Changing The Outside World Will Never Make You Happy (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #623

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast and this is another snippet of Wisdom, where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Let's dive right in.

[Tom Cronin]
There's really two moments in time that I think are very significant in where I am today. The first one was in sort of February 1996 when I had a nervous breakdown. It was really a culmination of many years of drug addiction, late nights, very deep neglect to my mental and physical well-being, lots of drinking, lots of drugs, lots of partying, lots of hedonism.

And then one day, my whole system just collapsed. It kind of broke down and I was quite incapacitated at that point after many years of insomnia and anxiety and panic attacks and depression. And what that led me to was an interesting sort of dark night of the soul and really the sort of the worst case scenario that I had to get to, the breaking point.

And then interestingly, not long after that, literally just a few weeks, I discovered meditation. And I'd never come across meditation in my life. But it was the fact that the first part in that journey had to happen before the second part in that journey had to happen.

And how it happened was that I was at home, I was having mental health leave from work, I couldn't go to work as a broker. And I was watching TV. And while I was watching TV, there was a documentary about a person who was a very successful businessman, but he was talking about how we use meditation to help him become successful.

And that was one of those sliding door moments where if I wasn't at home, at that point with my mental health leave, I wouldn't have seen the documentary and who knows, I might never have picked it up. So just one of those two defining moments of having that sort of breakdown and then finding meditation. And then that was really like the trajectory.

So the breakdown was the sort of the crash. And then the meditation was the sort of the elevator lift upwards. And that happened very, very quickly.

It was quite transformational for me.

[Agi Keramidas]
Was that, I'm curious, a specific kind of meditation that you were doing? And also, I want to ask you, what are your immediate benefits? Because the way you describe it, it must have been something very intense or profound.

So what happened then?

[Tom Cronin]
Yeah, it's very distinct, very specific, what happened. I did explore lots of different meditations. I did a lot of research.

And you know, there was chakra healing and rebalancing and mindfulness exercises. But it wasn't until I came across a particular style. At the time, it was called transcendental meditation, also goes by the name of Vedic meditation, where you get a particular mantra.

And the beautiful thing about the transcending meditation was twofold. The first benefit that was very significant, and I'll tell you about the impact it had on me. But the first thing that happens was it puts your physical body into profoundly deep state of rest very quickly.

So it was this physiological, profound, deep state of rest that was happening in the meditation that allowed my body to get out of the sympathetic and into the parasympathetic nervous system and start healing itself. But the second thing was this expansion of mind when you transcend beyond the thinking place. We call this Turiya, when you get into that fourth state beyond thinking, then something really significant starts to happen, you get out of the recurring thoughts that you're having, and start accessing a field of conscious awareness.

So it works sort of, I guess, on a physiological level and on an expanded mind or spiritual level. And the benefits that I started noticing very quickly within the week was that I had chronic insomnia. I just couldn't sleep.

I was riddled with insomnia, but I just literally was falling asleep everywhere in that first week. And it was a real breath of fresh air to actually be able to sleep. So that was a big shift.

And by being able to sleep, plus getting the deep rest in the meditation and the sleep, that was really allowing my body to heal. And very quickly, as I got out of the sympathetic nervous system, and you start producing more biochemicals like oxytocin and serotonin and melatonin, a lot of the addictions and the cravings started to just melt away very quickly. My depression started to lift, the anxiety and the panic attacks started to fade away.

And I noticed quite a significant shift within just a matter of days and weeks. And I went back to work and continued on as a broker for 16 more years.

[Agi Keramidas]
Oh, that's kind of a surprising thing, because usually people who go through such a transformation, because you mentioned the dark night of the soul, so that preceded your transformation with meditation. So many people during that time realized that part of the reason why I have been in such a state was because of my career. So for you, it was something different then.

[Tom Cronin]
Yeah. And it's really important that we understand this. And it's important we just pause for a moment to reflect on that, because we currently have a world that is very deeply coded and conditioned to believe that the external world is the problem.

And we have this inherent belief system that if I can only change the outside world, then my inside world will be in a better state. And what that does is it really disempowers us. And it means that we're constantly trying to buy things or move things or change things so that we can feel happy.

Work wasn't the problem. What was the problem was my inner state. And when I cultivated my inner state, eventually what happens is we don't become completely immune, but we find that we have greater sovereignty, greater equanimity to be in the world, but not ruffled or disturbed by the world.

And I think this is one of the keys to finding fulfillment, is that we're deeply conditioned to think that it's in an acquisition or an experience, a partner, a job, a particular amount of money. We'll never get there through that model. We'll never get there.

[Agi Keramidas]
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