Latest / The Inner Well Podcast / The Conscious Thread: A Father-Daughter Story on TM
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- The Inner Well Podcast: We all contain a space within that when enlivened and nourished will support us with unwavering stability, expansion, and peace of mind. Join us each week as we dive into honest, grounded conversations about transcendental meditation, consciousness, and growth, and what it means to live an integrated life supported by a foundation of creativity and calm. This is the inner world. Welcome back to the Innerwell Podcast. My name's Danielle, and this week I'm so excited to have a conversation with my friend Greg Russo and his daughter Isabella, also known as Bella. Thank you guys for being here. I wanted to have this conversation because recently I've had so many parents who learn TM who have asked, how can I share this with my kids? And I think that your story is so powerful and it will really resonate with a lot of people. And I am excited to dive into that. Greg, if you want to start with just introducing yourself briefly. I'm Greg. I'm Isabella's dad. And ⁓ yeah, I've I've worked in healthcare and ⁓ and I have I'm in the coffee business. I have a coffee shop in New Jersey. And Bella, do you want to introduce yourself briefly? Sure. I am Bella. I am Greg's daughter and I'm seventeen years old. I've been meditating for ⁓ a little over two years now. And Greg, how did you first come across transcendental meditation and what was it that got you interested in it? Meditation's one of those things where ⁓ it has so many benefits like to to enhancing life, but most of us come to it because like we hit rock bottom and we're looking for solutions, like real solutions. ⁓ so I that's where I was. And ⁓ I don't I think it's easy for like for people not to appreciate like what something is until they've exhausted all avenues. And so I have. I I've looked into everything. I've tried all different types of things, nothing, and I do mean nothing, nothing helped me like transcendental meditation. ⁓ it it it's helped me in ways I I can't even explain in getting that relief and learning more about it and It it's fascinating. And like you see all these positive, amazing benefits to like human performance and academics and things like that. You you want everybody to have my children watch what I do. I meditate twice a day and I never miss ever. I tried sharing it with my daughter and and my kids and just I I like them to just kind of observe through my experience. And I think they've seen a lot of changes. ⁓ and but you can't force it. So a lot of us it's through crisis that we come to this. And that's unfortunate because I think Like I I can speak for myself. I wish I had this. Well, if I grew up with this, it would be a a a very amazing thing. So what was that first conversation like when you wanted to share it with your kids? How did that go? My my daughter was having some issues. I'll let her talk about them. And I said, you know, you should really look at meditation. It's helped me tremendously. You've seen what it's done in my life. And it's kinda like everybody meditates, everybody takes a nap. It's got a lot of meanings to a lot of people. But ⁓ I'm like, no, this is a very defined, very definite, very easy, very effective system. It's rooted in research. Like, you know, so I I just tried to explain some of the benefits and you know, and I offered it. I said, You you know, I'm happy to to pay for your course of instruction. She was like, Yeah, you know, that's interesting, and wasn't quite there yet. And ⁓ so I kind of let it go. You can't you can't push things on anyone, you can't push things on your kids. ⁓ they'll they'll wind up rebelling and they're not gonna you can't make anybody do anything. And learning met to meditate, that that's not gonna help you. It's doing the practice. It's actually doing the meditation. And that that's where the change comes from. So I knew that and I'm like, okay, well when she's ready she'll she'll come back. And she did. When she came back to me, she wanted to revisit the meditation ⁓ instruction. I said, I'm happy to do that for you. our deal has changed a little bit and you're gonna learn a little bit about it. You're gonna have some skin in the game. And then then we'll we'll look at getting even some instruction. So I recommended Strength and Stillness by Bob Roth, which I think is a beautiful book. It encapsulates so much of like the research and just and it's very like conversational. She she read it and she read it in like no time flat. And ⁓ and then we got her instru instructed into yeah. Bella, I want to hear about your side of that ⁓ that journey. You know, what did you think when your dad first brought it up? And then what changed for you that got you curious about wanting to learn more? So I'll be honest with you, I can hardly remember when my dad first brought it up because it's almost hard to remember a time without TM. That's how ⁓ how just out of it I was. ⁓ it's unfortunate because exactly what my dad said at the beginning that a lot of people come to it through crisis. And I hate to say that I did. I came to it because of crisis. And so I do remember bringing it back up. I was in a really bad head space. I struggled with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia. And I could barely tell like where my my body began and where it ended. And I would have days where I'd call my dad and I'd be like crying. And I'd be saying, like, I don't understand why I did this, why did I do that? I couldn't understand why I was doing things, why I was saying things, why I was feeling certain ways. It was just like a whole out of body experience. Like I wasn't in control of myself and I didn't really know where I was or what