A growing number of business executives are turning to the Transcendental Meditation program to increase alertness, eliminate stress and fatigue, and enhance their creativity, according to a new article in the May 9 issue of Business Insider.
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CLICK HERE to read this article:
“14 Executives Who Swear By Meditation”
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Business Insider is a U.S. business/entertainment news website whose original works are often cited by other larger media outlets, such as the New York Times and National Public Radio. The site provides business news and analysis and serves as an aggregator of top news stories from around the web.

From the earliest days of his teaching around the world, beginning in 1959 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spoke often of the positive, peaceful global transformations that would naturally result when as little as 1% of the world’s population practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique.

Then in 1975, the results of the first scientific research were announced, which found a statistically significant reduction in crime rates in 12 American cities when the threshold of 1% of each city’s population practicing the TM technique was reached.

The news confirmed Maharishi’s prediction, and launched a new phase of his work to bring enlightenment to the world through Transcendental Meditation.

“We are declaring in all confidence, on the basis of the subjective experience of millions of people in the world, and on the basis of objective verification from the different sciences, from all the hundreds of experiments performed in the fields of physiology, psychology, sociology, and ecology, that all the various aspects of life are enriched and developed through the practice of Transcendental Meditation.

“When the body becomes better, the mind becomes better, the behavior becomes better. With this orderly brain, a few people—one percent, half a percent—moving around in the city can improve the trends of life. It requires only a few people, just a few people! What do those few people have to do? Fifteen minutes morning and evening less gossip and close the eyes; fathom the depth of unboundedness deep within one’s own consciousness. Realize that fullness of life, that wholeness of life, that level of enlightenment which is kindled within, deep within everyone’s heart. Unfold that, experience that, and that is enough to make the whole day more orderly–life in orderliness; life in accordance with all the laws of nature.”

“…the nature of life is to grow. Ninety-nine people can violate their own nature to grow and maybe weave around non-growth. One man, having a desire to evolve, having a desire to progress, having a desire to grow, by nature, he’ll take up Transcendental Meditation. On that basis, he will start producing a harmonious influence around him. Without knowing how he does it, without knowing the mechanics of how the radiations go from a more orderly mind to influence the less orderly minds around him, without knowing it, invariably he’ll be producing a harmonious influence in the whole society. Then the whole society will find a trend in the direction of evolution.

“What is necessary is just a small area in the whole room to become lighted and the whole room becomes lighted. What is a bulb? It is a very small filament. How much is that in relation to the whole volume of the room? It’s a very insignificant area. Yet it becomes lighted and the whole room becomes lighted. One simple, single individual brain becoming a little bit more orderly—how much more orderly could one become in fifteen minutes, with all the chaos and disorderliness of the whole day?—but that little orderliness increasing in the mind of an individual is good enough to radiate its influence. One small filament becoming lighted is enough to light the whole room.

“Like that, one person, one slightly enlightened person, is good enough for the whole society. It’s a blessing for the whole society.”

–Maharishi, January 12th, 1975, from the book, Enlightenment to Every Individual, Invincibility to Every Nation.
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Note: In 1976 Maharishi brought to light the TM-Sidhi program, an advanced program of the Transcendental Meditation technique. In the intervening years, research found that the practice of Transcendental Meditation and the TM-Sidhi program created maximum brain wave coherence and increased the power of the positive influence on the meditators’ surroundings that resulted from their experience of transcendence. Research also found when the TM and TM-Sidhi program was practiced in groups that the positive effect on the surrounding was so greatly increased that it was predicted that as little as the square root of one percent of the population would be needed to create a powerful influence of coherence for the population.

Over the years Maharishi inspired the establishment of large groups of experts practicing the TM & TM-Sidhi program together in groups. An example is the large group practice of the TM and TM-Sidhi program that takes place each day at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.

The 25,000 sq ft. golden domes at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa provide a setting for the entire university community to collectively practice Transcendental Meditation and the TM-Sidhi program.

More than 130 military and governmental leaders and medical researchers gathered on May 3rd at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C. for a national summit on “Resilience, the Brain and Meditation.” The meeting investigated the extensive scientific evidence and clinical experience using the Transcendental Meditation technique to promote resilience and overcome post-traumatic stress disorder among active-duty military personnel, veterans, and cadets.

