I remember very vividly the time when I was around eight years old during the Holy Week, which Catholics around the world observe, when my mother gave me a small booklet which depicted the Passion of Jesus Christ. It had drawings depicting His ordeal at the hands of his Roman tormentors, the forty lashes that He endured, the vile words and calumnies, the heavy cross he bore and his eventual crucifixion and death. I did not fully understand the meaning of all this but I felt intensely the pain that He must have felt and my mother said that He died for the sins of the world. These were concepts which an eight-year-old boy could hardly grasp but it caused me to go deep within myself and and I entered into a world which seemed so real to me. I was not aware of it as being my imagination but it felt like I was seeing Jesus being brutalized for my sins and I felt carried away in the feeling of pain and mental torture. that caused tears to well in my eyes and I found myself sobbing uncontrollably.

I was caught up in this pain and misery for quite a while and I carried on this quiet sobbing until I had no more tears to shed, and a calm feeling came gradually over me as if something had been lifted from my chest. This was my first foray into the world of the mind and it showed me in a powerful way how it could affect and control the way that we feel. I realized that while I was in that state, I could not help but feel the sorrow and passion which I imagined Jesus Christ felt two thousand years ago.

The mind is a powerful thing and the ancients have realized this and devised various forms of meditation to try and make sense of the world beyond the obvious and the material. While what I had experienced could hardly be called meditation, hysteria might be a better word for it, the whole episode left a very lasting impressions on me.

We know now that meditation can help to calm the mind and contribute to our mental health. Many forms of meditation have been suggested and many methods and processes have been devised. There is a general agreement that meditation has a direct and powerful influence not only on the psychological aspects but also on the physical and physiological processes which could be characterized as beneficial to both the mind and the body. Physical health and mental health therefore can be attained from meditating on a daily basis.