I grew up in India watching my parents meditating twice a day, they were hardcore Meditators, as a child I used to copy my father and use to imitate him, may be that practice also counts. But with time I forgot the skill or desire, I used to ask my parents or some many gurus they use to disregard my desire to learn how to mediate by looking at my age. So I used to try meditating on my own once in a while before going to the bed, but experience was not really good all the suppress stuff and memories use to pop out, at that tender age I even did not know what and how to deal with them. I used to ask my family, but even they did not have any answers, as they use to follow Mantra based mediation, and for some reason I was not able to create inane interest in mantra based meditation. Then i moved to USA at a age of 21 by myself lived in NyC for 8 years, was a new immigrant with high hopes and pride, but the culture was very different and I had my share of struggle, there I met somebody online and he showed me a meditation, and tried to teach me a witnessing meditation. I started meditating not to find the god, but to relieve the stress, and something to help me incorporate me to the new society, but things were fine, in the college where I was studying business, my grades were almost As in all the subject I was doing good in school but not in my professional life may be because it was not meant for me. Anyways, I got stuck with spiritual practices, after that I bought every self help book in the market, tried most of the methods and techniques available in the Market, I almost tried 113 methods all together. Which only lead to more trouble, than any help, may be I did not have any guidance from any spiritual master, but now I feel it was a blessing in disguise,
In 2008 after I moved to Canada, moving to another new country, starting a career and life back from scratch brought more struggle to the overloaded mental system, that's where I decided to visit a Mediation resort in India, all I wanted to know why I am not able to live a comfortable normal life, sharing the same ideas and views as rest of the world, the answer came in the wake of the name and that was "it is my destiny" it did give me some relief, but not what I was really looking for, I stayed there for a month, and came back to Canada and started working again as Restaurant manager. after getting laid off my job in 2010, I decided to take Sabbatical, to understand myself more, so I ended up back in India, this time I spent almost a year visiting lots of spiritual places covering India, and Nepal, and Tibet. I was introduced to beware awakening, old age, Sufism, exocism,
In between my pilgrimage my new born niece had a not so good delivery, so I decided to visit my family, and help them. I was in modern well equipped hospital and asked the doctor, if I can do spiritual healing, ( I was not very confident at that time), I had learnt from a American sanyasin and tried on some friends with positive results. The doctor was not happy, so I introduced myself and he let me enter into Neo natal ICU, for my surprise, my Niece was from no hope to out of the hospital in a 3 days. I continued my pilgrimage against my family wish, but it was good, when I came back home, I started to have weird non believable experience, like out of body experience, visions, from past and future. It was too much to handle at same time.