I was doing. It was a really like hard time in my life. And that's when I came back to it, when I came back to meditation, 'cause I had seen how my dad had changed. His life had just gotten exponentially better. more fulfilling, healthier. He had gotten healthier. And it just seemed like such a a flip. And I wanted that for myself as well. Considering that I was going through such like hard times. I wanted I wanted that flip. So I came back, I approached him about it and he was like, Well, deals changed now. You gotta read this book. And I'm like, great. And I did it. ⁓ because I was desperate and I have never gone back. I don't regret it at all. My life has just been changed ever since. What was there something that you read in the book that stood out to you? Honestly, the way Bob Roth writes is just like incredible. And the way he writes about TM, it made me realize that this wasn't just important to my dad. And this wasn't just like something that just saved my dad or whatever. It It was really something that touched a lot of people. You know? And what was that first experience of learning TM like for you? It was good. You know, it was I that's like such a light way to put it, but it it was good. It was a good experience. I went home afterwards. The next day woke up, meditated. I right before I went to school, woke up a little early, was a little chaotic in my house because like I was meditating on the couch and it was just like and we were trying to get to school. But I meditated, I got my two meditations in that following day. And it was strange. I actually didn't notice for about a week. So from the time I meditated to like a week later, I didn't realize that I actually knew where I was. And I was in body and like the entire that entire week I hadn't even realized that I was just me again. Like I was finally me again. And It took me like a week to finally realize like, wow, I don't feel any body dysmorphia. I don't feel any fear of just like, what am I doing? I I didn't even notice that. It had just gone away from the first time I meditated. It took me like a week to like realize that that had changed and it was like an instantaneous change. And it was so natural and normal, like a returning to to ⁓ myself, what did you notice in Bella, Greg? I speak to her regularly. I noticed that the frequency of text messages like started to decline very quickly. I was used to getting like kind of like these crisis kind of messages. And it's interesting, like when you get helped, I mean and I I I I don't mean this like as any exaggeration. Like this literally gave me my life back. Like this was last like last stop. I get I get emotional like actually like thinking about it. But it it's it's interesting when you get like the the antidote, if you get like the remedy, if you get relief to the extent that I did, you start to look into like why? Like is it like is it that easy? Like is it really effortless? Like like is this like for real? Yes. And it's like, okay, like why didn't anybody tell me this? So then you start to look into it. And I I've read I you know, I've read every book that I could get my hands on before I learned. TM, I've I've taken I'm like, ⁓ I've learned to meditate. I've done hypnosis and listened to guided meditation. I've done breath work and stuff. I've never experienced anything like TM. I wanted to get more information. So I I read every book I could get. I read Transcendence, Supermind, Bob Roth's book, Strength and Stillness, before I took instruction. And after I revisited those things. And it's interesting, like I I look at my daughter. She's always been academically very strong. She's always been, you know, very disciplined. But but it's funny, and I can say this for myself, and it starts to make sense when you start to look at it. We're all living in a state of stress physiology. We're living in fight or flight. We're having, you know, there's the concept of allostatic load. I think it because it's so common, we call it normal. Like, of course I have stress up, but it's eating away at human health and performance. When you read these books and stuff, and you start to read about like alpha one brain waves and, you know, and and neurological like brain coherence. And and how that's becoming fractionated with the stress response. As we we have this chronic low level or high, in some cases, very high levels of stress, our brain starts to fractionate, like it starts to become like divided. Certain areas of the brain become very dominant, some some become a little less engaged. And then we start to lose the ability of our brain to communicate from front to back, side to side. And and so, like you start to get into the human performance and the human potential aspect of meditation, and you're like, man, like. Not only could I have potentially like so many people, you know, are suffering and they could have averted that suffering or at least had relief from the suffering, but they could have gotten so much more from their life. And as a parent, I'm like, please meditate. Please. We all say, you know, we have to come to it how we come to it. So interesting. In that dive into the question of why, what were the biggest things that you found out as to why you were experiencing the profound effect that you did with TM that you didn't with other practices. Yeah. So, well, first of all, TM is very researched. It's like to my knowledge, it's probably the most research supported technique in the ⁓ field of meditation. There's there's a profound release of stress. Like when you're meditating, like there's your your body is like alternating from from you're naturally diving deep within the cell. And as you do that, it's a profound state of rest. And your nervous system is literally releasing and offloading these burdens