We live in a world where the dials are gradually being turned up. This brings us great opportunities for growth but also the stress of almost constant change. Globalization has made our world smaller but has exposed us to the breadth of human suffering.
As a result, hypertension, PTSD, and anxiety disorders have become normal. The most common illnesses are either directly caused by stress or deeply influenced by it.
If we want to enjoy life and grow in healthy ways, we need to learn how to be in the world the way it is now. Aversion and escapism are not solutions. Nor is obsession or acting out.
There is an art to being in the world without being overshadowed by it.
The best way I’ve seen for relaxing the body, mind, and emotions is an effortless meditation. A deep effortless meditation like TM will take you beyond the mind into a deep peace (transcendence or samadhi). The body follows along into a state that can be much deeper than deep sleep.
This allows deep healing and the release of old incomplete experiences we carry around. That energetic baggage has clouded our quality of life.
With regular dipping into peace, it gradually becomes infused into day-to-day life. Step by step life becomes better. Our problems don’t go away but we create fewer new ones. Greater mental clarity allows us to solve issues more easily.
More remarkably though, touching peace and clearing our load gradually opens us to our deeper nature. A nature that is peace, is happiness, is love, is fulfillment.
We gradually shift from being a me taking everything personally to an observer of life, able to navigate without falling into dramas. To act without reactivity, to be without being tossed by the waves of change.
Why would we choose to suffer?
Davidya
This article a friend sent adds another approach re: the media barrage.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-to-stay-sane-in-era-non-stop-outrage/
Hi David!
Ahh, well if they have real PTSD not like the sjw style 😉 usually meditation and relaxation is not a good idea (it can, in some cases but often not). Because they need the tension to keep things down and if things come up they are overwhelmed (much more like non-ptsd people). them being overwhelmed results in a psychiatric beakdown (in our clinic we have PTSDs).
As a healing tool later on when some of the loads have been released it is good though.
Best overall apprach to really heal ptsd is a Scott Kiloby type approach (supplemented withs Peter levines “somatic experiencing”, meditation etc. )
The article has a very good general main point but is soo poorly informed that it can not be called journalism in any way. 🙂
but the main point is important in this age.
Hi Michael
Well – I’d agree that a generic meditation may not be advisable but TM is quite effective for anxiety and PTSD. There’s published research on TM and Iraq veterans with PTSD, Congelese refugees, and so forth.
Of course, each case may have it’s own wrinkles but TM is very effective at processing deep trauma in my experience.
Hi David!
took me a while to respond 🙂
yes i have read that about TM but have never looked into the material.
all i can say is that in germany meditation is not commonly used for traumatreatment and TM would not be used as it is considered a cult in Germany.
We also have to look if the trauma is more recent (like comming out of a war zone) or if it is deeply ingrained (happened in childhood)
the former can handle things much better. they usually can do relaxation techniques etc.
The later need a lot of caution or they are flooded (internally). they usually get a lot of traumaeducation and some light ergotherapie and very long periods of stabilization (because they lived their lifes with extremly high inner tension). I could not imagine them to do any meditation, maybe some but they are just to unstable. (with them you can often do almost nothing for a long time).
The psychotherapist have long been against any other therapy but somehow had to admit (not really officialy 😉 that their work was not helping enough. Now some extra therapies are slowly more accepted. EMDR being the one with the most acceptance and things like somatic experiencing becoming much more common.
It is the same with mainstream doctors……in that they slowly open to alternatives.
but i have yet to see someone healing his trauma fully just with techniques. The only ones i have seen who healed fully where the ones who at some point took responsibility for their situation and did not want to just use techniques to get rid of it but started accepting it and slowly feeling through it. (like in the kiloby center).
Hi Michael
It is interesting how health is approached in different countries. In the US, it’s quite profit-driven but they also explore new treatments extensively. In Europe, they’re vastly more open to traditional therapies and remedies.
