Why I would NEVER (EVER) give up Meditation … no matter what.

Was stress reduction part of your New Year resolution … again?

If so, here’s my question to you: have you yet figured out how to effectively reduce stress and anxiety from your life?

A high level of daily stress is simply bad news. It not only is one of the most important beauty busters it also does quite the number on your hormonal levels and has been linked to causing a long list of illnesses. High levels of stress may contribute to premature aging and it also may increase your likelihood of breaking out.

That said, the theory of reducing stress in our lives is much (MUCH) easier said than done. Unless you live on a remote mountain in the Himalayas or if you are a Tibetan monk, you cannot get away from everyday stress. The magic trick, I’ve come to understand, is finding activities that help you control how you internalize stress.

Reducing my extremely high level of stress was my 2005 New Year resolution. As of mid-December of the previous year, I started looking high and low for ways of calming my mind. My life had become a heavy burden that I carried on my shoulders and that haunted me at night. I could no longer sleep throughout the night without being violently awakened by my thoughts or worries. The last straw came when one day I started feeling my heart palpitate. I remember holding on to my chest thinking to myself: I’m way (WAY) too young to be having a heart attack. At that point, I knew that I would not be able to continue at this pace.

I had read that most highly successful people practiced meditation daily, but I truly had no idea what meditation entailed. After doing a bit of research on the Internet, I decided try to start my mornings with a “quiet session”. Basically, I sat for five minutes with my eyes closed in front of my computer and I tried not to think of anything. I found that to be the longest five minutes of my life and would peek at the time to see if the time was up.

I then tried meditation with meditation music playing in the background, but not much happened. I really wasn’t feeling calmer and my mind was still constantly racing.

I decided to look up meditation classes. I looked up the Transcendental Meditation school in my city, but when the representative called me back, I found out that the program cost several thousands of dollars and I was surely not in a position to spend that kind of money at the time.

At this point, I was way into 2005 and I was still feeling as agitated as I had in 2004. As I was leaving a natural health food store, I happened to stop in front of the community board and noticed a posting for group meditation lessons that were free. I didn’t have much to lose and I did manage, after much hesitation and many excuses not to make it, to attend the lesson.

A very kind woman greeted me at her home and explained that this is her way of giving back. She felt it was important to pass on to others the joys of meditation. I’ve got to be honest, this was little too esoteric for me, but I still joined the small group.

After a quick explanation on the principles of meditation and a few explanations on the importance of breathing from our core, our hostess proceeded to show the group how to chant. We were all armed with a bead bracelet to help us remember how many chants we had performed and we all started chanting for about 15 minutes.

The next morning, I woke up and started chanting at my home, but I’ve got to tell you that listening to the sound of my voice for 30 minutes was driving me bananas. I tried to keep up with the chanting program for a good month, but then realized this would not be working for me.
A contact of mine who knew I was having a hard time managing stress sent me an email about a sort of “high tech meditation” program. After visiting the Web site and reading all the information on “why” meditation is so important, I decided to go ahead and fill out the form to receive more information and a demo.

When the package arrived at my home, I quickly opened it and started listening to the CDs and reading the material. I cannot say I was convinced this might be a good option. I had tried so many different variations of meditation that I just thought the whole thing might simply be a nice marketing ploy. After not fully sleeping for one more full week due to high levels of stress, I decided that I really needed to do something fast and I decided to proceed with this newly found Holosync “high tech meditation” program.

The program does say up front that it takes at least four months to start seeing any benefit and it must have taken me at least two months to fully commit to doing the program properly (at the beginning I was cutting corners because I just didn’t believe it would make a difference). For whatever reason, I decided to fully commit at the end of August 2005 and since then I’ve been meditating every morning for one full hour.

During a recent trip to Paris to visit some friends, I told them about my newly found way of reducing stress in my life and my girlfriends were dumbfounded when I explained that I sat for one full hour doing nothing and thinking of nothing. Most of them said they could never see themselves doing that and I was honest with them and told them that until I actually committed, I would never have imagine that I would actually to be able to meditate properly.

At this point you must be wondering if this Holosync“high tech meditation” program actually works.

Anybody who has been meditating for a long time will tell you that they cannot imagine their lives without meditation because it’s just an experience that is so difficult to explain, but it’s also the type of activity that truly and honestly changes your life in a way that’s unimaginable. I never thought I’d be sitting down quietly for one hour meditating and I never thought that I’d say to friends that if I had to give up certain things in my life … meditation would NEVER be one of them.

At first, I personally found that the concept of sitting down and simply forcing myself not to think of anything was very intimidating and it’s something I don’t think I could do without help because my mind is constantly racing.

I don’t think I’d be able to do the Holosync “high tech meditation” program justice by trying to explain it in detail, so I think that if you are looking for a way to reduce stress, you might want to visit their Web site. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that every morning I wake up and sit down on a chair and put on my headphones and listen to the Holosync sounds (for one hour) that help my brain get into meditation mode.

When it came to making that final decision to move on with Holosync “high tech meditation” program, the testimonials that were sent to me via mail influenced me a lot. These were long testimonials from people who were torn, depressed, stressed, angry, overwhelmed, unhappy, exhausted and I think that at the time, I had all of these people inside me and I thought if they were able to find a method to balance out their lives, I should at least give it a go.

I know that meditation seems a big “out there” and a bit “granola” to a certain extent. I know that when I first started looking into meditation, I thought I’d find myself at a retreat hugging a group of strangers and dancing to the Goddess of the Rain, but the reality is that in our crazy-busy-double-booked-hooked-to-our-BlackBerry lives, we need to allow our minds to calm down every day in order not to totally lose it (and God knows that I felt like I was going to lose it).

Meditation has been around for centuries and if you’ve tried the old fashioned way of mediating, then perhaps, you might find the Centerpointe Research Institute’s Holosync “high tech meditation” program easier to follow.

Photo by Hape_Gera