that you've like carried with you neurologically. Like literally, it's it's it's processing and releasing these burdens. And it, you know, and as you're doing that, as you, as you experience transcendence, you know, pure awareness, pure consciousness, you do that in in session one. I've taken meditation classes where like, You're told in the beginning, this is going to be hard. This is going to take years. TM, you experience it day one. Like day one, you experience pure consciousness. Like, and so like there's this fluctuation of pure consciousness and there's this profound healing that takes place. It's interesting, like reading some of the research that was done, and you start to see that the brain is actually starting to reorganize. It's you're breaking that stress physiology, that that that hold that stress has. You become less reactive. And you see that with cases of ADHD. You see that with, you know, ⁓ oppositional defiance disorders where where children are acting out and stuff like that. where children are hyper adults ⁓ nowadays more than ever, hyper stimulated. They have all this input and they're they're they become so reactive because the brain is literally changes changing in response to that stimuli. So you're offloading the stress. Reorganizing the brain, allowing areas of the brain to communicate, effectively you're getting more whole brain function. I mean, it's pretty amazing. And and I noticed like with my daughter, and I noticed certainly with myself that tasks the tasks became easier. Like it was easier to like things just didn't they weren't as difficult. For me, it's like such a turning point because literally I watch my children, tasks become easier, less reactivity. Less triggers, better academic performance with less time. I mean, to me it's like the ultimate hack. You know, and I work with professional athletes. I tell them all the time, like TM, TM, like it's it's my number one tool. Like if you want peak performance, if you want to reduce stress whatever it is, it's it sounds like, you cookie cutter, but I'm telling you, like it all starts with the brain. Yeah. Bella, now it's been what? Two you said about two years that you've been practicing. A little over two years now. And what's continued to change? I mean, you said w even within that first week you recognize that there was a profound difference, but has that continued now over time? And what has what have you noticed? So immediately body dysmorphia off switch. It was gone after day one, meditation one. I just didn't notice for a week because it was just that natural of a change. ⁓ I have to say it only gets better. I no longer have an eating disorder or body dysmorphia because body dysmorphia was gone, but the eating disorder did continue, but it was very reduced and it felt like with every single meditation I was becoming again more my myself and I was losing bits and pieces of that unnecessary stress and that disorder. So with ⁓ each meditation it chipped away at that until it was gone completely. I still have struggles, obviously, because TM's not going to relinquish your struggle. That's the whole point of TM is that you meditate twice daily so you can ⁓ come into the day coherent and then the stress will eat up at you a little bit and it'll like take away a little bit of that coherence, but then you'll meditate again and it'll bring it back and While I still have those stressors, I have to say that I can deal with them better and that they're easier. ⁓ I was very reactive at times, but now I feel more calm and confident in how I handle situations. And ⁓ so really it doesn't take away everything. That's One thing that I get from certain people when I'll try to tell them about TM, they'll be like, ⁓ but you were just complaining about that thing the other day. So like clearly you still have problems. I'm like, okay, that's life. It's not gonna take away the bad, but it just makes it less impactful. Like something that would have completely stopped me in my tracks for like a week. ⁓ Now it just gives me like a minute pause and then I'm like, all right, back to back to the way we go, you know, continuing on with the path. It's ⁓ it's not as detrimental as it used to be. Yeah, and you know it's interesting, I love what she said, because ⁓ truly like when you transcend, when you go like to the depth of the self, by alternating like wakefulness, rest with those periods of meditation. You're literally bringing more of the self out. That's why I'm really passionate about getting TM to children. Why do you have to come to a crisis? Let's make this normal. I think people look at meditation and they're like, yeah, like that's cool. Let's burn some incense. No, this is about becoming more and more yourself. And you're not going to learn that in a book. You're not going to learn that by like, you know, exploring your hobbies. That's by experiencing the self. And then from the power of the self, you can choose those hobbies and you can do them very well. And you can develop anything you want. I'm not a TM teacher. I make no money on T like when you find out what it is, it's like the easiest sell in the world. And it's just it's like, man, I I just want to yell it from the roof. Yeah, like I wish I came to it sooner. Life shouldn't be about surviving. It should be about thriving and being and becoming every day with every every twenty minute meditation. You become more yourself. And that's I think I think that's a big end goal in life for a lot of people. They're like, ⁓ I want to become my best self. Well, with this, like it's forty minutes out of your twenty-four hour day and every single time you meditate, you are becoming a little bit more your best self and yourself in general. Capital S. That's such a great way to put it. I've done the