I would suspect the depth of the trauma is more important than the time frame, although older trauma can certainly be more complex. Often, it’s more layered in.
However, What a given person needs will vary widely.
Books like Rosenthal’s Transcendence apparently deal with recent research on TM and mental health.
In some cases like you mention, other therapies to bring stability like routine, diet and exercise can be good. But again, I’m no expert here. Just sharing what I’ve seen as a very effective tool.
I’m not suggesting any tool is a magic solution. It has to be used appropriately by a person engaged in a conscious healing process.
Common therapies often don’t address the underlying cause of anxiety and thus are more about managing issues rather than resolving them.
Going into the feelings without establishing a ground of being is inherently more difficult and can amplify rather than resolve traumas.
When we establish the ground of being within, we create an inner stability that is profoundly healing. It also makes it much easier to release our history.
This is why I recommend a good tool for that.
I do mostly agree….
Just wanted to share some clinical perspective what i have seen in our hospital.
the depth is an important issue, but timeframe is very important as there is soooo much build around it and their body is sooo used to this high tension, which then is deeply ingrained. And then reducing some of the tension is felt by them as extremly frightening almost traumatizing in itself.
Getting into the feeling is not a start point as i wrote but comes with the processing. However it can be done very carefully and gentle with a qualified person.
here a very good talk though not fully the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-uG_2TvCmo&t=218s
let us finish this here David! 🙂
Agreed. It’s amazing the hell some people live in, sometimes considering it normal.
Hi David,
I have been practicising TM with redoubled efforts, thanks to you. Why do you call it effortless? It takes all the effort and discpline. What am I missing when you say effortless? And TM takes me deeper when I make the effort.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge. You are an inspiration.
Hi Sandesh
The TM technique is an effortless practice. It’s one of the things that makes it distinct from most others. They use the analogy of a diver – you take the right angle and let go. The technique is much the same. You take the right approach and the natural tendency of the mind leads you within.
While it can require a small effort to establish the routine of meditating regularly, the benefits generally make this easy quickly.
How deep we are is very subjective. We can feel deep but not be or feel shallow and get up suddenly, only to discover how deep we were.
If you have access to a TM center, it would be good to get the meditation “checked”. This is a simple, free process they use to give you the experience of correct practice.
If we let the mind get involved in judging depth or applying effort, then we’re just in the mind, manipulating experiences. This doesn’t tend to lead to samadhi so regularly.
This also leads to fewer benefits, which can lead to dropping the practice. That and getting too busy to practice are the 2 reasons most people stop.
Samadhi can often be quite vague but it brings benefits nonetheless. Scientific research has confirmed this.
For clarity, readers of the article may be interested in an article on research on types of meditation.
https://davidya.ca/2010/12/27/choosing-a-meditation/
Hi David,
As a clinical psychologist, I find effortless mantra meditation as the best way to promote a healthy psyche. Psychotherapy helps to work through issues on short-term, in the hope that in the long term the person learns adaptive coping skills and undergoes a positive transformation. Meditation is the best way to dissolve and heal personal trauma to access unconscious patterns in order to bring them to awareness, and then to see through the deep unconscious patterns before they have a chance to become active. If the process of cleaning up and healing is too intense, a technique such as Richard Miller’s iRest is effective in dealing with trauma. Once we learn that we are fundamentally ok, that our true nature is “peace,…happiness,…love,… fulfilment”, we can deal with the wrinkles in life.
As the inner entanglements start to unravel, the outer problems start to smooth out. When we take care of our problems, we do it not just for us, but for everyone else. As we dissolve the knots of energy, we become effectively “washing machines” for the world problems, as one of my friends says.
Thanks you for sharing your insight!
Blanche
Thanks, Blanche. Beautifully put.
Just a caveat on the above article and comments. If a person has mental health issues, they should consult a mental health professional.
Tools like meditation can be excellent therapy but in such a case, should be used under said supervision.
The context was in managing personal anxiety. I wasn’t clear about that.