One Week of Practicing Transcendental Meditation and . . .

I began my Transcendental Meditation training in Bedford Hills a week ago, the day after my 46th birthday.  To refresh your memory, dear readers, the center has been quietly wooing me since I moved to the 'burbs four years ago, it's song growing stronger every time I stopped by the cafe it sits above, and then even stronger once my best friend and husband started practicing in the city, reporting feeling refreshed and less stressed.

I had been reading up on TM and how far it had come since it's slow introduction in this country in the 1950's with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to it's blast in popularity with the "following" of the Beatles, turning some people off as being faddish, if not cultish. But it is the most scientifically studied and backed form of "treatment" for living in our modern society, to go back to the rhythm and flow of our own Nature, and it is most decidedly NOT a religion.

I was incredibly excited - as you all know, I am a seeker, fascinated with all things metaphysical. I thrilled at the thought of having my own personal mantra, and my own guide. Yet I was also feeling anxious about my overloaded schedule. How again did I think I could fit this in?

Yet taking care of oneself is a highly esteemable act. Although I consider myself  a  "happy" person, I am no stranger to bouts of anxiety, depression in my youth, and sleep deficits. And how about full brain potential? I know that I have more creativity,  intelligence, and executive skills to tap into. Who can't do with more flexibility of body, mind and spirit?  

So I approached my first of four sessions on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday with both excitement and trepidation. Each lasting 90 minutes, the first session was a 1:1 with a teacher who has been practicing for over forty years, Melody Katz, a lovely, ageless woman. (She, along with her husband Sam, are the directors of the Bedford Hills TM Center.) I felt a kinship right away.  After some instruction and quietness together, Melody gave me my own personal mantra,  a sound-word-vibration.  I found it easy - easier than any other meditation I have ever tried. 

Twenty minutes a day, twice a day, preferably not after eating a full meal. I was told not to have a timer on - that I could peek at the clock to check the time and that gradually my body would recognize what twenty minutes meant. And then I would need to take two to three minutes to come out of it - that being jolted back to reality would be counterproductive. I had a very enjoyable experience sitting in my back yard that afternoon, meditating for exactly twenty minutes.

The next morning though, I was due at the TM center at 9am and it proved to be not quite as easy. I had a terrible night of sleep and I felt worn down. I started meditating at 8:30am, again in my back yard, and my thoughts were racing with my to do list, my increased anxiety about not sleeping. Although my stream of consciousness didn't stop, my thoughts slowed down and I did feel more peaceful. 

The morning was the first in a series of three group classes. There were two recent college grads, and two Wall Street commuters as well as myself. First we each met with our teacher privately to check our mantras. Everyone had a similar experience of a "busy" meditation and had to be reminded that this meditation did not involve any concentration or effort—and not to fight it. I was a little shocked by how stressed out I was in the morning and then after a day in the city, I settled down into a quiet calm and almost fell asleep during my second meditation right before dinner.

On Monday morning I woke up with a cold, but I had to be at work so I was determined to muscle through it. I had exactly twenty minutes until I hit the road, so I sat through twenty minutes of the racing thoughts and received some relief when they slowed down and felt more calm. 

After work and before our third TM class, I meditated before practicing yoga, and found my postures to somehow be more relaxing.  In this class we explored the connection to the body, and how the stress is actually released from the body. It's tautological - the more the mind relaxes, so does the body - the more the body relaxes, so does the mind. It is then that we can experience transcendence, which I am coming to understand as a merging of mind, body and spirit. We watched a short video of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and I was glad of the chance to finally hear him.

Unfortunately, by Tuesday morning, I was sick. I worked from home in the morning and meditated in a chair in my room. I went to work in the afternoon and meditated outside when I got home. Tuesday was also my last class at the TM center. We explored the lasting effects of meditation, and we each had an individual TM Checking. Even though it had only been four days and I was sick, I was a believer. It was a revelation to see the transformation on my classmates. They reported greater energy, increased clarity of mind and an overall calmness in the midst of their busy lives.

I have been sick all week - I have bronchitis AND a sinus infection, something that had clearly been building up for a long time. Yet, through meditation and taking the mornings off, I have been able to hold workshops in the afternoons and give my best to my students.

