Hi Friends,
I hope you're weekend is off to a great start.
We all have stories about our lives, and we define ourselves to the world by the stories that we tell. But more important than the stories we tell the world is the story we tell ourselves—our own experience of life.
I’d like to share with you my story.
There was a time when, if you looked at my life on paper, you would say, “What is he complaining about? That’s a good life.” It looked good on paper, but in truth, I didn’t feel good. The experience of living my life wasn’t a good one.
My life now is very different from what I ever imagined it to be. I’m a father, a husband, and a full-time meditation teacher. When I’m not with my family, I’m teaching Vedic meditation to hundreds of New Yorkers every year. If you told me this is what I would be doing a decade ago, I would have looked at you in disbelief. In 2008, I was a first-year junior attorney at a prestigious international law firm. This wasn’t my first career, as I had spent the years prior studying sports medicine and exercise physiology in college and graduate school and had been an athletic trainer and a strength and conditioning coach.
Although I had severe anxiety as a young boy, with a lot of help, it became somewhat manageable until I started law school. Within the first few weeks of law school, I found myself living in survival mode, barely keeping my head above water. Riddled with anxiety, depression, and insomnia, I was put on a full regimen of prescription medications and weekly therapy sessions. And this is how I got by for the next three years.
My hope was that after law school and the bar examine I’d feel better. I was wrong.
I started practicing law in September 2008 just as the financial markets were crumbling. The atmosphere at my firm had changed dramatically since my summer there the year before as a summer associate. The impact of the financial crisis was evident. Most of the firm’s clients were affected. This had a direct effect on the firm. There were multiple rounds of layoffs. Every day I received a number of emails from attorneys announcing that they were leaving the firm. I showed up each morning not knowing if I was going to be let go. This terrified me and my anxiety skyrocketed. I started having panic attacks again.
I had a naive albeit self-serving idea. The idea was that being a lawyer was going to be the rest of my life and that I would have to find another way to manage my anxiety. I didn’t want to increase my dose on any or all of the medications I was taking or to spend more time in my therapist’s office. I decided to try meditation.
I once thought meditation was only one thing: sitting still and stopping your mind from thinking. Upon further examination, I came to learn that there are many forms of meditation, each with their own specific design that yield varying results. I experimented with a number of these different forms of meditation with limited success, but I was determined to find something that would work for me.
Then I discovered Vedic Meditation. I had attended an intro and liked what I heard. Everything the teacher presented seemed to make sense and I thought that maybe this would actually work for me.
The course to learn Vedic Meditation consists of four sessions on four consecutive days.
I showed up to the first session and my teacher walked me through my first meditation. During that first meditation, I had an amazing experience. Everything started to quiet down and I felt totally and completely relaxed. Then there was a moment where it felt like everything stopped. Nothing. After the meditation, I continued to feel calm and relaxed and at ease. It felt strange, but good, very good. I had been so tightly wound for so long, I couldn’t remember feeling that relaxed. When I arrived home, I still felt that way. I couldn’t believe it. I had only meditated once and it was working. I thought to myself this couldn’t be, it must be a placebo. I’m feeling this way because I want to feel this way, it couldn’t be the meditation. I didn’t trust it. So, I did what I had done every night for the past four years, I took an Ambien.
I woke up the next morning with my usual Ambien-induced hangover, tired and groggy. I had some homework to do for my meditation teacher. I was to meditate that morning exactly as I had been instructed the previous evening. After freshening up in the bathroom, I sat up in bed with some pillows behind my back. The 20-minute meditation was definitely more thought-filled then what I experienced the night before. But the time seemed to go by quickly and I felt much better than before I started. I was now rested and clear-headed and significantly less anxious than I usually felt as I made my way up to my mid-town law office. There was also a marked decrease in my anxiety throughout the day.
