Jumpy in Jordan? Restless on Skye? You should try TM The Times, 9 June 2005 by Mary Ann Sieghart UP THE HILL we scrambled, on a sweltering day, to reach the monastery carved into rock high above the ancient site of Petra. When we got there, I clocked the beautiful pillars and doorway, I clocked the view beyond, and within minutes of sitting on my boulder I was restless again. “Can we go back down?” I asked my husband. “You really need to learn to meditate,” was his response. He had a point. Like Richard Morrison, who wrote on this page on Monday about his inability to relax and do nothing on holiday, I was like one of those ultra-bouncy balls that you find in children’s party bags. I was capable only of doing, not of simply being. Metaphorically and physically, I couldn’t sit still. Richard described how he tried to fill time on his Hebridean island making collections of pink pebbles and examining minutely the runes on Celtic crosses. He felt bereft away from TV, newspapers and telephone, and craved mental stimulation. I couldn’t sympathise more. My instinct is always to find something to do, to feed a brain that craves busyness. But gradually, over the past 18 years since that incident at Petra, I have been learning not just to resist the temptation to feed the craving, but to find joy in calm, to slow down my brain so that it isn’t always yabbering inside like a crazed parakeet. My husband was right: the best method is meditation. Some months after that trip, we both signed on for a short course in transcendental meditation (TM). We learnt how our minds could be compared to a glass of muddy water from a swirling river. Meditation helped the mud to sink quietly to a sediment at the bottom, leaving a glassful of clear water above. It worked - not brilliantly, not every time - but I often found myself descending into a deeply relaxed state, which calmed me and refreshed me afterwards. The teacher warned us that, if we had any physical symptoms of stress, they would probably get worse for the first few weeks before they got better. I had suffered from unexplained nausea for years. When miserable at boarding school, I would spend ages hunched over a loo feeling as if I were about to throw up. It did not go away as I got older. Doctors could not cure it, and I had begun to believe that feeling sick was one of those things, like headaches, that you just had to put up with. For the first six weeks of practising meditation, the nausea became worse and worse. But I persevered. And gradually it lifted until it vanished altogether. The extraordinary thing is that, even though I have since gone through long periods of not meditating at all, particularly during the years when we had babies and young children, the nausea has never returned. That alone convinced me that the practice was beneficial. But there is more. Since I started meditating, I have found it easier to take pleasure in the moment, to inhabit the present, rather than constantly scanning backwards and planning forwards. Be Here Now, the title of an Oasis album, is a useful injunction in life. Had I understood it in Petra, I could have sat and simply absorbed the beauty without feeling the urge to get on and do something else. Inhabiting the present gives you an immediate sense of calm. The normal pressures and impatience of life melt away. It is not something that you can sustain for long, unless you are the Dalai Lama, but in the moments in which you experience it, it feels as if you have nudged open a door into a more serene world. These moments are both nourishing to the spirit - like a gulp of cold water on a hot day - and uplifting. They make you feel great. All sorts of physical benefits are claimed for meditation. It lowers your blood pressure, and when you are tired it can be more reviving than a nap. It certainly helps to bust stress. We now learn, though, that meditation may even help us to live longer. Last month, a study published in The American Journal of Cardiology tracked 202 elderly men and women with raised blood pressure. In contrast to the control group, those taught to practise TM showed a 23 per cent reduction in death overall, a 30 per cent reduction in death from cardiovascular causes and a 49 per cent reduction in death from cancer. So that proves it. Meditating is good for your body, good for your brain and good for your soul. People like Richard should give it a go. It can’t do you any harm - and it might even help you to appreciate the glories of an empty Hebridean beach. © The Times 2005