math on that. That forty minutes out of the fourteen hundred minutes in the day is two point seven percent. So we'll round it up to three because transition time. So we're investing three percent of our day for the impact that it has on the rest of the 97%. And all of the things that you've described just illustrate that. ⁓ to me, seems like a really reasonable investment of time. Cause that does tend to be one of the struggles that people have is, you know, ⁓ my gosh, I'm already so busy. How am I gonna find 20 minutes twice a day to sit down and do that? What would you say to that? I like to tell people that like Suck it up because you can do it anywhere. I have and I have told this to people that I have med you can meditate anywhere because it's an easy, effortless practice. I've meditated on airplanes, I've meditated in the car, I've meditated right here in my coffee shop, like I've like literally anywhere you do it and you know what's gonna come from it. It's a guarantee. And it just becomes like natural that it's just it's less you're just naturally less reactive. Obviously I I like to carve out time for my meditation so it's in a comfortable space and I just feel like I get the most out of it. But you can do it anywhere. I've I've meditated on vacation. I've meditated on a baseball field. I have like an active baseball field with a game going on. I have meditated in the car. I actually I if I may just add to that, you meditate twice a day, twenty minutes twice a day, and the results of people versing one time a day versus twice a day. I mean, you can meditate one time a day. It's your choice. But like it but if if you if you do what they're saying, like the results are exponentially more significant. So I said, well, you know, I'm in a pretty bad spot. So I'm going to borrow this guy's com confidence. I'm going borrow this information and I'm going to do it. And I'm going to do it for a month. And if I don't find that that's effective, I'll go to one time a day. I never I and I've literally never missed a meditation in the years that I've been in the couple years that I've been doing this. This is my guarantee. I can't speak for the you know TM or for you. But but like it I'm telling you as a as a person who's been helped, if you give this thirty days and you do it twice a day, I would bet you a cup of coffee at my coffee shop. That you that you that that you will continue the twice a day practice. Because you you'll look back and you'll be shocked. Because sometimes like in the first week of my meditation, you don't notice and then you look back and you're like, Wow, that simple practice has completely changed who I am. And has ⁓ completely changed my life and how I handle everyday life. I can't recommend more like if you're meditating, you've gotta like consistently do it twice a day. And I've never missed a meditation either. At first when I started meditating, I think a little bit of it was competition, a competitive spirit. I was like, my dad's never missed a meditation. I'm not gonna miss a meditation either and we'll see who holds out longer. And ⁓ so that's why I ended up meditating in some pretty weird spots because I was not going to miss. But then like suddenly it it just created this amazing change in my life. So I was like, why would I miss that? Why would I want less of that in my life? But my daughter's very plugged into activities and school and the you know, academics and community things. She's always done that. But it's interesting, like the stuff that's come out of meditation, it's one of the things I'm most passionate about, actually. ⁓ TM To to to see as a parent like the unfoldment of the self, to what to see the unfoldment of her true self in her life has has profoundly like amplified, like it it supercharged her efforts. So for instance, she's preparing her application to Princeton University. She this is something she's a long time goal. And as such, she's she's involved in a lot of things. But I mean, one of the things that came out of her meditation practice was a ⁓ was a water initiative. Like you start to have this like bubbling up of compassion for others and service. Like it it's amazing. She was in the newspaper, she had four write-ups, and she cited her meditation practice as the inspiration. She started like she literally had the thought come to her post-meditation. And ⁓ yeah, she's changing the world. My daughter is changing the world. Like if your child is an interest, like encouragement, this is this is this needs to become normal hygiene, normal. you know, wellness practice and and something that we need for life. You you got right on what I wanted to add. I was gonna talk about I was gonna talk about ⁓ the flow initiative, which is that's the the water initiative. It's ⁓ tell us more about it. It came out of meditation. That's correct. I was meditating one day and I've always been involved in like community service stuff. I'm just like really passionate about that kind of stuff. I I run a girls on the run team and things like that. But and it's all been like very localized and I I love that because I love my community and I love building community, but the water initiative was definitely something different for me. I came out of meditation one day with just like a strong urge to do right, not just by my community or by like my f neighbors or by my family, but to do good for the world. For me, it was this idea of spontaneous right action, which is something I've been wanting to touch on this entire time because I think it's so important. And you just spontaneous right action is when like you're as you're growing in your coherence and in your ⁓ consciousness, you just naturally, automatically start having these urges to just do the more correct thing. I think spontaneous right