There is a way for you to optimize your health and heal your body beyond just medicine. Transcendental Meditation (TM) is a holistic approach to wellness and a natural approach to better health. Joining Juliet Clark to discuss the benefits of TM is Laurina Carroll, Ayurveda & Wellness Consultant and Transcendental Meditation® Teacher. She is also the author of Perfect Health for Busy People: A Maharishi Ayurveda Guide to Enjoying a Longer, Happier Life. Tune in as she dives deep on how TM impacts overall health and wellness to help you become more attuned with your body’s needs.

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Ayurveda And Transcendental Meditation For Holistic Wellness With Laurina Carroll

Before we get started, we have one of our very special authors to share with you. We are getting ready to go on to the rumble. For those of you out there who are rumblers, we have some information about how you access this. Don’t forget that this is the year of our magazine. Go over and grab your free subscription of Breakthrough Author Magazine, and you can find it at www.BreakthroughAuthorMagazine.com. Go over there. We have great contributors that will tell you a little bit more about the publishing industry, the things that you don’t know that you wish you had known or the things that you need to know going into the project.

Also, we highlight some of our great authors. Our author who’s with us is going to be one of our features in our April magazine as well. Our guest is Laurina Carroll. She is a certified Transcendental Meditation and Wellness Consultant who specializes in promoting a more natural approach to better health using transcendental meditation, yoga, diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes.

She has been seen on ABC, NBC, Fox, Associated Press, and MarketWatch, and earned a BA at the Maharishi Ayurvedic Medicine and a Master’s in Maharishi Vedic Science from the Maharishi University of Management. She has been practicing the transcendental meditation technique for many years and has been teaching it for some time. It’s great to have you, Laurina.

Thank you. It’s wonderful to be with you.

I’m excited about this because everybody is looking for those ways to chill out and stimulate creativity. Tell us a little bit about how you’ve got into this and where you see all this going.

I was 22 when I started transcendental meditation just as a practitioner, not any interest in being a teacher. I was in New York City, a student, was studying Acting and working very hard to afford my very expensive apartment there, which is a lot cheaper than it is now. When I learned, I didn’t realize how much anxiety and worry I had until I’ve got trained in this technique, and it reduced it. I was young and going in motion of how young people do and be busy. You have a hectic social life, work a lot, and go to school. These are what young people are doing.

I was overworked, stressed, and doing too much. No matter what age you are, there’s a limit. When I learned this technique, I felt an inner calm and peace that I had never known. It stopped me in my tracks. I thought, “I want more of this, and I’m going to continue to practice twice daily.” This transcendental meditation is the basis of Ayurveda, which I will go into. It’s so calming to the mind and the physiology that you practice it twice a day, and the benefits build on one another. I felt more creative and focused.

Transcendental Meditation: Transcendental meditation is the basis of Ayurveda.

I started to recognize that I was over-committing. My body is not a machine at any age, and I can’t keep going and going. My body was rejoicing in this level of rest that I was getting, so I continued to do it. About a year later, I met a friend who does transcendental meditation but he’s also big into Ayurveda into these other modalities of diet and lifestyle change based on Ayurveda, which is a 5,000-year-old practice of natural medicine. He introduced me to that.

For a couple of years, I kept meditating, reading books on Ayurveda, and training with different people around the country with top Ayurveda experts. I decided I wanted to become trained myself in doing post-diagnosis and consulting with people. For many years, I have been using Ayurveda Principles and showing that you don’t need to be heavily medicated.

I’m getting old. I don’t need to take any medications. I use herbs and a diet lifestyle. That’s how the journey started. I raised my daughter without any medications. It’s not that I am against modern medicine. I always want to let people know that medicine is part of our Ayurveda, so we want to honor and respect that. If you get into a car accident, you need doctors to put you together if you are all mangled up.

Sometimes, we need antibiotics, and sometimes we need medications but there is no denying that there is overused in this country that is unnecessary. I’m trying to teach people to go back to most likely what our ancestors did. I know both my Italian and Irish-English heritage have all different and more natural remedies for different things. If we go back far enough, we all have that within our own tradition and upbringing.

That is so true. I, myself, am pretty holistic. I stay away from drugs and doctors as much as I possibly can. It’s funny you said that because when my daughter comes to me with problems, she’s always like, “How did you know that?” It is something that my Irish side family that we pass down along the line. It’s a mom thing, too. Your daughter was a little bit sick. You mentioned to me that you use this as an organic healing modality for her.

