal Download Festival in Donington Park, where apparently 20,000 metallers meditated using the app and ended up hugging each other and crying. If it can work for them, it can work for anyone…
The Mindful Nation app is available to download on your iPhone from the Apple App Store.