Feeling the benefits after three years of transcendental meditation

I told myself I would write another piece after a few years of meditation, as the practice really is a slow burner for healing, and sharing the current state of myself after this period of time would mean I have something else to show and say. Coming out and saying you are doing something like this, which is quite far removed from our culture until just recently can be a bit of a lonely experience. Part of me wants to revert to a cultural comfort zone and say “Well lads, I have been meditating for three years and it’s a load of shite and a waste of time”, but I am afraid that’s not the case at all – it is an absolute game changer.

What meditation does is not very tangible. It’s abstract and you have to bring in some concepts that are perhaps a bit highfalutin to get what it does across, but bear with me. I will keep it as grounded as I possibly can.

We exist in what is known as a consciousness, and there are no definite explanations as to what flickers in and out of the telly screen of our mind. But there are some forces at play that give rise to certain energies in it, and the ones I need to address here are the ones that cause me to suffer. I want to compare my consciousness to a cocktail with two main ingredients forming the bulk of it. The first ingredient is the energy linked to the events of my life, the second is a mystery ingredient that is linked to our past in some way I’ll never understand. These prime ingredients mix together forming the bulk of me.

Daily meditation is like a tiny titration of pure consciousness into the cocktail. That droplet makes the cocktail change colour to something beautiful for a moment, and sometimes I can experience a completely blissful feeling when this happens, but then it returns to its original hue as the day moves on. You go deeper into yourself, a place of peace, and over the twenty minutes you seem to dip in and out of it. The contents of my cocktail are present and permanent, and often turbulent, but meditation really does aid in making the mixture a whole lot healthier.

Meditation is battling against the negative side of who I am constantly, and it could be seen as a long, losing battle. In my experience it does not alleviate feelings of depression totally. However, it works tremendously as an immediate stress killer and eradicates negative thoughts in the short term very effectively also. I can be sitting with my partner and suddenly thoughts creep in and I am awash with negative bitterness about myself and all the people in my life. I move to another room and meditate for twenty minutes and come back and it’s like a light switch; all of that negativity washes away, the bitterness, stress, anger – all gone. I am joyfully present with my partner and feel uplifted. I can feel the calm to the tips of my fingers and toes. This happens time and time again with meditation and it is a treasure to me, that twenty minutes.

Sometimes it doesn’t work as well, there are some days when the blues can’t be beaten, but on the whole, it works more often than it doesn’t. A lot of the literature around meditation will tell you that knowing yourself is not just about lifting up an old big filthy paving stone and witnessing all of the creepy-crawleys underneath, but actually getting to know this part of you, the self without any fear, pain, stress – the self you feel when you meditate. The calm walks away with me and is present with me wherever I go.

I am not so comfortable with telling everyone Transcendental Meditation (TM) is the way forward. Because I don’t know that for sure. So I am not here trying to herd people into a TM centre, but rather I am here as the fella on the sidewalk performatively moving a sign about saying “TM this way –> (it works)”. You can take a look for yourself, or of course, you can choose not to. If you are genuinely in a financially desperate situation, you can talk to this person and arrange something, there won’t be a barrier to doing it if you really want to.

There are other forms of meditation of course, and we should be open to all different types, but I do believe that the area is rife with inauthentic opportunists and it wouldn’t be easy to spot the fakes. I am three years into the meditation practice and I cannot recommend Transcendental Meditation enough. Every now and then, the person who gave me my mantra gets in touch to arrange a group meditation. There is never any other means of communication to get me thinking a certain way about anything, or any attempt from the organisation to include themselves in my life in any other way. They could have easily come back to me with cynical tactics to suggest additional payments are required to bolster up my connection to them, but that has not happened. It has been nothing but a completely wholesome influence in my life for the past three years.

I sort of fell apart at the seams, but I am in a very good place right now and can attribute a lot of that to the fantastic people I have had the luck to bring into my life. It feels like it’s helping me to accept new bonds of friendship and love more easily without letting old fears find their way into these new relationships. I will continue with what might appear to be a losing battle, with a little drop into the mixture every day.

The core ingredients of who I am will never change, for the most part I wouldn’t want them to as it is probably what connects us to each other in some way. Where I hope to gain ground is on those parts of me that suffer, and have the potential to make others around me suffer. That is where the value of meditation is to me.