Meditating With Virtual Reality
Tristan Gribbin
Tristan Gribbin is the co-creator and CEO of FLOWVR and is passionate about helping bring meditation to the world. She has been practicing meditation with serious dedication since the year 2000 and is a recognised meditation teacher in Iceland.
Tristan grew up in Palo Alto, California, and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in Theatre Arts. She worked for over ten years as an actress in theatre, television and films, mainly in Ireland and Iceland, until 2004. Since then the she has been on a path of transformation with a strong emphasis on meditation and deep spiritual work. She is an expert in Modern-Day Meditation™ and Breakthrough Breathwork™ and continues to write about meditation and leads meditations weekly, including FLOWVR corporate workshops. Besides her family, meditation and spirituality, she is passionate about health, the environment, nature, organics, and sustainability.
Tristan Gribbin, CEO of Flow VR, demonstrates how virtual reality provides
Meditation can increase mass in parts of our brains that support our feeling of connection, well-being, heartfelt love, and joy. It is physical and it is real. Imagine being transported out of your busy day and catapulted into a world of wonder.
Summary
- Global stress causes decreased productivity and costs corporations hundreds of billions of dollars annually due to rising rates of sick leave and lower employee engagement.
- Peer-reviewed research shows meditation effectively combats stress and can physically increase brain mass in areas responsible for wellbeing, connection, and joy.
- Virtual reality offers an immediate, immersive solution for busy people who find traditional meditation difficult, providing profound experiences from the very first try.
- Flow VR utilizes 360-degree nature visuals and music by artists like Sigur Rós across six modes: Breathe, Focus, Move, Let go, Calm, and Restore.
- Key tools for accessing meditation's benefits include deep belly breathing, setting clear intentions, trusting physical movement, and releasing stress through vocalization.
Article
Meditating With Virtual Reality
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, Tristan Gribbin Argued That Immersion Could Turn Mindfulness From Aspiration Into Immediate Relief
The promise of meditation has long been sold in the language of patience: sit still, close your eyes, return to the breath, wait for the mind to soften. But at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm**, held on **18 May 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden**, **Tristan Gribbin**, co-creator and CEO of Flow VR, offered a different proposition. Relief, she suggested, did not have to be delayed. Calm could be engineered into immediacy.
In her presentation, **“Meditating With Virtual Reality: Immediate Access To Stress Relief & Corporate Wellness,”** Gribbin set out to make the case that virtual reality might solve one of modern mindfulness’s most stubborn problems: that stressed, overworked people are often those least able to sit quietly long enough to benefit from it.
Her argument was commercial, scientific and spiritual all at once. Stress, she said, was now a global epidemic, draining not only individual wellbeing but corporate productivity, costing businesses hundreds of billions through sick leave, disengagement and exhaustion. Meditation, by contrast, had been repeatedly validated in peer-reviewed research as an effective response, with evidence suggesting improvements in emotional regulation, wellbeing and even physical changes in the brain.
Yet for all that evidence, the barrier remained painfully ordinary. Busy people struggled to begin.
A Case For Meditation Without The Waiting
Gribbin’s answer was not to abandon meditation’s core principles, but to repackage access to them. Virtual reality, she told the audience, was “immediate and immersive,” capable of delivering “a profound experience of meditation, no matter where you are and from the very first try.”
That line captured both the seduction and the ambition of the Flow VR platform. Rather than asking users to withdraw from sensory stimulation, it enveloped them in it: **360-degree Icelandic nature visuals**, carefully curated sound, and music from artists including **Sigur Rós**. The aim was not minimalism but total attention. If the modern mind could not easily turn inward, perhaps it could be guided there through awe.
The platform was designed around six functional modes: **Breathe, Focus, Move, Let Go, Calm, and Restore**. Together they formed a vocabulary of intervention for the overstimulated office worker, the anxious executive, the employee who might never willingly attend a meditation class but might put on a headset between meetings.
Gribbin noted that among corporate users, the most popular modes were **Move** and **Let Go**, a telling detail in itself. The hunger, it seemed, was not just for serenity, but for permission to discharge.
The Corporate Wellness Gold Rush Meets The Stress Economy
There was a clear pragmatism running beneath the talk. Meditation was not presented solely as a path to transcendence, but as an answer to workplace dysfunction. Gribbin cited the rapid expansion of the digital meditation market, noting a **48% compounded annual growth rate for meditation apps**, alongside the rise of workplace mindfulness programmes, with **22% of US corporations offering meditation programmes to employees in 2016**.
