Invitation to a Journey of Heartful Living


Margaret Schenkman, February 11, 2021

I began a journey toward Heartful living over 30 years ago. This journey has been very personal, a quiet force in the background of my life. I have talked about it a bit with friends, but not widely. Given the stresses and stressors of living in today’s world, I feel moved to share some of what I have learned on this very special journey of self-discovery, broadening consciousness, and reorientation of my life perspective and purpose. 

I was struggling with a rather debilitating health condition, beginning around 1986. This condition worsened progressively to the point that I was in considerable pain most of the time and was so fatigued that I could barely keep up with my job. I was lying down about 18 hours out of every day and doing much of my work supine – which fortunately was possible because much of my job entailed reading and writing. For about seven years, I ate most of my evening meals reclining because pain and fatigue made it uncomfortable to sit upright by the end of the day. The physicians that I consulted had no solutions; I knew that I needed to find a way to live with this condition. At the time, Herbert Benson’s ‘Relaxation Response’ was gaining popularity. He discussed the relationship between stress and pain and used meditation to reduce stress. Also around this time a friend who was a long time meditator in the Heartfulness Meditation system encouraged me to try this meditation practice. Given that nothing else was helping, I decided to give it a try. And so began a spiritual journey that had nothing and everything to do with the pain and fatigue that I was experiencing, a journey that changed my life and perspectives profoundly and inexorably. 

The Heartfulness Meditation system is available to all, free of charge. This was very important to me at the time, because I had limited resources and was concerned that I would not be able to continue to work which would put me in dire financial straits. Over time, I have come to appreciate that spirituality cannot be ‘sold’, so the fact that this practice was without charge was of much greater consequence than I had initially appreciated.  

During my first meditation session with a trainer, I realized that something occurred that was beyond my ability to describe or explain. I was trained as a scientist and spent much of my work life investigating phenomena, hence the experience was intriguing to me even if a bit disconcerting.  

Within six months, I had the opportunity to meet Parthasarthi Rajagopalachari, referred to as Chariji, who was the teacher at the time of the Heartfulness practice. He lived in India, but traveled widely and was in the United States, based in Georgia, for a few months. I spent ten days at a very basic boy scout camp about an hour and a half from Atlanta, meditating with him and learning my first profound lessons in the silence of meditation. There were few amenities and I had little there to relieve the pain and fatigue that plagued me.  Had I had the financial resources, I would have fled back to Atlanta and flown home. It was ‘just too much’.  Nevertheless, even though I didn’t feel like I could ‘meditate’ due to being focused on the pain, the time there was life altering for me.  

One day, toward the end of my stay at the boy scout camp, we were meditating in a large tent during a downpour; it was very dark outside and in the tent. Suddenly it seemed as if a spot light had been turned on. It took a few minutes to realize there was no spotlight, that I was experiencing a moment of deep inner illumination. In that moment of ‘light’ I realized that I had been deeply angry at my family. For ten years, I had helped four of my younger brothers and sisters and my mother after my father died suddenly at age 55. I had put many of my own needs ‘on hold’ to support them. When I became quite ill, barely able to care for myself, they were nowhere to be found; they had effectively deserted me. The resulting anger was profound. In that moment at the boy scout camp, I realized I thought I had acted simply because I was a ‘good person’, but that really, there was a lot of expectation attached to my actions. Because I had cared for them, I expected they would reciprocate and help me. When they couldn’t hear how greatly I was struggling, I was devastated. In an instant, I realized the only way I could ever care for people unconditionally was if I had a source of unconditional love to support me. And that source of unconditional love only could come from ‘God’ or ‘Nature’ or some other unnamed principle. Now this was quite a disconcerting realization, given that I had been brought up in a family that had been atheists, or agnostics, for several generations.  How could  there be something so profound beyond me? And yet the knowledge in that moment was indisputable. Clearly there was something greater than myself, and if I could access it permanently, I would be able to love without condition or expectation. In that meditation, I had understood that the meditation was much beyond a way to manage pain and fatigue. I had been given a glimpse of an entirely different life paradigm and was being offered an opportunity to completely change my life, my entire being.  I was on an unanticipated spiritual journey to learn to love unconditionally.

Another incident during this trip to the boy scout camp solidified my understanding of ‘what is possible.’  I told my experience to the friend who had encouraged me to come to the boy scout camp. I told her that I realized how deep was my anger at my mother and that I didn’t know how to let it go. She suggested talking to Chariji. This was a non-starter for me. I wasn’t about to discuss something so personal with someone I didn’t know. Rather, I wrote down my thoughts about my mother, and my desire to get past my anger. I wrote from the deepest core of my being. Remarkably, over the next month, I realized that the anger that I had held for years dissipated, it simply was gone – not just the anger at my mother, but at all my relatives who I felt had let me down. This was remarkable – I had held anger for years over my illness, but also realized that I had probably held anger at many things over many years, maybe over my entire lifetime. And I hadn’t even recognized it, because it was simply ‘part of who I was’. I only recognized how much energy it takes to be angry once it was gone. Remarkably, I never experienced that depth of anger again. Yes, I might get ‘mad’ but the corrosive anger that was eating at me from the inside was no longer there. Over many years, I have marveled at how the simple act of sitting with my eyes closed, in the Heartfulness practice, could remove long standing emotional pains. (As examples, in later years, I watched as fear disappeared, as a sense of rejection slowly dwindled).  Periodically, I would marvel at how much easier this practice was and how much more powerful than any amount of psychological counseling!

These two experiences were a turning point in my meditation experience. I had started meditating to reduce pain and fatigue. And the practice did, indeed, assist in that way over time. But I had experienced what was possible, in terms of approaching life from a perspective of unconditionality. I realized that the Heartfulness practice was in some way able to help me in that quest. This realization was just a beginning, an introduction to a different possible version of my ‘self’. I also recognized that knowing where I wanted to go and getting there were two different things. Fortunately, the Heartfulness approach to meditation is a very simple and systematic approach to finding the best in oneself, removing that which is unwanted and unnecessary, and changing behavior to live in a ‘heartful manner’. I have come to understand the results don’t necessarily occur over night because the process of changing oneself and patterns of behavior is just that – a process.  Ten principles of Heartful Living were described in detail by a previous teacher of the Heartfulness method of meditation, Ram Chandra of Shahjahanpur, better known as Babuji. In the next postings, I share some of the lessons that I learned as I worked to apply the practice and these principles to daily life. 

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The Importance of Prayer

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Making Meditation Part of the Daily Routine