{"id":14380,"date":"2018-05-22T18:43:44","date_gmt":"2018-05-22T23:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tm.org\/blog\/?p=14380"},"modified":"2018-05-25T19:45:14","modified_gmt":"2018-05-26T00:45:14","slug":"helping-the-less-fortunate-a-highly-personal-yet-highly-impersonal-endeavor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/meditation\/helping-the-less-fortunate-a-highly-personal-yet-highly-impersonal-endeavor\/","title":{"rendered":"A Highly Personal Yet Highly Impersonal Endeavor"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a little kid, it always broke my heart to see a homeless person on the street or someone begging for food.<\/p>\n

On one such occasion, I proclaimed to my father, \u201cWhen I grow up, I\u2019m going to give every poor person in the world a bag of gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s very kind of you,\u201d he replied. \u201cBut if you only give someone money, they might just spend it all and end up back in the same situation. If you really want to help people, you should teach them to meditate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both of my parents learned the Transcendental Meditation technique shortly after college and have been meditating twice a day, every day, for\u00a0over forty years. I learned at the age of ten and have been meditating consistently ever since I started high school.<\/p>\n

While the desire to help others was present from early on, I wasn\u2019t sure how my career would unfold to support that goal. I earned an MBA and aspired to start multiple companies, yet the idea of teaching the TM technique was always in the back of my mind.<\/p>\n

The experience that ultimately propelled me to become a certified TM instructor was a stint working at the Maharishi Institute<\/a> in Johannesburg, South Africa. This college for underprivileged students offers higher education to young people that wouldn\u2019t otherwise have access to it \u2013 and incorporates TM practice into the curriculum. It was amazing to see firsthand how students from extreme poverty and hardship could blossom, with meditation playing a big role in that transformation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I had the good fortune to open a new TM center in Los Angeles<\/a> in 2012, along with my wife and another certified teacher. We quickly became one of the most active locations in the country and teach an incredibly diverse range of people, including many from the creative fields. Our two-year-old daughter even tags along and helps us welcome people sometimes!<\/p>\n

Speaking about the role of a TM teacher, Maharishi once remarked how it\u2019s both a highly personal yet highly impersonal endeavor. That description always stuck with me, because it\u2019s true. When we teach people to meditate, we meet together for several days in a row and really get a good sense of each other. Yet we also don\u2019t need to spend hours talking about someone\u2019s issues in order to help them address those challenges more self-sufficiently and often achieve remarkable growth and progress.<\/p>\n

Transcendental Meditation is such a simple, clear technique, and I\u2019m continually surprised by how quickly many people experience positive changes. The irony is that I\u2019ve been meditating my entire life, so I don\u2019t even know what it\u2019d feel like to be without the TM technique!<\/p>\n

I wake up every day excited to give people \u2013 rich or poor \u2013 a precious tool to transform their lives in ways they hadn\u2019t even imagined, and to discover a wealth of possibilities within themselves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jesse Berkowitz is one of about 500 certified TM teachers active in the US. The Transcendental Meditation organization is grateful to him and the rest of the TM teachers for their commitment to sharing this technique with anyone who wishes to learn it!<\/p>\n

Although the TM technique is a simple, straightforward meditation technique, the learning experience is nuanced and delicate. TM teachers, like Jesse, go through 5 months of teacher training and gain the ability to teach every student, no matter their learning style, in a way that ensures they are practicing successfully and able to gain the maximum benefits of the practice. Each teacher is also trained to teach the TM course exactly the same way it’s been taught for over 50 years, guaranteeing the technique\u2019s authenticity and effectiveness.<\/p>\n

So no matter where you are in the whole world, you can learn the authentic TM technique in the same manner that has been proven effective time and time again, by hundreds of studies and millions of people.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wake up every day excited to give people \u2013 rich or poor \u2013 a precious tool to transform their lives in ways they hadn\u2019t even imagined, and to discover a wealth of possibilities within themselves. Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":14381,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,26,3,53,21],"tags":[273,295,292,202,299,32,297,62,232,37,22],"class_list":["post-14380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-enlightenment","category-maharishi","category-meditation","category-people","category-students","tag-meditate","tag-meditation","tag-meditation-benefits","tag-meditation-technique","tag-people","tag-stress","tag-students","tag-teaching-tm","tag-testimonial","tag-transcend","tag-transcendental-meditation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14380"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14394,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14380\/revisions\/14394"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}