How I Learned to Meditate

I discovered the technique by accident while napping between classes in college. I would find a lounge chair to slouch really low and try to pass out. Going to bed late has always been a problem for me, so I needed all the extra rest I could get. After practicing this for a short while, one day my thought-body fell through the chair into an orgasmic bliss cloud. It was very abrupt in the beginning, almost startling, but really just extremely pleasant and rejuvinative. I always felt crisp, clear and rested after only 10-20 minutes of it. It usually took that long for me to involuntarily come out of it anyway.

Fast forward a couple years and I found myself at the Maharishi University of Management. It felt like destiny, a whole liberal arts university centered around meditation and eastern philosophy. However, when I learned the official Transcendental Meditation (TM) ™ of the school, they tried to convince me what I told them I was already experiencing was not the same thing. I naively took their word for it and proceeded to follow the mantra protocol of TM. For the first couple months it was a very shallow, boring experience, nothing like my slouching into a chair cloud method.

I soldiered on and after a couple years I got back to the level of depth my original experiences got to using the TM method. However, I did give up on the mantra most of the time as I found it added too much to my thoughts. I also had to realize that I was mistakenly putting too much effort into the technique, which directly contradicts the inward momentum of consciousness transcending. Once I learned to let go of how good of a meditator I was, transcending became much smoother and blissful.

Meditation had most certainly become a pillar of my daily habits for health.

Over a decade later and I’m still using the same TM-hybrid method that also parallels The Relaxation Response and Mindfulness Meditation. I can use mantras beneficially now too, but don’t always feel the need to. These years of meditating has also shown me the large variety meditation techniques have some things in common and some not, but I do maintain that the method I employ is a deconstructed, simple explanation of mechanics underlying many meditation styles. The explanation I title, Universal Meditation, embracing the broad and symbolic meanings of this method. Its simplicity allows for one to use it as a launching pad to a variety of other techniques. In other words, if one understands Universal Meditation, the methods branching off from it will become more accessible.