Swapping Partying For Meditation.

If you have an interest in meditation, here's an article from the Times of London, about how a six week stay in a Buddhist Monastery in Bangkok changed her life.

My problems were different; they couldn't be fixed by simply sitting still every day. I needed intervention! A personal trainer! Oprah Winfrey! A hypnotherapist! But in the monastery, with no other option but to sit and at least try to meditate, I slowly found that I could sit for longer and longer, sometimes more than an hour. And I began to feel clean and refreshed afterwards, as if I had bathed in a cool sea.

My memory became sharp, and I could remember my chants, which impressed my old monk no end. I gradually stopped being angry with myself and starting feeling proud of myself. I saw strengths that I had never noticed before, and I stopped punishing myself with food and lost the extra weight naturally. I've never really been religious, and I was not attracted to Buddhism as a faith, but I felt that meditation allowed me to understand myself better and to find the right thing to do. Essentially, it taught me to listen to myself.