‘Ten for Zen’: Former lawyer teaching Scotland’s legal profession to breathe again

Peter Ranscombe finds out how Martin Stepek is helping his former legal sector colleagues to harness mindfulness.

Mention the word ‘mindfulness’ and what images pop into your head? People sitting cross-legged in meditation? Couples strolling slowly through the countryside? Someone chewing thoughtfully on a piece of chocolate?

Martin Stepek was equally as sceptical when he picked up a copy of the classic book The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and American psychologist Howard Cutler in the old Borders book shop on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street back in the summer of 1998. But what he read soon changed his mind.

Learning to separate his thoughts from his feelings allowed Martin to cope with the stress of helping to run his family’s chain of electrical shops. “I found that just taking two minutes during each hour at work to meditate eased any sense of pressure or stress in my mind,” he remembers. “I got good enough to go home unstressed, whereas before I was going home stressed and that then had repercussions for my wife and my kids because I was tired or grumpy.”

While he was initially unfamiliar with Eastern philosophies, Martin was surprised to find the book was very modern in its way of thinking and explained the psychology clearly. As a law graduate, the cognitive neuroscience research into the mind that underpinned mindfulness appealed to Martin.

“Learning meditation from a book is like learning to ride a bike from a book – it’s not hugely practical,” Martin laughs. He began attending a monthly weekend residential programme run by a Tibetan Buddhist order and was invited to train as a mindfulness teacher, qualifying in 2004.

Taking mindfulness into the legal sector

Moving mindfulness from theory into practice remained an important part of Martin’s career following the closure in 2002 of the eponymous family business. He went on to create the Scottish Family Business Association in 2005 to share his knowledge and experience with other family-run companies, before joining The Family Business Partnership last year.

Having already set up his own mindfulness practice, he joined Wright, Johnston & Mackenzie (WJM) in 2014 as its director of culture and communications, and brought his mindfulness techniques with him to the Glasgow-based law firm. “I would go in early and do a short talk and then practice with my colleagues,” he explained. “We did some lunchtime sessions too, and once a month I would go through to the Edinburgh office and lead a mindfulness session there.

“Eventually, we opened the sessions up to clients and to members of the public too. Law firms can be quite private places and so it was interesting to invite people in from the street to do something as creative as mindfulness.

“There were polarised responses – some people loved it and found the benefit of it immediately and enjoyed it. But others were maybe more conservative in their thinking and said: ‘We shouldn’t do something like that in a law office’.”

A year after joining WJM, Martin even appeared on the cover of The Journal, extoling the virtues of mindfulness and the science of calm to his profession. The firm was taken over by Sheffield-based Irwin Mitchell in late 2023, with the WJM brand continuing to be used in Scotland, including during last year’s takeover of Edinburgh-based Davidson Chalmers Stewart.

Helping lawyers cope with pressure and stress

After leaving WJM, Martin now runs Ten for Zen, which is structured as a community interest company. Through the company, he’s continued to share the benefits of mindfulness with clients ranging from businesses and professional bodies through to local councils and National Health Service (NHS) bodies.

Law firms that have used Ten for Zen’s services include Eden Legal, Thompsons Solicitors and Turcan Connell, as well as the Faculty of Advocates and Legal Services Agency, one of Scotland’s charitable law centres. “The structure of fees and targets within the legal profession creates a lot of stress,” Martin observes.

“Without stereotyping too much, a lot of people enter the law because they’re intelligent and highly educated and they want a role with status and stability. Instead, they find they’re sitting at the centre of a maelstrom of pressure.

“That work can be very fulfilling, but I would often meet friends and colleagues who would say that they’d love to come to my lunchtime mindfulness class, but they couldn’t because they had a deadline to meet. I think that’s probably the same for many of the other professions too.”

He adds: “Ideally, mindfulness can help you to slow down, observe your own state of mind and your own feelings, and your reactions – then you can feel an immediate release, like opening a valve to relieve the stress. But, even in the absence of that ideal, if you can just take a minute or two out every so often and reduce the stress and pressure then you’ll feel the benefits.”

Looking beyond the legal sector

Some of Martin’s most satisfying and rewarding work with Ten for Zen has come through working with housing association tenants and people who have been given community service orders instead of prison sentences. “I set Ten for Zen up to try and help people understand what mindfulness is, from a practical as opposed to an academic perspective,” he says.

“Having studied law, I knew that, from a criminal law perspective, a lot of people who go to prison have mental health problems from their childhood, they have trauma, and therefore mindfulness could help them. There’s some good research on that, from Harvard and Yale and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). They’ve done studies with people who’ve been imprisoned and who basically helped rehabilitate themselves through mindfulness.”

That sense of giving back to his community was ingrained in Martin at an early age. “We’d come home from school and eat with homeless people around our dinner table,” he remembers. “We had many homeless people come and live with us too.

“I’ve run a free mindfulness session in Hamilton every week since 2011, except when the coronavirus pandemic made it impossible to meet in person. Giving something back to my local community has always been important to me.”