We share this story with the permission of the person it belongs to. She asked that we use only her first name. Her name is Meera. She is 41 years old, a schoolteacher from Pune, and she describes the three years before she came to Premkutir as the darkest of her life.
The Weight of Grief
In the space of eighteen months, Meera lost her mother to cancer, went through a divorce, and was diagnosed with clinical depression. 'I was functioning,' she says. 'I was going to work, feeding myself, paying bills. But I was completely hollow inside. I felt like I was watching my life from behind glass.'
She tried therapy, which helped somewhat. She tried medication, which took the edge off the worst of it. But she describes a persistent sense that something essential was missing — not just happiness, but meaning. 'I kept asking myself: what is this all for? And I had no answer.'
I wasn't looking for God. I wasn't even looking for peace. I was just looking for a reason to keep going.
A single flame — the image Meera returns to when describing her first meditation experience
The First Meditation
A colleague at her school had been attending meditation sessions at a local center affiliated with Premkutir. She invited Meera repeatedly over several months before Meera finally agreed to come, mostly to stop being asked. 'I sat down, closed my eyes, and waited for nothing to happen,' she says. 'And then something happened.'
What happened, she struggles to describe precisely. A moment of stillness. A gap in the relentless internal commentary. A sense, brief but unmistakable, of being held by something larger than her circumstances. 'It lasted maybe thirty seconds. But it was enough. I knew there was something here worth exploring.'
The Practice Deepens
Over the following year, Meera attended weekly meditation sessions and began a daily home practice. She came to Premkutir for the first time for a five-day silent retreat. She describes the retreat as the turning point.
Guided Yoga Nidra for Deep Rest
The yoga nidra practice that Meera credits as a key part of her healing — try it yourself
'On the third day of the retreat, during the afternoon meditation, I had an experience I can only describe as coming home. Not to a place — to myself. To something in me that had never been broken, even when everything around me was.' She pauses. 'I cried for about an hour afterward. But it was completely different from the crying I had been doing for two years. It was relief, not grief.'
What the Teachers Say
Swami Ananda, who has guided many people through grief and depression over his decades of teaching, is careful not to overstate what meditation can do. 'Meditation is not a substitute for professional mental health care,' he says. 'For serious depression, please work with a qualified therapist or psychiatrist. What meditation offers is a different kind of support — a way of relating to your inner experience that reduces the secondary suffering caused by resistance and self-judgment.'
The tradition teaches that suffering has two components: the pain itself, and our resistance to the pain. Meditation cannot always remove the pain. But it can dissolve the resistance — and that changes everything.
Meera Today
Three years after her first meditation session, Meera meditates for 45 minutes every morning. She has completed two silent retreats at Premkutir and is considering the teacher training program. She still has difficult days. The grief for her mother has not disappeared — she says she no longer wants it to. 'She was my mother. I should grieve her. But now the grief is clean. It doesn't swallow me.'