What's your origin story

Ironically, at the same moment you created this thread, a meditation friend and I were discussing this very same topic. My answer was that I was surrounded by rich people when I grew up and. despite their material well being, they were frequently unhappy and somewhat insane people. It sent me on a quest for happiness and sanity.

I was in grad school and was addicted to various substances. I hated being sober. I had an A&P that was triggered by doing DMT and I hadn't ever sat down to meditate at that point. I was blissed out and slept for 3-4 hours per night for several weeks and got a ton of work done. That series of events brought me to NA and they talked about meditation.  A few months later I sat down for the first time to meditate in a little corner of the grad student office I worked in before starting lab work for the day.

I'd always been interested in or involved in spiritual practices, sometimes quite seriously, but the sense that I urgently needed to solve a particular problem came when my dad died. He was a meticulous, organized, intelligent man, with all his ducks in a row, so to speak. And yet when he died, all the things I had been taught to value were revealed to be impermanent, broken, lost, empty. A bunch of other deaths and injuries occurred around the same time, and I was so afflicted I thought I needed to understand how to die well. I started listening to guided meditations, including some from Buddhist Geeks, and from there found Alan Chapman, whose teaching was a good fit until I felt called to Christianity, which he thought a bit silly. However, Christianity has been an even better fit than previous practices, and remains so despite conflicts with teachers, disappointments with peers and family, and all the rest of the plot twists that come up. The initial intention to die well turned later into a general intention to know divine light, love and wisdom (that's how I expressed it then) and is now largely a general intention that my every thought, word and deed be in accordance with God's will and for His glory and the salvation of souls, and a frequent begging of His mercy for all the miserable messes we all cause each other here in this life. 

I went with my parents to see Jesus Christ Superstar in 1974 at the age of seven. “Heaven On Their Minds” is still one of my favourite songs. I was horrified by and fascinated with the idea of crucifixion. I was deeply touched by the idea that this man/god died for my benefit. At the age of nineteen or twenty I decided that I’d been disappointed by god once too often, so I turned my back on it all. I’d also always been fascinated with anything and everything anomalous or mysterious; Ghosts, monsters, aliens, UFO’s, etc. These interests have endured all my life and it’s led me to seek answers about the nature of our existence. In 2003, I read Aleister Crowley’s autobiography and was motivated to seek out and join the Ordo Templi Orientis. I became interested in meditation and was fortunate to stumble upon MCTB and then Kenneth Folk’s website and AwakeNetwork. I’ve seen the dramatic changes in my life as a result of my practice and I’m profoundly grateful.

A full-blown Christian mystical experience intruded on my spiritually and intellectually dormant mind when I was 14 or 15. By 16 I had heard about psychedelics and explored those for a school year, culminating in an MDA-induced extended mystical episode that changed my life.

I stopped all drugs and smoking and lost interest (at 17!) in sex and had an image from a psychedelic episode of abandoning society and becoming a desert hermit, though I wasn't sure what they did. 

I read a book by Hermann Hesse (Glass Bead Game) in high school that mentioned meditation which sent me to the library. The second book I found was 3 Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau and half-way through had a conversion experience from my family's Protestant Christianity to Zen and Buddhism.

A few months later I dropped out of high school and made my way to the Rochester Zen Center, one of only 4 or 5 Buddhist Meditation centers in the country at that time with people flocking from all over.

Kapleau's insistence that enlightenment is possible in this lifetime by our own efforts set me stumbling on a life path.

Parents were into eastern spirituality & grew up around it.  At age 17 had sudden onset of mood disorder & spent 5 years treating with conventional means of therapy & medication.  At age 22 discovered pragmatic dharma, DhO, maps & noting technique.  Possibility of awakening as another, more impactful layer of healing was deeply inspiring.  Began noting like a madman & the rest went from there.

The human mind and psychology have been a big interest of mine since I was a child. I didn't end up going to study psychology, but when my friend invited me to participate in a meditation session, I found that meditation also spoke to that same interest, maybe even in a more profound way. It's so interesting to directly perceive how various mental constructions work and to have found out that there are deeper levels to the human mind than just thoughts etc. Taking an active role to change things for the positive in ones mind is also a big interest of mine and seems to be a pretty straightforward process through certain meditation techniques. I've had a very active imagination for my whole life and I think it is somehow linked to this interest to the human mind. It feels like there's a part of me that has known that there is infinite potential in the mind and it seems that going deeper into meditation practice is making the potential more visible.