Part of me is wondering: what took me so long to do this? But I think that actually this came at just the right time. I am older and already comfortable in my own skin, fulfilled by my work and my family yes, but also knowing there is so much more within and without to explore. If I was able to accomplish this much this week when I was sick, how much more effective will I be when I am well? 

Here are the books I am reading now to help deepen both my understanding and my practice.

1.  Transcendence by psychiatrist Norman E. Rosenthal, MD 
2.  Transcendental Meditation by Jack Forem.

Author's Statement, take 2

At the risk of being redundant, I am posting the next draft of my Author's Statement, or, "Why I Wrote Edges". The feedback I got from Beth Potter at FSG and my publicist, Jessica Zimmerman, was very enthusiastic. They assured me the more personal, the better, and even though it would make it longer, they asked me to include a nod to my grandmother. So I've revised and tweaked because I can't help myself. What do you guys think?

EDGES was borne out of the year I spent in Moab, Utah. I had never heard of Moab before I went out west from New York City on vacation with a friend. We stayed at the Lazy Lizard Youth hostel where I met a cast of characters, including the man who would ultimately become my husband.

The surreal landscape of barren earth and red rocks called me to change my life, lobbied me to quickly, almost impulsively, quit my job as a Drama Therapist on the psychiatric floor of a hospital in the Bronx. It was meant to be: Moab’s Four Corners Community Mental Health Center needed someone to help start up an intensive out-patient program for teens.

My adventure to the desert shocked my family, friends, and most of all myself. Counseling teens in rural Utah? I was pushing the boundaries of my self-perception. To get on my feet, I stayed at the youth hostel where I had made some friends. Among the personalities at the hostel was a charismatic teen who had pitched a tent in the back and was ostensibly "living" there. Nobody knew his real story, and then one day after a long hike, I heard that this boy had moved on.

I’ve wondered about him ever since.

My work that year consumed me. I was naively shocked when a 14 year-old girl was sent to me for her habit of shooting crystal meth. She wound up in the hospital and an in-patient program. Most of the teens I worked with were court-ordered; it was all intervention and no prevention. I introduced them to a variety of tools, including behavioral therapy, the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and some outward-bound type hiking sessions. My faith in love and the universe was sorely tested treating these young men and women who were only seeking a way to transcend a hum-drum existence: drugs and alcohol replacing faith.

I was constantly asking myself questions. Aren’t we all seekers of some sort? Isn’t that what I was doing in Moab? Why is addiction so pervasive, and allowed to go unchecked? What road map can we offer kids who are lost, to help them find their way? Books have always been a kind of map for me, but I couldn’t find any fiction about the process of recovery. We all need some kind of guide, but our society trains us to use people, places and things in an addictive way, leaving us no room for faith in ourselves, let alone a Higher Power.

Years later, back in New York City, I had gone on to work as a high school counselor, was beginning to raise my own children and was helping take care of my aging grandmother, author Madeleine L’Engle. It was she who’d given me my first journal when I was a child, and though I always wrote, I’d never dared follow in her literary footsteps. She’d won the Newbery for A Wrinkle in Time and written over sixty books! My grandmother had always encouraged me spiritually and creatively, yet as her health declined she felt lost to me. It was only after she died that I felt her spirit again and found the persistence to finish a novel.

One morning seven years ago, the boy from the youth hostel figuratively tapped me on the shoulder and whispered the first scene of EDGES. I wrote furiously as if taking dictation. I called my protagonist Luke, and he was running away from his mother’s death and father’s alcoholism in New York City to a youth hostel in Moab, Utah.

I wrote the first draft in about three months, and then kept revising. At first I was obsessed with the crystal meth problem. I read great books with graphic depictions of the descent into addiction, but nothing about the journey beyond that addiction. I was more interested in asking: what happens when you take away the substance? Or, if like Luke, you just run away? What does it take to remain authentic, to maintain a sense of who we are when our perceptions of the world are challenged?

I write to map the world, and EDGES came from my desire to portray transcendence amidst bleakness, my interest in flirting with the edges of mysticism and insanity, my curiosity in challenging where our personal edges are.