Author Archives: Brian B Baker

Unknown's avatar

About Brian B Baker

I write horror stories, review books, and talk about depression, and how I get through all of it.

Lead yourself to where you want to be.

Posted on by
Reply

We often see the person in the mirror as a differnt person than the one we’re living with.

We don’t see the person others see.

We ignore the accolades, pats on the back and the well dones.

We think that something may be wrong with these people. They can’t be talking about us, they don’t see us that way, they must some sort of defect.

What if we get past that and see ourselves as better than what we think of who we are? What then?

When we get past the doubt, hate and hurt of who we think we are and delve into the world of what everyone else sees, then we’ll be structuring our lives for better things.

Each day we have a voice in our head, but we can choose to ignore the doubt in our head and push through to the next moment.

Each moment in our lives is something we accept or ignore. 

If we accept the torture of hating who we are we’re finished, but if we choose to believe those around us, we can live the life we were always meant to live.

If you’re not living the life you want, what’s stopping you?

Why do you listen to the voice in your head?

Remember you control what happens in your life. You alone control the puppet strings.

Which way will you lead yourself? To greatness or mediocrity?

A Work In Progress

Posted on by
3

This is a guest post from my wife. She’s been practicing TM for three and a half weeks.

The Phoenix

When people make changes in their lives they often point to a breaking point, a specific incident that made them decide to make a change. For me, however, learning Transcendental Meditation (TM) is not about experiencing a breaking point, but about realizing I could no longer accept the person I had become.

Although I experienced some depression when I was younger, I was always able to overcome those feelings.

As an adult, I’ve had a difficult time doing this, and have been on and off various medications for the past six or seven years. I came to accept that not much made me happy even though I have a wonderful husband, who tells me how he feels more often than I probably hear, and two kids who love to play and laugh. Even painting and drawing that I used to love, would sit untouched for months because I didn’t find joy and satisfaction in it.

Over the past year, I’ve seen what TM has done for my husband, but kept telling myself that there was no way it would help me. After all, everything else I’ve tried has only been a short-term band-aid.

I have been doing TM for three and a half weeks, and can say I am starting to notice how 20 minutes twice a day can change how you view yourself, your relationships with others, and the world around you. Although I still take my medication, TM is helping me in ways a pill has.

I’ve been able to enjoy the time I have with my family. I don’t find myself getting as angry, or annoyed when my kids do something they should not do. I’m able to find the humor in things I previously ignored. Best of all, I feel better about myself, and who I am, than I have most of my adult life.

Everything is a work in progress, but with TM my hopes and expectations for the future are positive for the first time.

Breaking the Limits Of Who We Are.

Posted on by
Reply

We inspire, create and live by a set of limits placed upon us by those around us.

These limits define who we are, what we do and how we live.

When we get past these limits and realize we were taught wrong, it disrupts the life we had and can send us over the edge.

The most curious thing about TM is discovering things about myself I’ve believed since I was child. Things I was told by parents, teachers and school guidance counselors have turned out to be false.

I was told I couldn’t do something based on my grades, where I grew up or what I believed.

A few weeks after beginning TM, I had a revelation about my life and the limits I’d been taught.

This made me think about who I was and afterward I knew I’d discovered who I was and what I wanted out of life and it had nothing to do with the beliefs of those I’d been surrounded with as a youth.

I saw in those early weeks of TM my future self and where I wanted my life to go.

Our life is set by the limits of what we’re told, what we’re taught, but when we discover the falsehood of those limits and begin to understand there are no limits, it sets us free and helps us discover a part of ourselves we never believed could exist.

This part knows no limits, it accepts nothing but the absence of limits and when we choose to follow it, we’ll understand limits are placed to protect us from failure, but the greatest gift is to fail.

It’s only in failure we truly learn the mistakes we’d made and with learning we see the reason behind the failure and change things to never make the same mistake again.

Our life is short, but living without the limits placed upon us is the way to truly understand ourselves and our life’s failures.

When I saw the limits placed upon me, I knew something had to change and I’m beginning the changes.

The first was last week. By moving the blog to once a week I’m able to focus my energy to other things and break the limits of trying to complete two posts and maintain my other responsibilities.

In the next few weeks there will be minor things changed, but they will be negligible.

For next week I plan on having my wife—who’s been doing TM for a couple weeks already—write a post on the blog.

I’ll be doing other things with other types of media and will keep things going on the blog, but the posts will stay at once a week.

Transcendental Meditation, Blogging and Changing Priorities.

Posted on by
2

We see our creative side all the time.

It comes up in conversation when we least expect it, and sometimes, though not often, we find ourselves within the realm of finding writing and creativity that astounds us and amplifies what we believed in ourselves.

It’s been nearly a year since I began TM and though I’ve talked more about how it’s changed my life concerning depression, there is another way it’s changed me.

I’ve been writing a blog for 10 years, and though Delusions of Ink isn’t my first blog, it’s the one that I’ve been able to help people with and because of that the confidence I have in myself and my writing has grown.

A year ago I seriously thought I would stop writing.

