meditation – a personal story on transformation

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By: jason frahm

Everything has changed since meditation. Before I began the meditative journey, I was victim to the winds of circumstance. I was happy when I got what I wanted and different shades of miserable when I didn’t get what I wanted.

Once there was a ripple in my lake, the waters could be rocky for days or even weeks or months. My lake might have seemed still from the outside, yet the inner tumult often remained long after the storm. I was bound to the “Matrix” and didn’t know it!

At the edge of my 27th birthday my heart was flattened by a girl for a second time in life. My girlfriend, Maya called it quits since I refused to meet her timeline for marriage. I was abandoned without a place to live (I was primarily living at Maya’s place and not really welcome back at the flat of my housemate, Kolbe who was angry and jealous of my relationship with Maya.) Too, I was jobless with dwindling resources and credit.

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The night after the break-up I slept in my 95’ Grand Cherokee… my first brush with homelessness. I woke up the next day anxious, devastated and scared. What was I to do?

Fear as the driver, I negotiated one last month living with Kolbe which assured me to tip-toe around many unresolved issues with my gay roommate. Yet, this discomfort was far preferable to sleeping in the back seat of my Jeep.

I fretfully anticipated the same anxiety attacks may come back. A year and a half previous to this, I was fired from my medical sales job. I wanted to leave the misery I experienced in that job, yet my acting hobby was far from supporting me.

Allen Medical was not interested in waiting for me to figure out my life so i could aptly perform in the job. They justly fired me. I wanted this, but was unaware of my attachment to the paycheck and my identification with the job. Shock, Fear and Shame rabidly overwhelmed me.

Soon, I was so anxious that I could barely speak a word without clamoring for a shallow gulp of air. Each gulp of breath would barely afford me a half a sentence. The anvil on my chest was was unbearable. Inside, I was clamoring for a sense of security without a paycheck to hold onto.

This coffin-like experience continued for several weeks. After the third week, I guessed that I wouldn’t die from the failure and that it was time to shake of this anxious paralysis. From there I began to rebuild my identity and slowly my breath returned.

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Yet, here I was after Maya… rocked again. This time though, I knew I must act quickly because my resources were on empty… I needed a job, money and a place to live in a month. I declared that I was not going back to the hell of paralysis ever!

I sped though medical sales interviews to get a “real job” and landed a solid six-figure biotech sales job in three and a half weeks. 

Two days later,  I manifested a new roommate and a condo in a bustling part of the elite area of Brentwood with the new job credentials and every cent I had left in the bank. I was out of Kobe’s on the 29th day. A lot of change in that month August.

Things were looking up, yet, I could not unravel a new symptom that had arrived since my latest shake-up… my belly had doubled in size as though I had swallowed a balloon filled with helium. My voice was higher, but I felt like I was sinking.

The only relief from this distention was leaning my stomach into any hard rounded surface I could find like a table or counter edge to open up the space around my mid-section. This was the only way I could achieve a few seconds of breath and relief.

This eternal bloating stubbornly remained through my next six-month relationship and the ensuing heartbreak.

Even though I had some material security through this, I didn’t know what or who I could rely upon, including myself. The walls and identities that I had been constructing my whole life were splintering again rapidly.

Something had to change! I seemed to be shifting in a positive manner, but it wasn’t quick enough to stave off the scream from within. Yes, I already had my first awakening moment where I realized that I was responsible for every high and every low in my life which transformed the victim within me.

This happened shortly after the breakup with Maya when she gave me a book on taking responsibility for your life.

I was reading many spiritual books. I was fascinated with anything that had to do with growth and expanded perspectives of God beyond the confines of the Christian teachings. I figured there must be something more to discover since I was still experiencing such uncomfortable life symptoms. What could it be?

About a year later, I was introduced to meditation… something to transmute the confines of the mind and ego. I pledged to a forty-day commitment of daily meditation which has become an essential part of my daily life.

There wasn’t one big Wow moment that changed everything including the eternal swell in my belly.

Though, within three months of daily communion with “Presence” (meditation), what had been there for over a year and a half disappeared almost unnoticed. At the time I didn’t put the two together, yet in reflection I am now able connect the dots.

The fears, attachments, denials of responsibility and identifications to things outside of me had been so “log jammed” up that when the gates finally opened, I was flooded with an ocean of unprocessed emotions, unsubstantiated beliefs and life disappointments.

My belly became my teacher reminding me when I was on course (with space and breath) or off course (bloated and restricted). It guided me to seek help to unravel what I did not understand in me and in life. Slowly, meditation guided me to living “With Space” within me.

Meditation has piloted me to inner trust, eternal joy, peace, and an unending well of love and acceptance for what is that I’d never known. This gift continues to grow. The challenges in life still come; I’ve been severanced out the next job, been broken up with several times more, lost all of my assets twice more, almost died in a motorcycle accident, etc.

The list of tests goes on and surely not to top the life challenges in your journey. Yet, through daily meditation, guidance of a spiritual master and living consciously  “The Power” within me that is Source is awakened and unscathed by the highs and lows of life.  This “Power” continues to blossom freeing me from the confines of suffering and the ego.

This same power is within you. I invite you to hop on the meditation journey and awaken this fountain of youth, eternal joy and infinite wisdom within YOU! jasoncfrahm.com.

If you are looking for a way to start or deepen your daily meditation – take look at this program by MindValley: bit.ly/YOGIMeditation and the Mindfulness Based Stressed Reduction online course by Sounds True: – The YOGI TIMES team