--- In [email protected], Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
> You are not alone! I had headaches for years and
> years. Checking didn't help. MMY helped a little bit
> when he told me I had been straining for many years!
> (He actually found the whole thing rather funny
> considering I was a TM teacher). I finally decided
> that if I felt any head pain at all that I would just
> stop the mantra and sit there very easily until the
> pain left.
I had a period during which meditation seemed
like a big chore (no head pain, though). I
finally discovered that my mantra had become
much fainter than I thought it *could* be, and
that I had been exerting very subtle effort to
beef it up so I could be sure it was there.
I had to decide I didn't *care* whether the
mantra was there or not when I turned my
attention to it before it became clear that
it was indeed there, just vastly more abstract
than I had realized.
Checking hadn't helped, by the way; the effort
didn't occur during checking, only when I was
meditating on my own.
If I were able to make any changes to the way
TM is taught, I'd put more emphasis on just
how faint the mantra can become ("infinitely
faint," according to MMY, as I found out
*after* my problem was solved--I don't recall
ever having heard this previously), or at least
find some way to address it in the checking
procedure.
I have a sneaking suspicion quite a few people
who seem to have subtle "straining" problems
may simply not be aware of how faint the mantra
can be.
(Caveat: As most people here know, I'm not a
TM teacher.)
