Tom Cronin is passionate about reducing stress and chaos in people’s lives former finance expert with a longstanding successful track record in business and meditation; Cronin is the founder of The Stillness Project, a global movement to inspire one billion people to sit in stillness daily. Cronin’s ongoing work in transformational leadership and cultivating inner peace through meditation takes him around the world presenting keynote talks in such countries as Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, Mexico and the USA – hosting retreats, mentoring clients across the globe, teaching in schools, writing books, hosting mindfulness courses in the corporate sector, and creating THE PORTAL film-book experience, all as part of his commitment to the current planetary shift.
- What is The Portal?
The Portal is the brainchild of myself, Tom Cronin, and my dear friend and collaborator Jacqui Fifer. I am an ex-broker turned global meditation expert, and Jacqui is an international DJ turned film director. Together we collaborated and realized my dream of making a feature film that would inspire people worldwide to shift humanity into a new era by meditating daily.
The Portal is an experiential documentary created as part of a bold, global vision to overcome the chronic levels of anxiety, depression, PTSD and trauma that we are facing today. It’s a film that speaks to our current emotional climate.
The film brings to life the stories of six people who overcame great adversity using stillness and mindfulness and inspires our audience to follow in their footsteps in realizing the unique potential all humans have to change our world–from the inside out.
Supported by insights from three of the world’s foremost futurists, along with Sophia the robot, the film unfolds as a beautiful, audio-visual spectacle that takes the viewer on their mindfulness journey through the pain, joy and memory fragments of life.
Exploring a new way forward, this powerful film was created to change lives for the better by bringing peace and calm to an incredibly stressed world. Our goal with the film is to open hearts and minds to an exciting vision for humanity, transformed, inviting all 7 billion people in the world to make an enlightened planet possible by entering THE PORTAL.
- How did it all start?
The vision for this project started in 2012, hot off the heels of the release of The Secret. The Secret was a film and book that managed to bring a very esoteric subject, the law of attraction, and penetrate households around the world with it.
With that in mind, I was inspired to do something similar with meditation. Then, there were no meditation apps. Meditation was still a very much underestimated technique. I was on the verge of leaving the finance world as a broker to become a full-time meditation teacher and had this idea to use film as a medium to share the transformational power of meditation. I had just created The Stillness Project with the vision to inspire 1 billion people to meditate daily and saw the film as one of the great tools to fulfil this intention.
- From your work, there seems to be another worldwide pandemic of unhappiness and inner unrest. Is there a way through?
Yes, we are currently facing our global human crisis right now, wrought with extreme levels of unhappiness and poor health. I believe there is a way through this, though. All problems have a solution. We need to be creative and adaptive enough to find it.
I believe what we are facing is a crisis with a lack of consciousness. Meditation is an effective tool that expands our consciousness, increases our creative and adaptive capacity and improves our overall health and wellness.
My motivation is to inspire 1 billion people to meditate daily because I know from first-hand experience when people start meditating daily – their lives improve substantially.
- You have some great people featuring in the movie; what can we expect from the experts?
The experts in the film and book bring a profound and insightful vision about what’s possible for humanity and question our current dilemma. Through their insights and wisdom, we explore the role of AI in teaching us how to be more unconditionally loving, how we are coded and programmed to behave the way we behave. We start to consider what life might be like on an enlightened planet. There is much more to learn from the film, but I don’t want to reveal all the good stuff without you seeing it first.
- Why is meditation the answer to a better life and a better planet?
I have taught thousands of people how to meditate over the last few years. I have seen a consistent pattern of people experiencing less chaos and disorder in their lives. Meditation has brought them calm, clarity and vastly improved their health.
Meditation is a powerful tool that helps us access a source of wisdom and truth from within that is not wrapped up in the coded, indoctrinated belief system of our cultural, political and social upbringing. This wisdom gives us the freedom to live a more aligned life to health, happiness, and success.
One of the other great benefits of meditation is that as we quiet our mind, we find an opening in our heart that leads to more lovingness, kindness and compassion. These are inherent qualities within us all; however, our stressed, busy minds and nervous systems impedes us from experiencing this inner truth. Meditation is a technique that helps us get there.
The film is now set to launch globally on Friday, May 14 officially. It will also be the opening film for the Shift Your World Film Festival Thursday, May 6.