--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Michael Jackson wrote: > > After much thought, I think I would still recommend > something other than TM for PTSD relief.
As would I, having done a bit of research on PTSD in the past year. The condition or syndrome known as post-traumatic stress disorder revolves around an inability to get over experiences and impressions from the past, and live in the present, as if these impressions were no longer a ruling factor. Nothing I have seen in my over-46-year-experience with TM suggests to me that it enables people to do this. To the contrary, I find that most long-term TMers are more locked into and ruled by impressions from the past than normal, everyday, non-meditators. Recent research has shown that there is a one-to-one link between people displaying neurotic behavior and their risk of developing PTSD. Neurotic behavior is defined as "a type of personality behavior in which people experience high degrees of anxiety in response to everyday events, and thus tend to overreact to those ordinary events." That seems to me to be almost a definition of the long-term cultic TMer, at least in my experience. How is *cultivating* this behavioral pattern supposed to help those already victimized by it? I personally suspect that PTSD can be best treated by something that enables its sufferers to be as present in each present moment as possible, with as few "trigger points" reminding them of the past as possible. If TM worked as it was described in its marketing brochures, it would help to do this. But all one has to do to tell whether the marketing brochures were telling the truth or not is to watch what long-term TMers tend to *focus* on. Is it the present, or the past? I rest my case.
