By Angela Moore
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Certified meditation teacher Kristin Westbrook offered guided meditation sessions inside of her converted RV truck on Wednesday in midtown Manhattan and encouraged frazzled passersby to join her for a 10-minute mental break.
Leaned up against her vehicle, which was parked around New York’s Bryant Park and alongside several food trucks, Westbrook, 50, said she opened “Calm City,” a mobile meditation studio, in May to alleviate people’s stress as it helped her with her own.
In town from Massachusetts, Susan, 55, saw the parked truck while walking back to her hotel in Times Square and stopped in for a 10-minute session costing $10.
“It’s a total reset,” Susan, who did not wish to provide her last name, said.
“Any sort of high-level stress, it just would bring it right down, remind you to breathe, remind you to come inside, remind you to just ground your feet and just drop in. It’s perfect.”
The Calm City mobile studio, which seats up to nine people at a time, hosted about four customers total on a recent Wednesday, according to Westbrook.
She hopes to partner with companies around the city for corporate events and eventually expand her business by operating more trucks.
Westbrook, a New Jersey native, said a two-time battle with breast cancer and stressful job as a creative director in Manhattan inspired her to open the mobile studio, which is now her fulltime job.
“I wanted to make it as convenient as a food truck so that you could just pop in, get 10 minutes of calm and then go back to work without it being a big time commitment or travel commitment,” Westbrook, who has been meditating since 2001, said.
“I love when people come in here and mediate because the look on their face just changes so much when they leave. It’s so relaxing and so purifying. People walk by and they are like, ‘Oh wait, let me see what’s going on in here.'”
(Reporting by Angela Moore in New York; Editing by Melissa Fares and Lisa Shumaker)