I was always interested in the idea that the mind was territory to be explored. Partly that was down the the inordinate amount of sci-fi I consumed as a kid. Later I got interested in meditation and Budddhism but it never really took until after I ran smack into the combined wall of exhaustion, stress and depression, relatively late in life.

At one point I would have said that it was the crisis that provoked the flowering of practice but I can see now that really that happened afterwards - I'd already started meditating for better mental health reasons and the crisis was over but somehow this path thing was unfinished business. And then I fell into bad company, MCTB and AwakeNetwork and the rest is history. Well it's all history now

As a meditation super hero I now fight for justice and world peace by sitting still for an hour and a half each day. May I save all beings - from myself.

I like this thread, thank you Tom for coming up with it. It's inspiring to hear how people ended up on the spiritual/meditative path.

It was the year 2000 and the Sydney Olympics were being held. I was 23 years old and miserable, studying at uni, living with my grandparents in the city. I hated my life at the time and felt I was lacking everything I needed to be happy. Very depressed. On a visit to my parents' house in the Blue Mountains, my mum, who was into all sorts of new agey things, said to me that I should sit this 10-day meditation course that had a retreat centre 20 minutes drive from where they live. I thought, man, I don't want to sit there and go "Ommm"  and have to sit around dirty incense-ridden hippies (my thoughts at the time), but I relented as the misery was too great. 

I went to sit the next ten-day on offer and the light bulb came on, proceeded to explode, crossed the A&P on the 9th day, and ended up finishing uni within 6 months of that course, moving to the same retreat centre to work and build the new strawbale dhamma hall, and sit 6 more 10-day courses over the next year. I then ended up moving to India afterwards to spend a year there studying Pali at Dhamma Giri, the main Goenka centre near Mumbai. Got to do a lot of dhamma bumming in that year, hanging around Goenka, Munindraji, cobras slithering across the vipassana centre grounds, going on a yatra/pilgrimage with Goenka to Burma, becoming a monk under one of Goenka's favourite Burmese monks at the time for two weeks, doing my own pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, Varanasi/Sarnath, Kushinagar, as well as Sarvasti, and then across the border to Lumbini in Nepal, which was an adventure in and of itself. I was the classic dhamma nutcase. This is all within a year and a half of thinking only dirty hippies did meditation. 

After that, I spent some more time being a dhamma bum living at the centre then got restless, dark nighting hard unknowingly, gave up , returned gave up, (I rolled my mat up a number of times), suffered some more, then in 2008 I needed to unroll my mat again and return to the Dhamma. In my search for inspiration, while I was living in Chile at the time, I found the Buddhist Geeks podcast with Daniel, which led to the DhO, which led to re-focusing my efforts, which then led to doing my last ever Goenka 10 day at the end of 2009 (I'm now on their naughty list) and then all the craziness that followed with Dho, KFd and the scisms and the this and that. (End of stream of thought)

That's an origin story and a resolution story!   Good to "see" you Nik!

I suppose there was always too much unsatisfactoriness.  Other people seemed to cruise through life more easily, while I was struggling a bit more and at some level always "looking for a way out".

I was introduced to Carlos Castaneda in high school (at a conservative christian prep school no less, what are the odds) which kind of got me browsing that part of the bookstore.  Later, reading a few High Times magazines turned me on to people writing about psychedelics, which led to Ram Dass' Journey of Awakening.  I meditated one time because of that.

Got into Yogananda in my late twenties.  I had been laid off work, my girlfriend dumped me, I was sick, and I went to the local used bookstore where I saw Yogananda staring out at me (I recognized his image from the ads they used to run in the back of magazines).  It struck me as kind of interesting, "what exactly is a yogi's life about anyway?".  That book told me what I wanted to hear, that there was magic of sorts, and there was a way out.  I ended up meditating for about three months because of that.

Read a lot of Zen and dabbled for a couple of decades until I finally did a retreat and had a big A&P experience.  That sold me, but it still took a few years to commit to a daily practice.

Meditated in my 20's a significant amount, got married, kept practicing. Decided to step up practice after learning about pragmatic dharma and a couple years later something really good happened.  Life is better, but there still some territory to be discovered.