One morning, more than a decade ago...

I woke up and realized that everything in my life had taken a wrong turn somewhere. I was unhappy in my job. My marriage was failing. I was depressed and living alone in the big house I had formerly shared with my family.

I felt I had lost my direction in life. On many days, I really didn’t care if I lived or died. Up until that point, my life had been going great. I had never experienced depression, and I didn't even know that that’s what was happening to me.  It took several friends, and even a few doctors, telling me that they thought I was depressed before I really believed it.

I tried the usual solutions, from self-help books to psychologists, psychiatrists, and even a whole array of antidepressant drugs, each of which just seemed to leave me worse off than I was before.

Eventually I ended up quitting my high-paying corporate job.  I got divorced. I sold my big house in the suburbs and moved into the city.

I changed everything that I could change, in a frantic effort to "turn my life upside down" in the hope that changing my circumstances would somehow reverse this slide that I was in. But the depression and fog continued. And I lived that way for nearly 10 years.

Eventually I gave up hope of ever recovering.

I thought I had somehow damaged myself irreparably, and I became resigned to living out my life in a haze of mental pain and physical lethargy.

Not surprisingly, during this time, my business began to struggle.  I had become a self-employed consultant after leaving my corporate job, and given my mental state, you can imagine that my productivity and motivation were not what they should be. I wasn’t bringing in enough new business.

Then the recession hit in 2008, and all my existing business virtually dried up overnight.Now I was in financial free-fall.

Over the next two years I gradually burned through my life savings, and I even went into credit card debt.  If I had gone any lower, I would have been living on the street.

But I couldn't bear the thought of going back to an office job. My depression was so severe that I felt I just couldn't imagine facing people every day.

I had truly reached a desperate point.

Previously, a few times over the years, I had tried meditation on the advice of friends and doctors. But it never worked.

And I was skeptical that it could work, because all the meditation instruction that I could find was mixed up with eastern religions or new-age mysticism. As a rational, scientific person, I was completely turned off by all that mumbo-jumbo.

But then I met a highly educated, intelligent friend who told me that he felt meditation made him “more rational.” Now this really intrigued me.  This was the first time I ever heard meditation described as anything more than a fancy way to chill out.

And when I reached the crisis point in my life, I remembered his words, and I decided to try meditation again.

This time I didn’t just look up some “how to meditate” web pages online, as I had before. You know, the kind of pages that have sanskrit writing and pictures of Hindu gods? Those hadn’t done much to inspire my confidence in the scientific benefits of meditation. This time I decided to do it right.

I got some meditation audio courses which were recommended by people I respected. Some were Buddhist, some were New Age, but there was enough solid content in each one that I started to see the common threads, and the more I listened, the more I could separate the woo-woo stuff from the real, practical, psychological techniques.

So I started making my own notes, in a notebook I called “Meditation for Atheists.”

In these notes, I distilled out the good stuff and left the religion and woo behind.

Over time, as I experimented, I discovered which techniques worked, and which ones didn’t. I even created some new techniques of my own. And all the while my “Meditation for Atheists” notes continued to grow and grow.

Then, amazingly, somehow during this process of intensive meditation, I found myself emerging from my decade-long depression. And once I started to see daylight, I doubled down on the meditation. I increased the time I spent meditating daily, and I continued to explore new techniques, and to mine the ancient traditions for techniques that made scientific sense. And now that I was starting to glimpse a way out of this hole that I had been in for 10 years, I began to get motivated again.

I knew I had reached a desperate point, but I still wasn’t quite desperate enough to go get an office job.   So I took a huge gamble, one last attempt to save my self-employed lifestyle, and I started a new business doing something that I loved.

I created a video training course for photographers, and I put it up for sale on a website that I built. And miraculously, it took off.  It quickly became profitable and soon was supporting me full-time.

And now that I was making money again doing something that I enjoyed, I started to emerge back into the normal life I had retreated from for so many years. I got a new girlfriend. I made new friends. I expanded my business.

I began to live life again.

I feel 100% confident that meditation was THE key element that helped me turn my life around. And you can be sure that I’ve continued the daily meditation ever since then.

Oh sure, sometimes I fall out of the habit, and when I do, I can feel myself starting to slip downward.  My mood, my energy, my perspective on life, my peace of mind, all start to erode when I stop meditating. And when I start up again, they all come back into harmony. And I’ve gone through this cycle enough times over the years to see it as further evidence that meditation really does work.

And that’s why I’ve created my audio program, Meditation for Atheists, for you.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard of the benefits of meditation, but maybe you’re skeptical, and maybe you’ve been turned off by all the eastern religion and new-age mysticism that usually comes packaged with it.

Well, in my audio program, I’ve taken all the best of the ancient and modern meditation techniques, and I’ve stripped out the religion, and stripped out the unscientific nonsense, so that I can take you straight to the good stuff. Just the stuff that works.

I want to help you experience the benefits of meditation first-hand, and I hope that meditation can change your life the way it has mine.

If you’re still skeptical, then I encourage you to download my Free Report: 7 Scientific Reasons You Should Be Meditating and How to Start Right Now.

That report summarizes some of the latest scientific findings—just the tip of a huge iceberg of research—that show conclusively that meditation can help with everything from anxiety to depression, to stress, to pain management, and even immune function.

And when you’re no longer skeptical, and you’re ready to get started with your own life makeover, then go ahead and download my audio program, Meditation for Atheists, and get started today.

~ Phil Steele