When I saw that a book about Transcendental Meditation (TM), written by a scientist, had landed on the New York Times bestseller list, my reaction was to quote the great Yogi of Berra: "It's déjà vu all over again."
In 1975, "TM: Discovering Inner Energy and Overcoming Stress" was propelled onto the list when its lead author, psychiatrist Harold Bloomfield, appeared on Merv Griffin's syndicated TV talk show (the Oprah of its day) with TM founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The book remained a bestseller for six months, and then had a solid run on the paperback list. During that period, Merv devoted a second show to Maharishi, and TM centers could barely keep up with the demand. By the end of 1976, over a million Americans had learned to meditate.
This was the culmination of a remarkable eight-year run that began when the Beatles famously learned TM and sojourned at Maharishi's ashram in India. Between that watershed moment and the two Merv programs, meditation moved from the counterculture to the mainstream, from weird to respectable, from youthful mind expansion to middle-age stress remedy. Now, the celebrity meditators were not rock stars but Clint Eastwood and Mary Tyler Moore, and you could not get more mainstream than the nation's big screen hero and its TV sweetheart.
The route from esoteric mystical discipline to respectable relaxation technique was paved by science. It started in the late '60s when a young meditator named Robert Keith Wallace was persuaded by his guru, Maharishi, to study the physiology of TM. The research became his Ph.D. dissertation, and then a Science magazine article in 1970. Wallace's follow-up study, conducted with Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, was published in 1971 in The American Journal of Physiology and Scientific American. The data sparked an avalanche of research. By 1975, a substantial body of evidence had demonstrated the efficacy of meditation on various measures of physical and mental health.
Now comes another psychiatrist, Norman E. Rosenthal, with "Transcendence: Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation." Once again, celebrity endorsements add pizzazz, in this case Mehmet Oz, David Lynch, Martin Scorcese and Russell Simmons, with cameo appearances by the gray eminences, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. And once again science confers credibility. Whereas Bloomfield was fresh out of his Yale residency when Merv Griffin showcased his book, Rosenthal has 30 years of distinguished clinical research and more than 200 scholarly articles under his belt. And by now TM has been the subject of over 300 peer-reviewed articles. The book describes the most recent findings, many of them involving common maladies such as ADHD, PTSD and hypertension, but not limited to medical conditions.
That meditation is good for you is no longer an eye-opening news flash. But the new book's bestsellerdom suggests that a new generation wants to hear the message. In this era of soaring anxiety, depression and health costs, perhaps the only people who don't think that's a good thing are the makers of pharmaceuticals.
As someone who has chronicled the transmission of Eastern spirituality to the West, I hope that this time around we can avoid some of the pitfalls of the past. As the title of Rosenthal's book "Transcendence," suggests, meditation is not just a medical intervention. The deeper purpose has always been the development of higher consciousness, as described in the Vedic tradition from which practices like TM derive. But when yogic methods become medicalized and their benefits quantified, they tend to get disconnected from their spiritual roots -- a loss for all of us.
Another consequence of the popularization of meditation was the rise of imitation practices. Health experts, self-help mavens and entrepreneurs did everything they could to de-Hinduize and de-Indianize the practice. Recently, we've seen a similar tendency as practices derived from Buddhism were secularized as "mindfulness." The advantage of this adaptation, of course, is that it makes such practices far more accessible. The downside is that something vital can be lost in translation, thereby diminishing their effectiveness. Modernizing the language is one thing, but tinkering with the ingredients of a meditation practice is not unlike changing a medical formula or a food recipe.
Finally, in the past, all forms of meditation were lumped together as if their differences were inconsequential. People who should have known better assumed that the initial TM data could be applied to just about anything that resembled meditation. That techniques practiced differently would produce identical outcomes defies logic, yet the premise was accepted on faith and promoted by both healthcare professionals and New Age promoters. Recent findings have corrected that mistake to a large extent, and current researchers are sorting out which practices produce which results under which circumstances.
The scientific investigation of ancient spiritual practices might be one of the most important advances of the modern era. But we have to proceed with care and discernment, assimilating the methods without obscuring or dishonoring their roots. If we get careless, we can dilute them, corrupt them and otherwise fail to harness their full potential. It's happened to some extent already, and it's happening as we speak in the trendy world of yoga studios, where complex and profound teachings are being reduced to fitness exercises. Rudyard Kipling's assertion that "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" turned out to be mistaken, to our everlasting benefit. But we have to make sure that East does not become West.
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Not sure what makes it work, but the proof is in the results for me.
Although, being delivered from the agony of debilitating migraines, without drugs, has changed my life for the better at every level.
number 7
1) Excellent de-stressor and tool for relaxation
2) Allows you to rest and store energy when your energy lags
3) Spiritually beneficial in that it allows you to experience yourself as a spiritual being.
4) Puts your brain in the "Alpha State" in which it is at its most creative.
