I was a busy young mother with small children in Seattle during the 1970’s when I began to experience stress and sleepless nights. “You have to relax,” my doctor advised. I didn’t need him to tell me to relax, I thought. If I knew how to relax, I wouldn’t be stressed!

It was during one of those sleepless nights when two words suddenly popped into my head: transcendental meditation. T.M. Where had I heard that? Oh, The Beatles. I remembered. They went to some mountaintop to meet with some guru. I’ll check into it tomorrow, I sighed, as I struggled back to sleep.

The next morning after breakfast, I dragged out the Lincoln logs to keep the kids busy for ten minutes while I checked the yellow pages for meditation. There it was: Transcendental Meditation. I hurried to make the telephone call before my ten minutes were up. A very pleasant voice answered. I was already beginning to relax.

She explained, “The course takes one week and costs $125. You meet everyday with a teacher who leads you through the steps to meditation.”
“What if I don’t learn how to meditate in a week?” She didn’t know how stressed I was.
“We will work with you as long as necessary,” she assured me.

And that was that. I learned T.M. I didn’t go to a mountaintop. I went to an office building in Seattle where transcendental meditation was being taught. I didn’t have the Beatles’s guru but I had a very good one of my own. I meditated on and off, mostly on, for the next 30 years.

It was 2004. My brother-in-law discovered he had lung cancer.
“I can’t sleep,” he told me. “I can’t get any rest. The medicine the doctor gave me to relax doesn’t really work. I read about cancer and meditation. Can you teach me how to meditate?”
“I’m no meditation teacher,” I told him, “ but I will teach you how I meditate.”

And I did. He often told me before he died that meditation helped him to rest when nothing else seemed to work.
Something I learned 30 years earlier helped a loved one much later.

You never know.

A breast cancer survivor, who also battled liver problems, Sandy Powers turned to organic foods to heal her liver and fight cancer recurrence. Sandy shares her recipes rich in antioxidants and immune boosters, her research and amazing results in her book, “Organic for Health.”
Visit Sandy at http://www.organicforhealthsite.com