Is Meditation Healthy?

If you've read my story on "voices," you've gotten a little glimpse into my mental health issues. I have a hard time understanding what's real and what isn't really there. For almost seven years, I've had these strangers stuck in my conscious. I call them strangers but at this point, they've become "friends," but your friends don't lure you into trying to kill yourself, or to hurt others.

Try falling asleep with a whole group of people telling you to go outside and take a walk. Or the audience standing in awe, when you pick up that knife. When they start to cheer when you see blood or encourage you to hit your head on hard things. I listened to this group of people for about five years. I let them take me over and control me completely to the point where I wasn't sure if I was in a dream or if it was an actual day.

I went to a therapist for about a year. You could say it helped, I mean I hid a lot from him and didn't tell him the full truth, which I know is completely on me. But the audience in my head didn't want to get out; they convinced me that if I told someone the exact things that they tell me, I would be put into an insane asylum. I didn't want that, so I didn't tell anyone.

If you've read my story He Broke Me, but I Love Him you know about my current boyfriend. He broke me down, and not in the reason I wrote that story…my ex boyfriends broke me. Really broke me, like my heart. My current boyfriend, broke that wall that I had build; He's been he only person to actually understand whats going on in my head, and knows exactly how to get into my conscious. He knows when something is bugging me up there, and knows the right thing to do at the right time to make it stop.

Writing has always been an escape for me. When I get something off my chest and out of my head, the voices escape and they don't come back for a while. Nothing though, and I mean nothing, has ever made the voices go away completely. Until I found meditation.

I've always been scared of meditation. I already had something in my head and didn't want something else to take me over. I found this app on my phone one night and just decided to try it. It wasn't the kind of mediation where you completely clear your mind and get "zoned" into it. These were breathing exercises, and shot recordings of one person telling you to think about something that makes you happy, or putting your hand on your heart and thanking it for all the work its done over the years. My personal favorite is the night time one—it guides you in calm breathing exercise and then tells you to repeat in your mind, "My day is over, let me rest." That, right there, was everything for me. My social anxiety throughout the day, these voices, being awkwardly shy, it just isn't that easy to close my eyes and rest. But telling myself constantly, "My day is over, let me rest" really helps me to take everything out of my mind and to relax.

Ive been doing this meditation for about a month now, and to be completely honest; this is the one thing that I've done in seven years that has helped me. I found this website about a week ago and with all this writing, along with the mediation, I haven't heard my voices in at least five days.