Dr. Patricia Carrington shares her initial experiences with meditation, the immediate benefits she personally gained when she first took up the practice of meditating, as well as how meditation affected her husband differently, yet also in a very positive way.
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Dr. Carrington’s Personal Meditation Experiences
This audio clip is excerpted from Dr. Patricia Carrington’s Learn to Meditate Course
I remember when I first read those scientific reports, thinking to myself, maybe meditation is what we’ve been looking for. Maybe this is the drugless stress-reducer we’ve been hoping to find. And then, like so many other things that happen in life, I forgot about meditation for a year.
I didn’t think of it again, until the next winter when my brother arrived from England for a visit. I remember that we met him at the plane and that we were startled by the way he looked. He looked marvelous. He was unusually relaxed and the first thing we said to him was, “You look wonderful! What have you been doing?”
His answer was, “Oh, I learned this thing called meditation in England. I do it twice a day. Best rest I’ve ever had.”
And then, we found out that since he’d been meditating his blood pressure had dropped 30 points. Apparently, his blood pressure had been higher than normal, but after commencing meditation, it had come down within the normal range, within a month’s time after starting. And, his physician had noticed this and told him, “Whatever you’re doing, stick with it, because something’s going right.”
Now this, of course, was very impressive to see. So, at this point, I decided the next step was to try it on myself. So, I went to learn meditation at a teaching center near my home. And, I remember expecting; even at that point, that I was going to walk into some kind of den filled with clouds of incense, and that everyone would be sitting on the floor in a sort of dreamy trance, in lotus positions. I remember wearing old slacks, because I didn’t know what would be expected of me.
And then, I walked in and saw these thoroughly ordinary people, a real cross-section of the community; all ages, very respectable, very conservative looking, actually. And, they were sitting in chairs, and peacefully and quietly listening to a very sober lecture about the benefits of meditation.
And throughout my whole learning experience, I was continually surprised to find how very easy and how very compatible with the way we live these new forms of meditation are. The actual day that I went to learn meditation, I remember thinking to myself, “This is probably going to be a good rest for me, twice daily and I can certainly use a rest in my work.”
But, I was totally unprepared for the effect it had on me. I remember that about a week, or ten days, after I’d learn to meditate, I was standing in my kitchen and I was in a hurry, because I had to get to an appointment and I spilled a whole carton of milk on the floor. It rolled all over. And, usually, if such a thing had happened, my stomach muscles would have tightened up, involuntarily. But, this time I was amazed, because I didn’t have any startle response at all. I didn’t tense up, and I didn’t feel distressed about it. I remember, I just looked down and thought to myself, oh well get a paper towel and clean it up. It was just an utterly matter-of-fact feeling. I didn’t seem to feel urgent or pressured. It was easy to handle and that was all.
And, after that, I began to find that I reacted the same way to one thing after another in my life. Things that had been difficult before you seem to be very, very simple, and no particular problem. It was as though my nervous system had been reconditioned. It was a completely automatic change.
Then, about several weeks after this first incident, I was in my car driving along the highway and I had my dog in the front seat with me, and my right front tire blowout.
Now, luckily I had puncture-proof tires, but if you’ve ever had that happen, you know that if you’re going 50 miles an hour it’s difficult to pull the card to the side of the road. And, I was amazed at how calm I was when I did this. I was very collected, and I remember getting out of the car with the dog on the leash and walking back a mile to the state police. I’m thinking to myself, “I’ll just take it step-by-step and I’ll phone the garage and everything will be taken care of.”
And, I didn’t have that jittery kind of feeling that you often get when you had a near accident. When you start thinking about what could have happened, then you begin to feel very, very tense. I had a very matter-of-fact response and I know I handled the car much better because I remained calm.
So, for me, meditation had the immediate effect of taking a sense of urgency out of my life and that sense of urgency has never returned and it’s been a number of years, now, that I’ve been meditating. And, what was fascinating was that while I didn’t seem to feel the same pressure about things that had to be done at all, I was actually more efficient. I found that I was getting a lot more done than I had before, it was a lot easier to do things, and this made me much more productive.
Now, this was such an important change to me that it was very obvious to my husband that there was a change. And, I must have been much more tense beforehand than I realized, because, after three months, he finally decided to learn meditation, himself. He went and he learned it, in the same way I had, and I remember in the first week after he learned that he had a very different reaction than mine had been.
The first benefit that he felt from meditation was an opening up of a tremendous amount of productivity. Within three days after he learned meditation, he sat down and wrote a 40-page scientific paper that he had been putting off for six months. His thoughts just poured out onto paper and he related this directly to the easy flow of thoughts, which one has during meditation.
The difference between his response to meditation and mine is a very good example of how meditation affects each person differently it really affects them according to their needs. I apparently needed something quite different from meditation and he did and we each responded in our own way. Now, this is typical of people who learn to meditate. And, that’s why I tell new meditators not to expect any result in advance, but to wait and see what the meditation will do for them.
This easy-to-follow instruction kit contains downloads of the 8 audios, plus the Learn to Meditate Manual (PDF) and the Interactive PDF Workbook. Using this method you can master meditation within a week and feel its powerful effects at once. See complete details…
