What does the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a native of India, have in common with Florida resident Val Shanaberger?
Maharishi, as his devotees call him, introduced America to the ancient technique of transcendental meditation. T.M. is a stress-relieving technique that has practical applications in business and most other walks of life.
Shanaberger, in turn, is an experienced yoga instructor for Lifestyle Family Fitness and teaches her students how the practice can relieve stress and help them to focus on their goals. "It helps the practitioner understand themselves," she says. The result is that they can get in touch with "what is going on inside, and how to let go of what needn't be held."
Letting go of the horrors of war is not an easy task for soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or P.T.S.D. Yet, it is necessary before they can adjust to civilian life and return to the workforce.
John Zisman is a transcendental meditation teacher in Florida and used the technique in his real estate business. "I was in real estate sales and investment for over 20 years," he says. "T.M. helped me to stay focused, feel refreshed and gave me that edge to succeed through clearer thinking and feeling less stress and pressure." Zisman is participating in a national outreach to help soldiers with P.T.S.D. "The TM program, in concert with Operation Warrior Wellness, is making available a personal improvement program called "Transcendental Meditation" to 10,000 vets who suffer from acute P.T.S.D.," he says.
In December, Operation Warrior Wellness held a fund raiser in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Clint Eastwood, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Katy Perry, Russell Simmons, Donna Karan and Russell Brand -- all T.M. practitioners -- were among the celebrity speakers. Filmmaker David Lynch, who also practices T.M., and the David Lynch Foundation hosted the event.
According to a July article in Military Officer of America, Dr. Richard Miller, a clinical psychologist in Sebastopol, California, studied the use of yoga as a potential treatment for P.T.S.D. He treated several patients with a yoga regimen at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. "The trend we saw was very favorable in the direction of decreasing the participants' P.T.S.D. symptoms," he said.
The article also cites T.M. as another alternative treatment for P.T.S.D. It quotes Sarina Grosswald, president of SJ Grosswald & Associates, a medical consultant in Arlington, Virginia. "T.M. addresses not just the mental issues of P.T.S.D., but also the physical problems that accompany stress disorders, including hypertension and heart disease," she says. "There are many years of research showing the effectiveness of T.M. in reducing stress and anxiety and improving well-being and mental outlook."
Meanwhile, yoga instructor Shanaberger says, "Yoga is a way of life." She says that it is a way of "embracing and giving from the beauty within the heart of seeing all things -- good, bad or ugly -- as one amazing journey of being human."
And Yoga Warriors International is accelerating the journey by opening up chapters around the country. The organization began in 2005 in West Boylston, Massachusetts. According to the organization, the yoga methodology was studied and approved for P.T.S.D. by the United States Army Institute of Surgical Research at the Brooke Army Medical Center.
"In a yoga practice, you are challenged on the mat, both physical and sometimes mentally," Shanaberger says. "Meditation is a powerful tool of focusing on where you wish to be."
I started practicing yoga and T.M. 40 years ago when I was in business. Unlike other types of meditation, T.M. teachers call it "effortless and innocent." I do it twice a day for 20 minutes to remove accumulated stress and relax. On the other hand, I try to take yoga classes two to three times per week. It makes my 70-year-old body more limber and less arthritic, and I feel healthier.
I recommend both T.M. and yoga for businesspersons, veterans, high achievers and anyone else who wants to make life more enjoyable.
Jerry Chautin is a volunteer SCORE business counselor, business columnist and SBA's 2006 national "Journalist of the Year" award winner. He is a former entrepreneur, commercial mortgage banker, commercial real estate dealmaker and business lender.
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I suffer from PTSD and meditation has worked wonders with the stress, fear, panic attacks and sleep problems. I also started taking medication and that has helped as well....but meditation sems to give me more control over my life and is a way to heal.
My hope is that the word gets out about the Transcendental Meditation technique. It is so easy and you begin to experience the benefits right away. It is so amazing that something so simple can produce such concrete improvements in such a short period of time.
One great side benefit is that as a result, it restores your faith in life in general.
What is Lynch worried about? He has a lot more money than the small production company making the film, and because of the attempted suppression the film has only been released in Germany, but you can get it from amazon.de: http://amzn.to/hwyayy. You can use the same userid and password as on amazon.com, and can use Google's translation service to help you: http://tinyurl.com/4hdxuox. However Google can't translate images so the best thing to do is to start buying something on amazon.com and follow along with the process on amazon.de.
