The following is written by Karlie Everhart and originally published on her blog.
I started meditating ten years ago. At the time, I had suffered from intermittent bouts of anxiety and was looking for a way to calm the surmounting pressure I constantly applied to myself. The only new-agey person I was familiar with was Gabrielle Bernstein, so I bought her book and her companion meditation CD and that’s how I started.
I listened to Gabby’s meditation tracks until I got bored of hearing the same voice over and over and then I switched to the Calm app and random youtube videos of Oprah and Deepak Chopra. In 2015, I was trained in Transcendental Meditation (TM) and that is what I’ve been doing ever since.
Meditation has been a saving grace to me in many ways. It keeps me focused, grounded, and sane. Over the years, when I’ve felt nervous, anxious, and scared I’ve turned to meditation. I’ve meditated in my car before job interviews, before big events – my wedding, my bridal shower, speaking engagements, and I’ve meditated for months in a small broom closet at one of my corporate jobs. I would be let in by our IT guy every morning and afternoon to practice my TM for 20 minutes.
I often get asked by clients or people new to meditation what the benefits of meditating are and I always stumble through some prescribed answer that I found on the internet, which is all true but feels a bit sterile to me. So let me tell you about what happened when I stopped meditating because I think that identifying what you don’t want helps you to clarify what you actually desire.