The Summit was sponsored by Operation Warrior Wellness, a division of the David Lynch Foundation, and hosted by Candy Crowley, the Emmy Award-winning host of CNN’s “State of the Union with Candy Crowley.”

W. Scott Gould Deputy Secretary Veterans Administration

Speakers included W. Scott Gould, the deputy secretary at the Veterans Administration; Dr. Richard Schneider, the 23rd president of Norwich University, the oldest private military college in the country, where Transcendental Meditation is being studied as a tool to promote resilience among cadets; Norman Rosenthal, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School and author of the New York Times bestseller Transcendence: Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation; and Col. Brian Rees, M.D., M.P.H., Command Surgeon, 63rd Regional Support Command.

The Summit received considerable media coverage. Click on the link below to see the story that appeared in the Washington Post.

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“VA Testing Whether Meditation Can Help Treat PTSD”

• The Washington Post (May 4) FULL STORY

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Dr. Richard Schneider President, Norwich University

The Washington Post’s article about the summit included the following highlights:

“The reality is, not all individuals we see are treatable by the techniques we use,” Gould said at a summit Thursday in Washington on the use of TM to treat post-traumatic stress suffered by veterans and active-duty service members.

By some estimates, 10 percent of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan show effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, numbers that are overwhelming the department.

Norman Rosenthal, M.D.

“Conventional approaches fall woefully short of the mark, so we clearly need a new approach,” said Norman Rosenthal, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University’s medical school. Rosenthal told the gathering that TM, a meditative practice that advocates say helps manage stress and depression, is “possibly even a game-changer” in how to treat PTSD.

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Dr. John Hagelin, President David Lynch Foundation

In this recent video, Dr. Mehmet Oz describes the influence of the Transcendental Meditation program in his own life and the lives of the members of his creative team.

Dr. Oz is the vice chairman of the department of surgery at Columbia University, and the founder of the Complementary Medicine Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Oz has been named to numerous “best doctor” lists, including Healthy Living Magazine’s “Healers of the Millennium” and Hippocrates Magazine’s “Doctors of the Year.” Dr. Oz also appears daily the Emmy Award-winning, The Dr. Oz Show, a national television program focusing on medical issues and personal health.
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EXCERPTS FROM THIS VIDEO BY DR. OZ:

“Literally the day after people learned to meditate, I started getting some remarkable emails and having some amazing conversations that really surprised me.

“The first thing I noticed was a change in the tone and the texture of the dialogue—away from dwelling on problems towards a much more thoughtful, insightful, clever way of solving problems. Instead of highlighting the issues that were separating us, my team was deriving bliss and joy from finding solutions.

“Why did Transcendental Meditation have such a dramatic effect?

“The creative folks on our team can get pushed so hard from the pressures of their job that they find it difficult create. Sound familiar? This is probably true for most everyone. It’s frustrating to know you can create and yet not be able to do so because of stress.

“Transcendental Meditation allows you to relax deeply, to let down your guard so that you’re free to see reality in a much clearer way. You’re able to connect pieces of information that otherwise were not obvious to you. This is what the calmness and deep serenity that you experience during Transcendental Meditation does.

“Speaking as a scientist, the amazing thing about Transcendental Meditation is the very well established research showing that the technique impacts things that we didn’t think were changeable. You can actually reduce your blood pressure significantly with just using Transcendental Meditation. You can also reduce cholesterol, atherosclerosis, obesity, risk of stroke—even reduce death rates due to cardiovascular disease.

“But this is the tip of the iceberg. We all have within us a deep well of creativity, which we can access if we can settle down into those deep, calm places, those serene moments that Transcendental Meditation offers. As a result, we feel better about ourselves, we make better health choices, we communicate better with our loved ones, our colleagues, our friends.

“It’s both a smart management tool and one of the best gifts you can give to any employee because it’s a gift that keeps giving—whether it is to the people who work in your business, on a military base, in a hospital, or a school.”

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Related posts:
Dr. Oz on how you can overcome the build-up of life’s stresses

Health tips from Dr. Oz

Oprah Winfrey talks TM with Dr. Mehmet Oz

Here are excerpts from Peter Cohan’s recent column in Forbes about the Transcendental Meditation program and the spiritual entrepreneur.
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Peter Cohan, March 26th, 2012

Oprah Winfrey devoted her OWN show Sunday night to Transcendental Meditation (TM). But TM is not just for Oprah, it can help start-ups too.