I mean this seriously. I was going to delete my blog, all the stories I’ve written, the novels I’ve finished and quit writing.

When I began TM, and I began figuring out what I wanted to do with my writing, I never thought I would keep blogging, nor that I would help readers with their depression issues or have my blog featured on TM.org.

Writing is something I’ve loved since I was a child. I made up stories, wrote some of them down, but when I was in high school I began writing a lot more and somewhere between 18 and 22 I got lost and didn’t write.

After I quit college after my first year and spent more time reading, I learned to write again, though it was in baby steps.

I wrote a novel, though it was bad, and finished a second a year after that. But I haven’t finished a novel in a couple of years and I feel I need to do that.

I’ve written short stories, blog posts, but no finished novels. I’ve started a dozen or more, but I’ve always been stuck in the middle.

I started a novel shortly after beginning TM and it’s been sitting on my hard drive for too long and now that I’ve found my voice in blogging and have helped people find their voices through TM, it’s time to reduce my time commitments from Delusions of Ink for a little while and get some words on the page.

My reasons for this are many, first: I have day job commitments and family commitments which I must meet and along with plans to move in the next six months, finding the time to do all the things I want to this year while keeping my sanity will prove hard. I want to do at least a post a week, and more than likely will, but that’s all I’ll be doing.

I would like to thank all of my readers and especially the administrators of TM.org for their faith in my writing, especially when I had none, and for giving me a chance to help people with my words.

 

How Transcendental Meditation Helped Me Find True Happiness.

Posted on by
Reply

Being happy is of the utmost importance. Success in anything is through happiness. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Happiness is defined in many different ways. Each one of us defines happiness as something particular to ourselves and who we believe we are.

But, it’s only when we find true happiness we truly understand its meaning.

Our modern lives are filled with Starbucks, Wal-Mart’s and Target’s.

Some of us define happiness as that first taste of coffee in the morning. We only view it as such because we’ve never seen true happiness or we’ve seen “glimpses” of happiness.

Through our lives we see glimpses or fleeting moments of happiness, the birth of a child, our wedding day. These are only glimpses of true happiness. We don’t think about the moments which come after, and if we do we believe there will be bliss as there was in those moments.

We rarely think about the times when our child will be a teenager and we want to strangle them, or when our partner does something to upset the relationship.

The glimpses of happiness give us a perception of that exists only for that moment, but when we see everything later in our lives we may see how naive we were at that moment or how young we were in our thinking or maybe physically.

Happiness is defined as the moment you feel alive. The moment you’re happier than you’ve ever been and though the glimpse of true happiness is stuck in the moment, what would you do to attain true happiness?

To reach for that cup of coffee and it no longer has that wonderful taste, but everywhere around you things are brighter, you notice your wife’s smile in a way you never had before or you sit in the car singing with your daughter because she wants to.

Society defines happiness by monetary means, can you buy this car or that house, but remember you can’t take those with you.

Happiness is something else, it makes you think about the way you treat people, the way you look at the world and possibly, and more importantly, how you view yourself.

We walk through our lives looking for happiness. We strive for it every day. We yearn for the feeling of satisfaction in our lives, but there’s always something missing in the equation, something small, something we’ve overlooked…ourselves.

Happiness can’t be gained by monetary means, it can’t be bought, and most importantly, we must look inside ourselves and see who we are to discover true happiness.

We must look at the life we’ve led, the actions we take and the way we run our lives in order to find happiness.

The glimpse of happiness is only that, a small look.

I’ll be honest, when I first looked at myself after beginning Transcendental Meditation, I didn’t like the person I was.

I talked down to my wife and kids, and I didn’t know who I was or what I was put here for.

After the first week of TM I sat down with my wife, apologized for the person I’d been and asked her for forgiveness and if we could keep going.

She looked at me as if I had something growing from my skull. It was that look that made me understand all the pain I’d put her through and all the things I’d have to make up for.

The one thing I discovered about the relationship I’d had with my wife before TM is that she loved me more than I loved her, and I’m trying to make up for that.

Today I still feel she cares more for me than I care for her, but I’m trying to be a better man for her and for our kids.

Realizing you’re not who you believed takes you out of your comfort zone and makes you look at yourself in ways you’d never do without help.

Today, I’m the happiest I’ve been in my life. My wife loves me, my kids are monkeys climbing over me whenever they get the opportunity and my family is proud of the man I’ve become in the past year.

There’s more important things than those you love being proud of you, being proud of yourself matters more, and today, after all that has happened, I’m proud of who I am now and the only person I need to approve of my life is the one typing this. He’s the only person whose happiness matters at the end.

There is nothing that can change the way I acted before TM, but TM has taught me that every day is a blessing and that every breath and every choice we make creates a better world for ourselves and those around us.

I choose to live in the moment of now and live in the life I have not one that can be bought, because honestly, happiness is never bought, it’s earned through pain, hardship and stress and at the end of our lives we can look at the people we’ve made happy and those are the people who love us.

It’s only after nearly losing everything I found true happiness.