I returned that evening for the second session of the meditation course eager and excited for what would come. I reviewed my experience with my teacher and he verified and validated what had occurred making some suggestions for subtle refinement. He then taught me how to be effortless when I meditated. Effortlessness sounds easy, and it is, however everything I’ve ever learned before Vedic Meditation required effort -- the more the better. Every teacher, coach, mentor, I ever had told me, if I wanted to be successful, I had to work hard, focus, concentrate, pay attention. My meditation teacher was telling me the opposite, less is more and least is best. At the end of the session we meditated together and I had a very similar experience to the previous night. Within a few minutes of closing my eyes it was like I was gone. In that stillness and quietness, I felt at peace. I was totally calm and at ease and this time, it felt much less strange. That feeling persisted throughout the evening and when I got ready for bed I thought to myself that maybe I could sleep without taking an Ambien. But, I wasn’t that daring, so I took another Ambien.
The next day was the same story. I woke up hungover from the Ambien. I meditated and felt better. When I returned that evening my teacher reviewed and further refined my experience. Then he taught a lesson on neuropsychophysiology. The way the brain and body are connected and how the nervous system responds to repeated experiences, such as being overwhelmed in demanding situations, and the impact of regular daily meditation. As in the previous sessions, we meditated and I felt very settled. When I arrived home, still feeling relaxed, I proposed an experiment for myself. I wanted to try to fall asleep on my own, without my Ambien. I placed the pill on my nightstand and decided that if I were still awake in an hour, I would take it. I fell asleep within a few minutes of closing my eyes and stayed asleep all night. I woke up feeling really good, rested and clear. It was the first time in nearly five years that I didn’t wake up with a hangover. It was in that moment that I knew that I would continue meditating every day. If curing my insomnia was the only benefit I would receive from Vedic Meditation, I would have been satisfied, but it was only the tip of the iceberg for me.
My daily anxiety continued to diminish. I stopped having panic attacks. Soon enough, I stopped having panic attack onset symptoms. Going to work and being at work became a significantly more tolerable experience. I found that my focus and productivity improved tremendously. My physical health also improved. Before I learned Vedic Meditation, I was so stressed and rundown that I often got sick. A few times a year I would get an upper respiratory virus that would require a course of antibiotics. Feeling better, I started to make some of the changes I had only hoped to make all those years I was suffering through law school and during the first few months at my firm. I started exercising regularly and eating more sensibly. I lost nearly 40 pounds. This made me feel even better.
My relationships started to improve, all of them. The personal intimate relationship I was in at the time improved to the extent it could. My relationships with friends and family members grew. I started getting along better with my coworkers and notice a difference in even those very tangential relationships. Strangers started treating me better. I didn’t understand this at first because I wasn’t making any effort to facilitate these improvements.
People were being nice to me because I was being nice to them. And I wasn’t trying to be nice. I was being nice spontaneously because that was the outward expression of how I felt. I started making eye contact. I started saying hello. I started telling the barista at the coffee how great the coffee they made tasted and how much I appreciated that. Here’s the thing. When we’re anxious, nervous, and tense and we get around other people, we inadvertently make them feel a little anxious, nervous, and tense too even if we’re trying not to act anxious, nervous, and tense. When we’re calm, relaxed and happy, we make those who get around us a little more calm, relaxed and happy too.
Meditation also gave me ever-increasing clarity. I was able to view my life with more objectivity and subjectivity. Let me explain. When I was really stressed out, whenever faced with an important decision, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t trust my intuition that was telling me, based on my stressed physiology, to run away or go to battle (fight or flight). In reality, there was often a more appropriate option given the circumstances, an option I couldn’t see based on my current stressed state. In these situations, I would have to consult with others and follow their advice. As I continued to meditate, I began to see the patterns in my life. I also developed a finer level of feeling, a more acute ability to detect the small nuances and subtleties of the world around. Things on the surface that once seemed exactly the same proved to be quite different. From this new perspective, I was able consciously to identify those areas of my life that required change. And, for the first time in my life, I felt capable of taking the necessary steps to implement those changes. I felt as though my judgment had improved. I started becoming more definitive in my actions and it seemed as though everything I did was easier and felt better. It was from this place that I was really able to see and pursue real purpose in my life.
That was my story. Our past informs our future. Looking back, I couldn’t predict any of it with any certainty. That was then, this is now. If you’re stuck in the past, you want to hit the unlock button so that you can move forward. But to change is ultimately a decision.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story.
With Gratitude,
Ben