Dr. Sharda S. Nandram

At least that was the claim of Dr. Sharda S. Nandram, Professor in Entrepreneurship at the University of Applied Sciences HAN, Associate Professor Entrepreneurship at Nyenrode Business University, and founder of Praan Solutions.

On March 21st, Nandram and I debated ”The Future of Entrepreneurship: Hungry start-upper vs Spiritual Entrepreneur” at EADA, a Barcelona business school. Nandram cited research in her talk that companies whose employees do TM have higher productivity.

Before getting into her remarks and my comments on them, it’s worth discussing what TM is and why it might help companies.

David Lynch

Twin Peaks director, David Lynch, is a fan and he claims that it turned him from an angry man into a happy one. As he told the Seattle Times, “I was filled with an anger and sorrows and doubts and melancholy. And I took it out on my first wife. I made her life pretty much a hell. So I start Transcendental Meditation, and two weeks later she comes to me and says, ‘What is going on? This anger, where did it go?’”

The answer, it turned out, was TM. And for Lynch, his sister convinced him to take up the practice. According to Lynch, “One day my sister called, and she said she started TM, and I heard a change in her voice — more happiness, more self-assuredness. And I said, ‘This is what I want.’ Things lift away so naturally.”

For Nandram, start-ups benefit from TM specifically, and spirituality in general. Her talk on “spirituality and entrepreneurship” reflects her efforts to “see the person behind the entrepreneurs.” And she thinks “it is time to deepen the ‘inner box’, one may call intuition, reflective zone, inner sense, the area of mindfulness or authentic self.”

When my host, EADA professor Manuel Marin, asked me what I thought of the idea of spirituality and entrepreneurship my first thought was that I do not know what Nandram means by spirituality; however, I see two areas where things that might be related to spirituality factor into start-up strategy.

Manuel Marín

The first many entrepreneurs start companies not for money but to change the world. If entrepreneurs’ visions of what that world would look like end up improving life for other people, those start-up CEOs are using a kind of spirituality to attract and motivate top talent.

Furthermore, when entrepreneurs hire those people, they look for integrity. As I described in my book, Value Leadership, integrity means that people do what they say they will do. And in a start-up, integrity has a compelling business imperative — there is no time or money for people who can’t be trusted.

Peter Cohan

So I would argue that depending on your definition, start-ups that want to make the world a better place and hire people with integrity, do benefit from spirituality.

Moreover, if others get the benefits that David Lynch claims for TM, it’s worth investigating the notion that TM’s practice among a start-up’s employees could allow them to focus more on the task at hand, reduce their level of anger and distraction, and boost their productivity.

If such spirituality is good for business, bring it on.

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To read Peter Cohan’s full story in Forbes, CLICK HERE.
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The military allocates untold monies and resources to treating post-combat stress. Now, for the first time, research is being conducted at the nation’s oldest, private military college, Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, to determine whether the Transcendental Meditation technique may provide an important addition to the promoting of resilience among military men and women to prevent the trauma in the first place.

Norwich is the birthplace of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), and was the first military school in the nation to accept women.

Click on the orange play button below to listen to a report by Vermont Public Radio’s Steve Zind on the progress of this important research.

Here are excerpts from Steve Zind’s VPR report:

It is not easy being a “Rook.” Freshman cadets at the nation’s oldest military college are overworked, sleep-deprived, and are way, way down in the campus pecking order.

Ray Witkowski

“I would kind of like freak out every day—‘Oh man, what’s going to happen. I have to deal with the cadre, be around all the upper classmen—I have to go to classes—I have to do homework.”

That’s how Ray Witkowski felt until he started meditating.

“Practicing TM, it’s made me calmer. It’s made me better able to deal with the everyday stress here.”

Witkowski’s platoon of freshmen cadets spends twenty minutes twice a day meditating. They’re part of a research project to measure the effects of Transcendental Meditation. TM has been around for years. It generated a pop culture buzz when the Beatles went to India in 1968 to study with the Movement’s founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Over the decades there have been scores of studies showing TM’s ability to reduce stress and improve performance. That appears to be true for the Norwich cadets too.

