A feeling of 'calmness in the mind'

What does meditation feel like? East Auckland star real estate agent Dave Hilliam does transcendental meditation for 20 minutes, twice a day.

"I just sit in a comfortable seat, sitting up, with my eyes closed. You can also do it in a train or a car," he says. "It's a totally effortless technique. You think your mantra very faintly in your mind."

In TM, the mantra is a word taken from Vedic tradition chosen for individuals by their teachers, and they are supposed to be secret. They apparently range from the famously ridiculed "om" to the likes of "kirim", "shiam" and "ima".

Says Hilliam: "If the mantra was, say, "tree", you'd start by thinking "tree" and then go down to "tr", then you'd go to a feeling, a vibration. It's the vibration of the mantra and the fading of it which creates the settling effect in the body. The breathing slows down. You don't ignore your thoughts - you don't force them away, but take the mind back to the mantra."

He says his senses are heightened during meditation, and his body feels light, detached.

But every meditation is different: "Sometimes it's just very still, sometimes a lot of thoughts come into the brain, sometimes you feel you've distanced yourself from the body. I get bubbles of happiness during and after. Before I used to meditate, my mind was always chattering. There's now a calmness in the mind."

In the past, his response to stress was aggression. "I'd push people into sales that I should not have. Now, they want to buy from me. They follow. The natural enthusiasm that meditation gives me creates sales."