I have no religious envy and quite frankly I don't see religious followers being any happier than non religious people. I was bought up Catholic and went to Catholic schools so I am well versed in religion and know a lot about the bible because if you didn't you would get the strap. A great way to handle ADD.
I see a whole lot of the world's problems being due to religion and that disturbs me.
A religion based on love and peace would make some sense to me but I don't need a group to make me happy.
Happiness has to come from within and I try to remove the things that make me unhappy and try to replace them with things that make me happy. We are here for a good time not a long time.
I don't meditate but I do do breathing exercise as suggested by the Heart and Stroke Foundation during a clinical trial I participated in to lower blood pressure by calming one's nerves. They hooked me up to a machine that reads your blood pressure every second then had me perform certain physically and mentally challenging tasks.
You could visually watch how stress affects your blood pressure. It was eye opening.
Then they introduced me to the 4-4-8 breathing method, which is a common form of meditation btw, and I could see that after a few breaths my blood pressure would rapidly decline to below my normal blood pressure. It was amazing to see it right before your eyes. The needles actually went down rapidly as you watched.
Anyways I do this 3 times a day 3 sets of 12 breaths and my BP has gone from quite high to normal and this is when I was still drinking heavily.
If you are interested in the mechanics of 4-4-8 breathing let me know and I will post it.