About Maina Petry
For four years, nothing worked.
After my divorce, I stopped sleeping. Two hours a night if I was lucky, most nights less. I’d lie there watching the window get light, doing the math on how many hours I had before I’d have to get up and function on nothing.
Then the pain started. Then anxiety, then depression. I went to the doctors. I did the therapies. I tried every meditation app there was. Nothing held. I’d get a good week and think it was turning, and then I’d be back to two hours a night.
This was four years of my life.
The one place I got any relief was the country, with the horses. Something about being in their presence quieted the drama in my head. But it never followed me home. By the time I got back to my room, I was exactly where I’d started, already dreading the night.
Something big happened in that first meditation and I didn't have the words for it. I later learned what it was. I had transcended.
Within three months, I was sleeping eight hours a night. That one I watched come back. The rest I couldn’t put a date on. The anxiety left while I wasn’t paying attention. I found out it was gone by noticing I’d walked out the door without the usual production of talking myself into it.
The practice also cleared something older than the divorce, a voice that had been running my thoughts for as long as I can remember, narrating everything I did and finding it not good enough.
For four years I'd assumed something in me was broken. It wasn't. I'd been carrying more stress than my body could release.
That was years ago.
My life is different now.
And I still meditate twice a day.
Life keeps improving in ways I didn’t ask for and couldn’t have predicted. For years I was surprised whenever anything got better. Now I expect it.
What I didn’t expect about teaching is how much I’d get to see. People come in stressed, not sleeping, worn down by things they’ve carried for years. Then it starts to change. Their sleep comes back. They make decisions they couldn’t before. Life gets lighter, more enjoyable. They start telling me the same thing I once understood myself: nothing was ever wrong with them.
That’s why I teach. Someone did this for me when I’d run out of options, and now I get to pass it forward.
Maina Petry trained in the Shankaracharya tradition, one of the great wisdom lineages of ancient Vedic knowledge. This meditation practice has been passed down, teacher to student, for thousands of years.
She has been teaching in small groups in the Detroit area for four years, and offers lifetime support after the course.
If you want to learn this practice, here's where to start.
Writing on what happens when you close your eyes, and what happens because you do.