Sieveking obtained behind-the-scenes access to film a meeting between the Great King ("Maharaja") of the World and his subordinate Kings ("Rajas") of the various global regions. When an attendee started criticizing the Great King the attendee's microphone was cut off and Sieveking was asked to leave the room. Lynch doesn't want that footage in the final cut.
Sieveking then began to investigate under the covers of the TM organization's publicity facade and came up with some very interesting stuff. Here's an example... This (http://ti.me/fzO43Q) is a Times Magazine article on the event, and this (http://bit.ly/gw6daI) is a video of the event, some of which appears in Sieveking's film. That's the King of Germany (actually the "Invincible King of Invincible Germany") promoting a Tower of Invincibility (http://bit.ly/e75bCb). Here (http://bit.ly/eRRnb8) is a picture of what it would look like. Once populated with "yogic flyers" (http://bit.ly/ehG99E) it will make Germany invincible against any enemy. The King of Germany comes of very badly in the footage.
I suggested she learn the Transcendental Meditation technique from a Certified teacher. She learned TM and only a few days after taking the course she told me: "I've started and it puts me into a deep state very quickly. I never would have guessed it, but when I come out of it, I can really feel it."
I think this unfortunate claim comes from an unfounded fear of what lies deep within us all—from not knowing the essence of our own existence. TM practice leads to the experiential knowledge that deep within human beings is a field of pure goodness, peace, and order. TM is a way of getting to that innocent field. When you transcend in TM you're tapping into that, and it can only have positive effects.
This strange assertion, that practicing Transcendental Meditation can induce some kind of harmful effects, is debunked here:
"Myth #9: Meditation can have bad side effects and make you go crazy!" http://meditationasheville.blogspot.com/2010/12/myth-meditation-can-have-bad-side.html
The stale old "cult" accusations are dispelled here:
"Myth #7: Yikes! It's a cult!"
http://meditationasheville.blogspot.com/2010/12/myth-yikes-its-cult.html
And for what I consider a more balanced view of Tanaats' Website:
http://skepticsontm.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-suggestibilityorg.html
After 3 months of doing this oh, so easy, relaxing practice, i found to my astonishment that a life- long
depression was Gone...it was like finding the Light at the end of a very dark jungle for me.
Stress cannot stay when one does TM...my daily Joy today is beyond words....TM is the most researched technique in the world...results are enlightening for scientists and esp. meditators.
Even so, many of us TM’ers pick and choose what we want to get out of TM. For me, 20-minutes, twice per day is my only choice. Additionally I get “checked” periodically. It is free to practitioners and fine-tunes my practice.
If TM releases stress, and nothing more, that is reason enough to embrace it. Everything else is an unfortunate distraction.
Jerry Chautin
HuffPost Blogger
Business Columnist
SCORE Volunteer Business Mentor www.score.org
http://tenonline.org/sref/jc1bio.html
The Natural Law Party was an experiment in changing public dialogue, which can use all the help it can get. It is understandable that Yogic flying can raise stereotypes and prejudices when people haven’t investigated the depth of transformation in human consciousness it brings. I met Andy Kaufman’s sister, who was fine with the organization.
Re Wiki, consider the often hidden source of slurs you find on the Internet. When I wrote my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, I studied the response of policy makers to research showing 75% reduction in war deaths in 1982-83 in Israel when a group was of sufficient size relative to the population. 75% is an unheard of level of result for any intervention. Consider what that means.
I observed attacks on the research being full of lies, innuendo. Of course, people can have prejudices or feel weird about something new. A political science professor said, however, that the theory had enemies because people didn’t want an alternative avenue for funding – large funding.
One has to ask, “what are the motives?” Research on Transcendental Meditation has repeatedly shown that it is a public good. I suggest skepticism re ill-founded slurs.
How is it that the practice of this simple mental technique is giving Vets back their life? It is because they have an innate healing capacity that is being tapped with the practice. The mind and body are very intelligent.
you may have your beliefs about the TM organization, but it appears your assessment is from a distance and doesn't rely on first hand account. your picture of it seems skewed compared to how i know it, which IS first hand.
i think your representation of Hagelin's "beliefs" are over simplified. maybe you should acknowledge that you are representing your OWN beliefs in this comment, not his. yogic flying is not about making the U.S. invincible from "the power of their minds." it's a form of yoga in motion and is about stirring the field of order that resides in the underlying depths of everyone and everything, a process which has been shown to have a measurable positive influence on crime rate and other social indicators. see the current article on Hagelin and unified field theory: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeanne-ball/collective-consciousness-meditation_b_822288.html
the non-profit TM organization is a noble, altruistic collection of people, and is doing a lot of good for people, and only good that i can see. as this article testifies.