Stress busting
Transcendental meditation is a great way to tackle stress, author Bob Roth tells Liz Connor
It’s time to consider transcendental meditation
Billed as a simple and effortless technique that can diffuse negative thoughts and promote a state of relaxed awareness, transcendental meditation has become a go-to solution for more than six million people worldwide, with everyone from business leaders and scientists, to students and politicians giving it a go.
And with four out of five of us feeling stressed during a typical week, and some 12.5 million working days lost to work-related stress last year, it might be worth tuning in.
Bob Roth, one of Hollywood’s most sought-after meditation experts trained with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and counts Ellen Degeneres, Katy Perry and Russell Brand as fans, and he even taught Jerry Seinfeld to meditate (“Jerry told me that if he’d been meditating twice a day when he was writing Seinfeld, it would still be on the air”).
Now he’s written, Strength In Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation, which he says is a no-nonsense guide to the technique and how it works.
“Stress is a very real deadly epidemic. You can’t just blow it off by saying, ‘I’m just going to muscle through’, because it’s killing us. We mask it with coffee and alcohol, and we selfmedicate, but there’s no pill that will magically get rid of it,” he says.
According to Roth, the health benefits of building a daily practice of transcendental meditation are bountiful. Research funded by the National Institutes of Health suggests the technique could be the most effective mind-body practice for reducing stress and its related disorders, including hypertension, high cholesterol, stroke and atherosclerosis. “It’s been shown by research to reduce high blood pressure, risk of heart disease, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, eating disorders, bipolar disorders – basically any disorder that is caused or exacerbated by stress,” says Roth. “And on the positive side? You can experience more creativity, more energy and more focus.”
This growing field of scientific research, Roth says, is the reason
“You can experience more creativity, more energy and more focus”
why ‘TM’ (as it’s known) is now being offered in some schools, military bases and companies – the US defence department has reportedly just invested $2.4 million into a study on the effects of TM on PTSD in soldiers. If you’ve tried the popular Headspace app and mindfulness meditation before but didn’t get on especially well with it, don’t write off TM too soon. It differs completely from other forms of meditation, as it does not involve concentrating, or trying to empty the mind, or be really ‘in the present’.
Roth says it’s best to seek out a course with a certified teacher, who will guide you through personalised instruction and present you with a mantra to concentrate on (a meaningfree one, or two-syllable word that comes from the Vedic traditions of India). The TM technique involves repeating this mantra over and over, until all meaning melts away and the mind stills into a state of inner silence. Once you’ve mastered this, anyone can adopt the practice at home, ideally meditating for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night.
Roth is chief executive of the David Lynch Foundation (davidlynchfoundation.org), a charity set up by the celebrated film director, who has been practising TM for over 40 years. The non-profit organisation works with children and adults in the US, particularly those who are disadvantaged and at greater risk, to manage stress-related disorders that can fuel violence, crime and ill health, and compromise the effectiveness of education, healthcare and rehabilitation.
Now the foundation is launching a pilot in the UK with two schools in London, to illustrate the benefits of meditation on young minds. Researchers will measure the students for changes to attention span, stress levels and academic performance. Roth’s hope is that he can successfully roll out the practice to more schools across the country. “If adults are swimming in an ocean of stress, our children are drowning in it,” says Roth. “The child’s brain is sculpting the adult brain, so if they’re anxious and not sleeping well, it can become a bigger problem later in life. It’s just like we teach physical education; I think within two to three years, this is going to be part of school education. “n