The true way to calm? We try it
Meghan is a fan – as are burnt out chief executives – but can a Hollywood guru persuade sceptic Judith Woods that meditation is the key to calm?
The man who taught Oprah transcendental meditation is due to arrive any minute at the offices of his London publisher. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking because I am, too. Of all the US exports surplus to British requirements, transcendental meditation comes somewhere between chlorinated chicken and Scientology.
And yet, Bob Roth’s client list reads like a Who’s Who of not just the rich and the famous, but the savvy and successful – Ellen Degeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, Michael J Fox.
We’ve all just learned that Meghan Markle regularly practises a not dissimilar kind of meditation – “I’m meditating every day, twice a day, it’s wonderful. Once in the morning for 20 minutes, once in the afternoon,” she wrote to her instructor – and judging from her effusive walkabouts and calm air ahead of her forthcoming nuptials, it seems to be doing the trick.
Roth, meanwhile, is best buds with Stella Mccartney, Katy Perry and Hugh Jackman; they all rave about him so much on the dust jacket of his new book Strength in Stillness, that I’m genuinely worried that he will turn up barefoot. I tell him so and he laughs with recognition.
“When I went to Tom Hanks’s house, he opened the door, looked me up and down and this expression of relief just spread across his face,” smiles Roth. “He said, ‘I thought you’d be wearing yoga pants and a man bun’. But that sort of woo-woo stuff is really not me. I’m a born sceptic, I’m all about the science – and it has been scientifically proven that transcendental meditation works.”
Roth, 67, looks more like a CEO on dress-down Friday than your average empty-your-mind-andwallet guru. This is quite apposite as Roth is CEO of the New-yorkbased David Lynch Foundation, a scrupulously non-profit organisation that he and the film director set up 13 years ago in a bid to make transcendental meditation (TM) available, without cost, to inner city schoolchildren, death row prisoners, women’s refuges and homeless shelters.
The foundation, which has taught 600,000 people and operates in 35 countries worldwide, has just set up a base here in the UK. All profits from Roth’s book will be ploughed straight into two pilot schemes in London, where TM will be taught at secondary schools in Southwark, as well as a primary school in Islington.
The technique involves twice-daily 20-minute sessions. A trained teacher gives students a personal mantra – a word or sound that has no meaning – and they learn how to “think” it, silently. It differs from more recent mindfulness techniques in that there’s no suppression of thoughts, counting breaths or visualising. Roth is confident that the results – greater energy, improved mood, increased self-confidence – will speak for themselves.
“We live in an epidemic of stress and there is often nothing we can do about our stressors because life is tough – but we can change how we react to stress,” he says. Practitioners report feeling
“restfully alert”, able to cope better, react faster and think more clearly and with increased creativity; our brainwaves change when we do this sort of meditation, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been found to drop by 30 to 40per cent.
Tall, lean and charismatic, Roth glows with bonhomie. And, crucially, he possesses a sense of humour, laughing when I mumble that “transcendental meditation” sounds – no other word for it – a bit poncey. “It’s a very ancient practice,” he says. “But does it suffer from a horrible image problem? Yes. Mention transcendental meditation and [people] roll their eyes and treat you like a nut job.”
In the US, the Department of Defense has invested $2.4million (£1.7million) into a four-year study of TM for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, while the National Institutes of Health has awarded more than $26million to research the effectiveness of TM for reducing stress-related illnesses, with a focus on cardiovascular disease.
“You don’t need to eat kale and affect a certain lifestyle for transcendental meditation to heal,” says Roth. “It is a powerful, profound intervention whether you are a troubled child or a burnt-out executive on Wall Street.”
Roth was born in Washington DC and raised by his doctor father and mother, a teacher, along with his three siblings. He had ambitions to become a US senator before deciding that education was the best way to change lives. Stressed out by insomnia during his exams at Berkeley in his mid-20s, he discovered TM. It marked a personal epiphany; after graduating, he went on to study TM with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who introduced the Beatles to meditation. Ringo Starr and Paul Mccartney still practice TM and are generous supporters of the David Lynch Foundation, having played a benefit concert for the charity.
For Roth, who has never married, TM has been his life’s mission for the past 45 years, although these days, his primary role is raising funds and awareness. “It’s the high-profile people who subsidise the rest and generate publicity – but let me assure you, a 10-year-old kid from the Bronx gets exactly the same tuition as Oprah did. There is no VIP programme.”
After he taught Oprah, she paid for the staff in her extensive empire to be taught as well. Michael J Fox, who has suffered from Parkinson’s for 27 years, discovered that from the very first session, his shaking stopped during meditation.
Certified TM teachers in the UK charge on a sliding scale depending on income. The non-profit organisation Transcendental Meditation charges from £590 to £2,900 for the course, although those unable to pay those rates are encouraged to discuss their situation with the teacher. The instruction is one-to-one and takes place over four consecutive days. The first session is 90 minutes, thereafter it takes an hour. The fee covers you for a lifetime’s support.
Roth offers to teach me TM and I feel humbled – not because Meghan Markle meditates or because he taught Oprah, Martin Scorsese and Lena Dunham, but because, while it would be easy to dismiss it as another Hollywood wellness fad, this is a pursuit that really does do good.