The Beginning
An old Chinese saying goes: "A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step." 千里之行，始于足下。My first step on the path to India started in 1999, when I learned Transcendental Meditation.
At that time, a series of events led to my decision to learn meditation. But in hindsight, this was really fate, written in my book long before I was born.
The first event was my contact with Maharishi's Sthapatya Veda organization in 1998, when I was researching an article for Management Review magazine, of which I was associate editor at that time. My article dealt with innovative office space arrangements that helped to create better working environments for employees. Sthapatya Veda was a solution that had proven to cure sick building syndromes and increase workplace productivity.
About a year later, I met my future husband in Pointe Rouge, Marseille, while backpacking in the South of France. When we were taking a walk on the beach there, he mentioned to me that he practiced meditation every day. When he mentioned the name Maharishi, it rang a bell. I told him I had written an article about his architectural design. It wasn't much of a drawn-out discussion, as we were just getting to know each other and we didn't know if we would meet again. But this little bit of conversation stayed in my mind. At least it convinced me that this meditating guy could not have been a junkie or weirdo. In fact, he seemed to be a super decent man, whose presence felt like a breath of fresh air to me.
When I went back to New York, where I was living then, I continued on my spiritual search, which started earlier during my clinical depression period. A large number of self-help books prepared me for the reading of Neale Donald Walsh's Conversation with God series. At the end of the first book, there is a resources page, which listed Transcendental Meditation (TM) as a way through which one can do good to the world. I was very socially minded and have always been a sort of humanitarian in my soul, if not by deeds. When I read that TM has shown to reduce crime rates and is an effective way for individuals to do their part to contribute to world peace, my mind was made. I decided to take the course.
All the while, my future husband, Durox the Swede, never tried to sell me on the idea of meditation. He felt that it would be best if I decided to do it on my own, which I did. So when I told him about my decision, he was overjoyed. He knew that it would be the greatest decision that I'd ever make, as it was for him, when he first meditated in the 1970s.
November 1999, I stepped out of the TM Center at Times Square, New York, and felt a sense of freshness in my mind that I had never experienced in my life. It was unexplicable. It felt like my mind suddenly opened up, and an ocean expanded inside it. It was so pure, so clean and so expansive. The noise of the busy city seemed so far away. I was not totally aware then, but now I know that I had contact with the source -- the soul within me.
Since then, meditation has given me the kind of calm, peace and stability that I had never experienced before. And it even helped me win the battle against depression. Realizing the harmful effects of anti-depressant pills, I went off it with the help of meditation (Disclaimer: this was done without doctor supervision--which some people might find risky.) It was my own initiative as I was confident enough of the effects of meditation. I knew that psychiatrists would disagree to this, which was exactly why I did not consult mine at that time because I could sense his motive to keep me on medication for as long as possible (and the part about Zoloft not being addictive was really bull shit.)
Over the past couple of years, Transcendental Meditation has been the source of light and power through the many ups and downs in my life. While I have heard voices of skeptics from various sources, I remain unwavered in my daily practice, because it is like a candle in the dark, and with this candle, I see the light of Truth. The skeptics out there are precisely skeptics because they have never even experienced TM themselves. How can you accuse an orange for being sour if you have never tasted it?
At that time, a series of events led to my decision to learn meditation. But in hindsight, this was really fate, written in my book long before I was born.
The first event was my contact with Maharishi's Sthapatya Veda organization in 1998, when I was researching an article for Management Review magazine, of which I was associate editor at that time. My article dealt with innovative office space arrangements that helped to create better working environments for employees. Sthapatya Veda was a solution that had proven to cure sick building syndromes and increase workplace productivity.
About a year later, I met my future husband in Pointe Rouge, Marseille, while backpacking in the South of France. When we were taking a walk on the beach there, he mentioned to me that he practiced meditation every day. When he mentioned the name Maharishi, it rang a bell. I told him I had written an article about his architectural design. It wasn't much of a drawn-out discussion, as we were just getting to know each other and we didn't know if we would meet again. But this little bit of conversation stayed in my mind. At least it convinced me that this meditating guy could not have been a junkie or weirdo. In fact, he seemed to be a super decent man, whose presence felt like a breath of fresh air to me.
When I went back to New York, where I was living then, I continued on my spiritual search, which started earlier during my clinical depression period. A large number of self-help books prepared me for the reading of Neale Donald Walsh's Conversation with God series. At the end of the first book, there is a resources page, which listed Transcendental Meditation (TM) as a way through which one can do good to the world. I was very socially minded and have always been a sort of humanitarian in my soul, if not by deeds. When I read that TM has shown to reduce crime rates and is an effective way for individuals to do their part to contribute to world peace, my mind was made. I decided to take the course.
All the while, my future husband, Durox the Swede, never tried to sell me on the idea of meditation. He felt that it would be best if I decided to do it on my own, which I did. So when I told him about my decision, he was overjoyed. He knew that it would be the greatest decision that I'd ever make, as it was for him, when he first meditated in the 1970s.
November 1999, I stepped out of the TM Center at Times Square, New York, and felt a sense of freshness in my mind that I had never experienced in my life. It was unexplicable. It felt like my mind suddenly opened up, and an ocean expanded inside it. It was so pure, so clean and so expansive. The noise of the busy city seemed so far away. I was not totally aware then, but now I know that I had contact with the source -- the soul within me.
Since then, meditation has given me the kind of calm, peace and stability that I had never experienced before. And it even helped me win the battle against depression. Realizing the harmful effects of anti-depressant pills, I went off it with the help of meditation (Disclaimer: this was done without doctor supervision--which some people might find risky.) It was my own initiative as I was confident enough of the effects of meditation. I knew that psychiatrists would disagree to this, which was exactly why I did not consult mine at that time because I could sense his motive to keep me on medication for as long as possible (and the part about Zoloft not being addictive was really bull shit.)
Over the past couple of years, Transcendental Meditation has been the source of light and power through the many ups and downs in my life. While I have heard voices of skeptics from various sources, I remain unwavered in my daily practice, because it is like a candle in the dark, and with this candle, I see the light of Truth. The skeptics out there are precisely skeptics because they have never even experienced TM themselves. How can you accuse an orange for being sour if you have never tasted it?
posted by Airchild | 8:22 PM
1 Comments:
Wonderful !
and as a bonus miracle we met there at Times Square back in November 1999 :)
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