action in TM has all also, at least in my life, connected to greater care and empathy and like an urge to make good for the world because they're just like me in consciousness. Like the people who are being helped in the Dominican Republic and in different countries right now because of the the money that me and my community have helped to raise, they're Just like us, they've got the same consciousness, they've got the same being, and ⁓ you really just want to support others like that. You want to support other people, and that's just like a natural feeling that comes along with your meditation practice, that unshield. At least for me. That's so beautiful and so inspiring. Thank you for sharing about that. ⁓ it reminds me of an interview with Dr. Tony Nader, who's the global leader of the TM organizations and he has a book called The Power of Caring. And talks about just naturally from that level of consciousness expanding that our care expands out into the world. And what you this story you just shared is such a perfect example of that. I cannot wait to read that book. I've read his book, ⁓ Consciousness is all there is and it's it's amazing. And that goes back to spontaneous story action because I've learned of all the Effects of meditating, the effects that meditation, your meditation practice, have on the environment and the world and the people around you. You know, we're actually creating benefit for the environment around us, for the people around us, for people whose the effects of it we're not even going to see or fully grasp or understand, but just being in the environment creates benefit to the world. And so That's why I I feel like almost meditation practice is that form of spontaneous right action 'cause now I meditate and I meditate for myself, of course, but I also know that I meditate for something greater than myself as well. Like I meditate because I want the world to be more coherent and I want the world to be better and I want people to experience more bliss, less suffering and ⁓ so yeah. I just see how proud you are of her on your face, Greg. And it's so awesome to see. one last question for you guys. The inner well is the name of this podcast. What does that mean to you? You know, in in Strength and Stillness, and Bob Roth talks about this, and we talk about this in TM a lot, like w in in in the course of instruction, like, you know, the surface if you have the ocean and the surface of the ocean, ⁓ you know. You know, some days it's turbulent or more turbulent than others. This, you know, but there's a lot going on underneath. And so diving deep, like going down into the well, experiencing the self, pure awareness without thoughts. In doing that, you you experience this profound state of bliss, the state of healing, the state of well-being that you've never experienced before. The bottom of the ocean is completely still. And when you dive deep down into the well, down into the bottom of the ocean. You experience a break from the turbulence, just being bounced around by the waves and like the storms of life and all these things. And you can just get this reprieve. But what's beautiful is it's it's not just for the act of meditating. Like I think this is the biggest misunderstanding, and I think I think it's you know, it's a beautiful title. It's not just for the twenty minutes. If it was just twenty minutes, who cares? It's for what's happening outside the twenty minutes. You're literally, you have to understand this. You'll bring like for for any parent that's listening to this, you're bringing that peace from the bottom to the top. There's less turbulence. As we change within, our circumstances start to change. We start to make better decisions. We start to become more ordered, more coherent. And that comes from not the 20 minutes. It comes from what's what you're taking out of that 20 minutes and you're bringing into your life. And and that that is so nourishing and so life enhancing. I can encourage you. The sooner the better. Don't delay. Get into a course. If if you're struggling and if you're not struggling, learn T ⁓ It's a great title. I was just gonna say that like I I think it's really nice because you're just diving deep into that well and you're like bringing up that infinite source of well being. Like it's an infinite, endless well of well being and you're just bringing bringing it up into your life. You know how they have the like buckets and they're Pulling the buckets up with the rope and they they're able to get the water out and you're just doing that. Every time that you ⁓ you meditate, you're bringing up more of that ⁓ infinite source of consciousness and well being. Yeah. And there's evidence to it. Heart rate variability, you know, like everything starts to improve in your physiology. Like it's cool. Like as you start that's not just during meditation, like you become more adaptable, more healthy, more resilient in in your regular life, not just in those periods of of transcendence. Super cool. Great answer both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you both so, so much. This was such a joy to connect with you and thank you for sharing. Thanks for thanks for being interested in our story. We love sharing it. Thank you for having us. That's a wrap on today's episode of The Inner Well. Please subscribe and leave a review. Your support means the world and helps others find us. And if this conversation added something to your day, don't be shy. Share it with someone it might resonate with. Also, please follow us on social for more between episodes and send in your questions, your stories, or the topics you'd like to explore with us. We genuinely love hearing from you, and this podcast exists because of you. So keep showing up for yourself, and we'll see you next week.