Before I became an Ayurveda practitioner, I’ve got to put 2 and 2 together in the raising of my daughter. I go to the doctor to get my blood work and evaluations. I try to favor more integrative specialists but the insurance doesn’t pay for it. If you go to a regular doctor, you can get your blood work done and get things that are not as costly.

I recommend that even if you don’t want to go to a doctor each year and get your metabolic paneling and review it yourself. That’s how I started to realize that doctors didn’t know everything. They were not always right. You have to question them. There’s a wonderful book called, Don’t Let Your Doctor Kill You written by Erika Schwartz. I loved that book.

I haven’t gotten to read all of it because I have been so incredibly busy but I love the fact that it’s written by a doctor. She goes into saying that she was recommending things that were not good for her patients, the side effects, and the medications. She felt like she did damage to some of her patients and that doctors should pull back and try to use more holistic.

My daughter had a cold, and she was five months old. I wasn’t yet an Ayurveda practitioner. I took her to the regular doctor who gave her antibiotics but she spit them up, and she was not taking them. I was like, “What am I going to do?” When you are a young mother with a five-month-old, you are nervous. Somebody said, “Why don’t you take her to Dr. Lad, who’s an Ayurveda Physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and see what he has to say?”

He said, “You don’t need the antibiotics.” He gave her some herbs, which were disgustingly bitter. He told me to mix it with honey, and the honey did not cut any of the bitterness. It was the most disgusting thing I had ever tasted. She loved it. I felt intuitively that she was saying, “I’m not taking that junk.” She was born into this world in another dimension like, “Don’t give me that. Do you want to take that modern medicine stuff? Fine.”

Since then, I never needed to put her on antibiotics because we would try other things first. I say this to all doctors if it is life or death. When I go to speak to doctors, I say, “If I pass out and I’m dying, please pump me up with whatever drug you can to revive me.” That’s where modern medicine is good. It is in these very immediate situations where you need something quick, so I’m not against that. I joke when I speak in front of doctors because I don’t want them to feel bad about spending ten years of medical school. It is overused. I found that when my daughter was sick or when she would have a fever, I would breathe for a moment.

I had one friend who was a doctor but he was also a Maharishi Ayurveda physician, and I could call him. I had that advantage. I had some friends that were in the profession of Ayurveda but they were MDs. They would say, “If the temperature goes above this, you’ve got to rush to the hospital.” I knew what I needed to do to be safe. Often, even the over-the-counter, I don’t even own one over-the-counter. I don’t own any aspirin or Advil. I have natural things. It’s not like I don’t have pain once in a while. I broke my ankle but I didn’t take pain medications. That’s how it all evolved into being very strong against rushing to modern medicine and having herbal preparations.

It takes longer to heal sometimes, while the antibiotics work very quickly, so you have to be patient. Most people are not patient enough to use herbs, diet, and lifestyle when they get sick because it takes them longer and if they need to go back to work. They are used to that quick fix. There’s this whole movement of antibiotic resistance, people out there that have used antibiotics so much that whenever they do need them, they are afraid they won’t work, and so are the doctors. The doctors have to keep finding new antibiotics that will work. If I ever need antibiotics, I may have to take them once in a while. I would if I needed to if it was dire, and they will work for me because I have not taken antibiotics in 35 years.

Tell us about your book. Why did you write your book? Why did you feel this was important? Tell us also a little bit about transcendental meditation because there are quite a few celebrities who are using it these days.

Perfect Health for Busy People: A Maharishi Ayurveda Guide to Enjoying a Longer, Happier Life

We have Tom Hanks, Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and many stars. Dr. Oz has been doing it for quite some time and had his whole staff trained. Transcendental meditation is a 5,000-year-old technique but it was revived by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who also trained The Beatles personally. In the ‘60s, those people that are old enough that might be reading this have heard of it because it was very well-known back then about this technique to reduce stress, and that The Beatles were doing it and went to Maharishi’s Ashram.

Even at that time, Joe Namath had his whole football team learn and win the Super Bowl in 1969 when they were the underdog. It is all these kinds of great stories. He revived it 60 years ago, and now, we have a worldwide technique. In every country in the world, in major cities, there is transcendental meditation. That was Maharishi’s feat. He passed in 2008 but this comes from a beta tradition. It’s taught worldwide. People of all different backgrounds and religions do it. It’s a very simple technique to manage stress but it does have to be learned in a four-day class and is very personalized. That’s a little bit about the transcendental meditation part of it.

Let me get back to that for a second because one of the things you do is private teaching of it. When you and I talked, you said, “This is not something you can learn over Zoom.” Can you explain a little bit about that? Why do people need to seek out a professional like you and go in person?

