Image by Alan Gueite on Unsplash.
I’m not a likely meditator. I’m very left-brained. I fidget.
But many years ago, I was walking around in downtown Philadelphia. I saw a sign in a storefront, advertising Transcendental Meditation. Just $75 and you’d learn a technique that will change your life.
At the first meeting, someone asked what would happen if you’d been meditating for 10 years. The instructor laughed and laughed. “You’ll definitely be different,” he said. That turned out to be the understatement of the century.
OK, I thought at the time, I’ll take a chance. It was an era of self-improvement. We had encounter groups. We had est. I never did those. But I did learn to meditate.
And I got hooked. Back then we had weekends away, where we could practice more TM. I remember once we meditated in the New Year.
We had free lectures. In New York, we heard from a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, complete with a beret, a beard, and a story. He told us he’d undergone three analyses. “Three,” he emphasized. And he couldn’t forgive his mother. After meditating he could do it…effortlessly
That made a huge impression on me. I’d never trusted psychoanalysts.
I too found that a lot of problems simply disappeared after I meditated. I can’t even remember what they were. Much later I learned that mantra meditation leads to self-acceptance, more than other kinds of meditation. And that’s what TM is: a secret mantra.
I kept up meditating faithfully for over 20 years. Sometimes I’d stop but I never stopped completely and I always went back.
TM takes time: 20 minutes twice a day. But it gives back more. When I’m meditating regularly, I feel like I’m gaining an extra 2 hours a day. There’s more time to do things.
What really baffles people I meet, though, is that TM promotes health. I skipped screenings. Decades went by when I didn’t even see a doctor. I didn’t have any health problem till I was old enough to collect Medicare and find more humane doctors.
Recently one of those humane doctors told me he agreed: meditation had kept me healthy for a long, long time.
Now I frequently meet people who’d benefit enormously from meditation. More, I suspect, than their quests for therapy. TM now costs a lot more than $75. It’s much more corporate. And it’s probably not covered by anybody’s insurance.
And meditation is sort of mainstream. You can choose the kind you want. Coursera even offers courses on mindlessness.
When a doctor told me to watch my blood pressure I made sure to meditate regularly. Just walking into a medical center still sends my blood pressure into the stratosphere. But t<here’s no way I’m taking meds. I wish we had a center in Philadelphia and I wish I knew more meditators. The ones I know are far away from me. Maybe this article will bring them out of the woodwork.
I just know for sure: Meditation is one hell of a lot better than medication. I plan to keep it that way.
