When I joined this meditation while ago, I was coming after 7 years of mood swings and severe depressions.
In this time I had gone to several psychiatrists and psychologists, gotten diagnosed first with seasonal depression (as my downs used to occur in winter time) and then with cyclothymia (a mild case of bipolar, which is deemed to be serious mental illness). And ended up taking a bunch of pills. All this to not much avail.
And then when I moved to a place with a better weather, I felt like I am finally way over the mood swings. At least there was no cold winter here!
But of course I was wrong. They occurred again. So I went through the cycle of desperately looking for some other solution, tried a number of different personal development courses and seminars, from psychoanalysis to hypnosis and a bunch of others.
Several times I thought I had gotten the solution, just to be proven wrong once again by yet another depression.
So, in the middle of a bad down period, that is when I came to find out about Meditation. And I started, as usual, eager to find the solution to my problems once and for all. Unfortunately, my expectations to feel happy immediately got in the way, so after just 2 months, during my first level, even if I felt some improvements, I decided this is taking too long. So I quit.
However, this did not solve my depression issues, so after 3 months, not having found a solution, I decided to come back and start again.
And this time I didn’t stop.
Going through the levels, I began to realize that the cause of my ups and downs had a lot to do with my attachments and own beliefs about myself. And especially had a lot to do with all my “shoulds”: I should be confident all the time, I should be on time, I should never eat sweats, I should exercise every day, etc.
Over the years I had accumulated so many rules about how I should live my life that I ended up being trapped by them.
And while sometimes it felt good and I was high as I was managing to respect them, obviously I could not always do it. So when I didn't, I would eventually fall down in the depths of self-loath and depression.
I feel this meditation helped me a lot to discard a lot of these false concepts, ideas, and beliefs. As before, all I was doing was to add more stuff, to do courses and seminars just to learn another set of rules. And to follow them for a while just to fall short again.
However, this meditation was different. Here everything is about discarding, about taking stuff out. And this process was a very liberating one for me. And helped me be more flexible, gave me freedom from all my 'should's.
I also became more aware of how selfish I had lived my life. How I would always think of myself and disregard others. How I created so many addictions for myself, like overeating, oversleeping, wasting time on internet.
And all this just because I wanted to get away from the reality that did not fit my mind world, my beliefs, about how it should be so I can be happy.
Moving forward, I definitely feel that even if I have come a long way, there is still a long way to go.
And no matter how much I want it to happen fast, becoming totally free from my own mind world of concepts, beliefs, and false ideas will take a longer time.