People that are doing Calm or Headspace, or anything out nowadays will often be the first ones to call us. The reason is that they find temporary minor relief from their symptoms. For example, TM helps with acute anxiety because it reduces your cortisol. One twenty-minute sitting of transcendental meditation reduces your stress hormone by 30% to 40%. If you sleep eight hours, your cortisol gets reduced by 5% to 10%.

Doctors have looked at this research and said, “There’s nothing else that can do it. No other form of meditation can dramatically reduce your cortisol to that level.” That has been scientifically proven. We have 700 scientific research studies showing the efficacy of TM in all different areas of health, lowering blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, ADD, ADHD-focused, and all the things that we are talking about.

People that do these other techniques will attest to the fact that they don’t work as much as they need to. They will hear from a friend because we are very much referral-based, either their doctor told them because a lot of doctors are practicing it and recommending TM or they heard it from a friend. We are doing a Zoom platform but not for the first session to be trained.

That is a private one-on-one always, and that will never change. That is worldwide that way. The reason is, it’s personal and the experience can be so deep. Also, you want to have somebody there to help you with follow-up questions because if they have a question, they have nobody to talk to about it. It’s like groping in the dark, “They said to do this. They said to do that.”

The other thing is a lot of techniques are focused-based, and TM is not. Focus-based meditation might ask you to focus on a thought, mantra or word. There are a million different ones out there but that’s not allowing the mind to relax. You are staying on this surface level of the mind. With TM, you go beyond the surface and allow the mind to access the quiet levels. We call it the source of thought, and it’s also called the unified field. The mind has two functions. It has two levels. One level is that it likes to think, and people are like, “You have to stop me from thinking.” You can’t tell the heart to stop beating. That’s its function.

What we can do is slow it down so you can think more clearly. It declutters the mind, and you can be able to focus throughout your day more easily. This is why it’s not taught on Zoom. The first day has to be private one-on-one but you go home, have to practice, and do it twice a day on your own. Everybody that does transcendental meditation does it on their own twice a day, and you have the teacher for the follow-up.

Tell us a little bit about your book, where we can find it, and what’s next for you? Where can we contact you at? Are you in Chicago?

I’m in Chicago, so I’m teaching transcendental meditation in Chicago, pretty much mainly. I travel with my daughter in Sarasota as well. If people have private courses they want, I’m willing to travel for private courses, companies and families. If there is the possibility of somebody wants me to be their teacher, I can train them.

I wrote the book because it was very important for me to get information on how to improve your health that I didn’t feel was out there in one book. It’s not like anything is new in my book. Although if anybody reads it, they will find information that they have not found anywhere else. I give a general overview of Ayurveda and why transcendental meditation is the technique to choose.

I go into every other aspect of health you can imagine, from not eating GMO foods and citing everything scientific research. I wanted to do that, so people would understand that everything is grounded in science. If I’m talking about EMF, we have to be careful with our cell phones and Sick Building syndrome. Do we have mold? Do we have magnetic fields too high? There are so many reasons why people would get sick, and you may not know about it.

If you are not doing well and you are sick all the time, you do want to read the book and find out, “Is there something I’m missing? Do I have a house that has high magnetic fields?” A lot of these things can be done on your own or you can have the help of someone who is a professional in your area that might help you determine how healthy and safe your house is in terms of your health.

Transcendental Meditation: With Transcendental Meditation, you go beyond the surface and allow the mind to access the quiet levels.

 Where can we find your book?

It’s on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kindle. Almost every bookstore has it. It’s in print form. I will be doing an Audible, hopefully within a few months. There are a lot of opportunities for people to read it in different ways. Whatever is more comfortable for them.

What is the name of it?

Perfect Health for Busy People.

Thank you so much for being on, Laurina.

Thank you so much for having me.

 Important Links

• Laurina Carroll
• Perfect Health for Busy People
• www.BreakthroughAuthorMagazine.com
• Don’t Let Your Doctor Kill You
• Barnes & Noble – Perfect health for Busy People

About Laurina Carroll

Laurina Buro Carroll is a certified TM teacher and Wellness Consultant , who specializes in promoting a more natural approach to better health using Transcendental Meditation, yoga, diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes. Laurina has been featured on ABC, NBC, FOX, and Market Watch. She earned a B.A. in Marharishi Ayrvedic Medicine and a Masters in Maharishi Vedic Science from Maharishi University of Management. She has been practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique for 34 years and has been teaching it for the past 24 years.