These figures helped place Flow VR inside a larger transformation: wellness no longer living on the cultural fringe, but moving into boardrooms, HR departments and startup accelerators. Beginning in Iceland, the company had worked with corporate clients including **Vodafone** and **CCP Games**, and after joining the **Catapult accelerator programme in Oslo**, Gribbin said, it had **tripled its customer base**.
This was the language of scale, adoption and traction. But Gribbin, a longtime meditation practitioner and recognised meditation teacher in Iceland, was careful not to let the presentation collapse into a startup pitch. She moved quickly past the business model and toward something more visceral.
A Meditation Session In A Conference Hall
What followed was less lecture than intervention.
Gribbin invited the room to stand. She asked people to stomp on the ground, shake themselves awake, and then do something she cheerfully acknowledged as radical: scream.
Not wildly, but into the inner arm, to protect the ears. The point was not spectacle. It was release.
Who, she asked, wanted to let go of stress right there and then?
The room complied. A deep breath from the belly. A collective shout. Then stillness.
It was a startlingly physical sequence, one that challenged the common Western idea of meditation as silent passivity. Gribbin’s model was more embodied, more theatrical, perhaps influenced by a life that had ranged from **Palo Alto** to a degree in **Theatre Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz**, to more than a decade working as an actress in Ireland and Iceland before turning fully toward spiritual practice.
In her hands, meditation became something muscular. It involved movement, breath, intention and, when necessary, voice.
Breath, Intention And The Inner Architecture Of Calm
The practical heart of Gribbin’s presentation was a guided meditation built on tools the audience could carry away without needing a headset at all.
The first was **deep belly breathing**. Participants were asked to fill the lungs fully, expand the rib cage, and imagine that each inhale created “more space within yourself and more space around your heart.” It was a simple instruction, but an evocative one: breath not merely as oxygenation, but as an internal widening.
The second was **intention**. Gribbin urged listeners to choose a focus for the meditation or the conference itself. Was it connection, clarity, purpose, strength? “Tune into your heart’s desire,” she said, “and amplify that feeling of desire that springs from your heart with every breath.”
Then came **movement**. Trust the body, she urged. Stretch. Shake the hands. Move the head. Stand if needed. The body, in this framework, was not a distraction from meditation but an entrance into it.
Stress, meanwhile, was treated as something that could and should be actively discharged. Inner obstacles were not always to be observed from a detached distance. Sometimes, Gribbin suggested, they had to be expelled. The scream returned here, transformed from novelty into method.
Finally, she guided the audience toward stillness. “Settle into a calm feeling,” she said, “an open and receptive place of presence. It is like you are sinking deeper and deeper into yourself for just calm, with no effort.”
The session ended, as many meditative traditions do, with **gratitude**. “End with a feeling of gratitude for this day, this opportunity, and for our lives,” Gribbin told the room. “Breathe that feeling of gratitude in, let it come in deeper, and let it expand for the rest of the day.”
Technology As Shortcut, Or Technology As Bridge
There is something faintly paradoxical in using advanced immersive technology to recover basic human capacities: breathing deeply, feeling one’s body, noticing gratitude, releasing tension. Yet that paradox was the point of the talk, not its weakness.
Gribbin did not pretend that virtual reality replaced inner work. Rather, she framed it as a bridge for those who could not otherwise reach the shore. If traditional meditation felt inaccessible, intimidating or impossible, then digital immersion might lower the threshold. It could provide a first experience of presence before the user had learned how to generate it unassisted.
That proposition sits squarely within the anxieties of modern life. We are overstimulated, overworked and increasingly estranged from our own attention. To solve that with more technology may sound like surrender. But in Stockholm, Gribbin argued for a more nuanced possibility: that the same tools often blamed for fragmentation might also be redesigned for repair.
A Quietly Radical Redefinition Of Wellness
What made the presentation memorable was not simply its product pitch, nor even its embrace of virtual reality. It was the insistence that wellness need not be reserved for the disciplined few. Meditation, in Gribbin’s telling, was not a rarefied practice for those with perfect routines and empty calendars. It was a human capacity that could be unlocked quickly, physically and even collectively.
At **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm**, Tristan Gribbin offered a vision of corporate wellness that was less about perks than access: access to the breath, to calm, to emotional regulation, to a moment of presence in the middle of a punishing day.
The headset may have been futuristic. The need it addressed was ancient.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm