| | I've looked into this as well, for the same reason as you-- it's what I love, and I can't stand the thought of spending 40 hours a week as a corporate slave when that time could be spent meditating. Here are my thoughts...
Meditation for a living, that's probably not going to fly in the typical "work to pay bills" routine that most Westerners follow. Who is going to hire you to sit in a room meditate? Many teachers are volunteers, or otherwise live off dana, generosity of others. However, there are other ways of living in the world outside of the 9-5 grind. If your housing and food is provided, you really don't need to work in a traditional sense. Whether this means doing extended work retreats at meditation centers, or buying a patch of desert land and trying to live in a self-sustaining off the grid manner, is up to you.
When you think about it, the driving force behind having a job is all the meaningless bills we have to pay. I know a guy who makes about $600 a year and that's all he needs; he has his own house on a patch of land out in the boonies somewhere. He grows most of his own food, hauls water from a lake, generates his own electricity, and so on. You could certainly live like that.
Here's an option-- write a book about meditation. If it's good, and a high quality publisher picks it up, you may be able to live off the income of that alone.
If you want to score some real money, train in concentration and develop siddhis, then start picking up followers and become a guru. From a morality perspective, this is a terrible idea, but people with no spiritual abilities or insight at all have done this successfully, as sad as that is.
For myself, I don't think pursuing meditation is a career option, as much as I'd like it to be. I have four kids and they need to be fed once in a while. |