At Prince Siddhartha’s birth, his father, the king of the realm, was told that his son would be either a powerful ruler or a great spiritual leader. Wanting his royal lineage to continue, the king did everything he could to prevent the young prince from seeing the ephemeral nature of life. This, he hoped, would keep him from seeking higher realities.

In today’s class one of the speakers talked about the time when Paramhansa Yogananda visited Therese Neumann, the Bavarian saint. In a chapter about this visit in Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda revealed that, in her elevated consciousness, Therese had transcended the need for food. She said that she awoke one day with neither the need nor the desire to eat. In other words, this “power” came to her spontaneously.

As a lifelong meditator, I love to hear people’s experiences of how meditation has helped them. Here are a few such stories which, taken together, show a broad spectrum of benefits that meditation can bring.