I dabbled in meditation as a kid and found it to be "different." It felt like vastness, possibility, and like a portal, although that is my adult mind description. I would not have used those descriptors as a kid. I would've just said it was "whatever" or "cool."
In high school, I would occasionally formally meditate for longer periods. Informally, I probably spent quite a bit of time oscillating between reflective and meditative states. The mind always felt quite powerful to me, though again this is the adult mind description.
I should add that I found school quite boring around this time. It seemed there was so much more to know, explore, and experience that what was being said in school.
In college, as far as I remember, I didn't formally meditate much, though I did a ton of reflection. There were a lot of questions that were demanding answers in the mind.
The most I meditated in the formal sense of sitting down and closing my eyes was probably during what should have been one of the busiest times in my life–my surgery rotation in medical school. I would wake up around 3am and meditate for a couple hours before going to the hospital. Then I'd meditate at night after getting home for another couple hours. This was absolutely necessary for me to release much of the tense energy and tendencies that had built up over years and lifetimes. (They're not all gone :) Primal tendencies would come up, be felt throughout the system, and eventually be released.
It was soon after this that the mind exploded and an entirely different experience of identity and world revealed itself. (Incidentally, this did not happen while formally meditating, but rather when reading something.) It took about 10 years to really assimilate and re-orient myself to what we call the world.
Now, there is always some kind of "meditation" happening, informally or formally, including when we were speaking a couple days ago Dr. Krishnamurthy Subramanian.
Meditation at first is an activity, then it becomes a state of mind, then a view of life, and then the nature of "reality." The subjective and objective worlds converge and unite. All human endeavor seeks this rest. This is health, in the deepest sense.
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