There are many, many others I could discuss but I recommend it highly to my fellow Huffposters.
I care about what real people are doing to improve their health and I don't know anyone who admits to TM.
I have a concern about the commercialism that is interjected with serious discussion of different methods, including the labeling of some methods as imitation.
I see energy work as an individual journey where one type does not fit all.
I will never transcend with mindfulness meditation, but it relieves stress while just walking home from the subway. And I can teach it to others. I will likely explore more and even try TM, but not to the exclusion of other ideas.
The branding that extends to all facets of healthcare is a problem. I have never had a doctor suggest meditation. But that could change, with more studies of the benefits of simpler meditation. As an energy healer, I see the ramifications of stress on quality of life and the more that stress can be reduced, the healthier and less substance-dependent more people will be.
Lastly, in terms of convincing more people to try meditation, anything more closely related to spirituality is a harder sell. What branding has done for healthcare, religion has done for spirituality. So a generic, mindfulness meditation is more appealing to many than a spirituality based TM. Once people are more familiar with different forms of energy work, they are more willing to explore.
THEN, I run across websites run by people with Tibetan names, who portray themselves as authentic Tibetan Buddhism teachers, who exhort students who practice samatha to use as much effort as possible to keep seated, no matter what, and endure as much unpleasantness as they can possibly stand during meditation and when they can't stand it any more, stand up and walk around until they feel better...
...and I realize that anyone can *claim* to be an authentic meditation teacher of some tradition or other, but without some licensing authority, you're left trying to trust what other people decide to label themselves.
Thank you for the comment.
I believe that quality is important for the serious student, but I don't know enough to comment on that level of practice.
On a practical level, I think that something as simple as mindfulness meditation (MM) has a greater potential to do more good for more people for several reasons.
Many people do not like spirituality and will avoid spiritual practices. Some of this is due to religions who manipulate spirituality for political purposes. Thus meditation that is not spiritual will look more appealing to more people.
Spiritual practices also take more time and effort and thus are less appealing to people with busy lives. MM is also very easy to do, so people are more likely to do it and more likely to appreciate its benefits.
Medical institutions, at least in the US, are doing more and more studies on the benefits of simple MM. Thus, doctors who rely on scientific evidence are more likely to be open to MM and more likely to recommend it to their patients. MM has been shown to reduce stress and is easy to teach. Stress is one of the greatest causes of illness.
VERY importantly is that ALL meditation techniques will grow in popularity by the wider use of something as simple as MM. More people will want to learn more and will become more comfortable with spirituality, IMHO.
And TM instruction is free for the student in many circumstances. The David Lynch Foundation has sponsored meditation instruction for 200,000 school students so far, and is expanding its venues to include Indigenous Peoples (try convincing THEM to learn such a practice out of a book), as well as prison inmates (again, the book issue), military veterans suffering from PTSD (again the book issue), former child prostitutes living on the streets in Brazil (again the book issue).
I'm glad that you have found something that works for you, but the organizations that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi set up to teach TM were designed to be able to work on the scale that national governments deal with. For example, the school system of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has apparently placed all one million of its students on a waiting list to learn TM. Telling them all to read a book wouldn't be practical.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2009.01007.x/full
Higher psycho-physiological refinement in world-class Norwegian athletes: brain measures of performance capacity
http://www.tm.org/american-psychological-association
Abstract for the 2007 Conference of the American Psychological Association
Brain Integration Scale: Corroborating Language-based Instruments of Post-conventional Development
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12406612
Patterns of EEG coherence, power, and contingent negative variation characterize the integration of transcendental and waking states.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19862565
A self-referential default brain state: patterns of coherence, power, and eLORETA sources during eyes-closed rest and Transcendental Meditation practice.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10512549
Pure consciousness: distinct phenomenological and physiological correlates of "consciousness itself".
http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/content/46/3/267.long
Electrophysiologic Characteristics of Respiratory Suspension Periods Occurring During the Practice of the Transcendental Meditation Program
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7045911
Breath suspension during the transcendental meditation technique.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9009807
Autonomic patterns during respiratory suspensions: possible markers of Transcendental Consciousness.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10487785
Autonomic and EEG patterns during eyes-closed rest and transcendental meditation (TM) practice: the basis for a neural model of TM practice.
Spiritual and Material Values
"Every experience has its level of physiology, and so unbounded awareness has its own level of physiology which can be measured. Every aspect of life is integrated and connected with every other phase. When we talk of scientific measurements, it does not take away from the spiritual experience. We are not responsible for those times when spiritual experience was thought of as metaphysical. Everything is physical. Consciousness is the product of the functioning of the brain. Talking of scientific measurements is no damage to that wholeness of life which is present everywhere and which begins to be lived when the physiology is taking on a particular form. This is our understanding about spirituality: it is not on the level of faith --it is on the level of blood and bone and flesh and activity. It is measurable."
-Maharishi Mahesh Yogi