Carole Bandy

Associate Professor of Psychology, Carole Bandy, is one of the Norwich researchers:

“Basically we’ve found that negative kinds of affect or feelings like anxiety or depression, perceived stress or bad moods, all of that decreased significantly for the TM group but not the control group.”

Bandy is surprised though by what she calls positive growth indicators that show a level of personal development among the TM users.

“I expected that this would be something that would show up after a year of practice. It showed up after only nine weeks, and very strongly at that.”

The Norwich study is using electronic imaging to quantify the changes that TM brings about in the brain. To do that, cadets don what looks like a black bathing cap bristling with wires. Their brain activity is measured as they respond to audio stimuli and images, like a photo of a car accident. In the coming months the brain patterns of the meditating cadets will be compared to a control group to chart the differences.

A Norwich University cadet wearing a cap designed to monitor brain activity.

TM has already been studied as a way to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. In the 1980’s, one study concluded that it reduced depression, anxiety and substance abuse in a group of Vietnam vets.

Last year a pilot study showed a reduction in PTSD symptoms among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Bandy says that the Norwich University study will break new ground by following these cadets into their military careers as officers. Tracking the students for seven or eight years might provide clues whether TM can used as preventative medicine, essentially inoculating soldiers to protect them from the most severe effects of combat stress.

“If it can prevent combat trauma, or if it can help veterans get over it more quickly, it’s big, very big.”

Richard Schneider

Before signing on to the study, Norwich University president Richard Schneider says he took some convincing.

“You know, I thought it was a little hocus-pocus, but the more I read about it, and got to talk with other people, I thought there was something there.”

Schneider says he went through the TM training himself. He acknowledges that the technique conjures up stereotypes of some kind of magical mystery tour in the minds of people his age.

“They think it’s ‘feel good, smoke something, and love everybody.’ That’s not where I am. I’m all about performance-based, evidenced-based outcomes.”

The experiment has aroused some curiosity at Norwich. When word got around that his platoon was practicing TM, cadet Ray Witkowski said he took some ribbing.

Sam Lieber

“We hear a lot about it. They call us the ‘Omm Platoon’ or they call us ‘The men who stare at goats.’”

The platoon sergeant is Sam Lieber. He sees a difference in how his group of freshmen handle the rigors of cadet life in comparison to the Rooks that aren’t doing TM.

“My cadets were much more professional in how they dealt with the day-to-day activities of a recruit at Norwich University.”

Freshman Richard Wells is also a member of the meditating platoon. He says that TM has helped him with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder which has hampered him all his life.

“It’s like I feel myself being more calm. I can sit down and study. I’ve never felt I could just sit down and study before, but now I feel like a different person.”

The potential benefits of TM to blunt the trauma of combat are a central part of the Norwich study. Researchers are also interested in determining if these young will perform better when they’re active duty military. Norwich President Richard Schneider quotes one Army general who speculated how TM might benefit them in combat.

“If you’re a sniper and you’re hyperventilating, that is not a good place to be in. You are not going to be a good sniper.”

And this is where you might imagine some tension between the military’s goals and the ideals of those who teach Transcendental Meditation, which has long been touted as a path to both inner tranquility and world peace.

Bob Roth

Bob Roth is vice president of a foundation established by filmmaker David Lynch who is a long-time TM practitioner. The David Lynch Foundation is providing training and financial support for the Norwich study. Roth says that there is no conflict between TM’s ideals and using the technique to make better soldiers.

“A better soldier is a soldier that doesn’t act out of anger, revenge, violence, fear. If an individual’s job, their duty—their ‘dharma,’ as they say—is to safeguard the country, then we want people who are going to behave prudently. So I don’t think that there is any discrepancy.”

Roth points out that TM’s origins go back thousands of years to a time when it was used by warriors to prepare for the rigors of battle long before the Beatles help bring Transcendental Meditation to the attention of the western world.

For VPR News, this is Steve Zind.
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In her new book, “Work Zone Madness! Surviving and Rising Above Work Place Dysfunction,” Nancy Slomowitz, President and CEO of Executive Management Associates in Washington, DC, recommends the Transcendental Meditation technique as a way for businesses to reduce the negative effects of stress, to help create more focused, positive, priority-driven employees.

A chapter on the TM technique is not the only thing that makes this new book unique.

“I wanted to reach people who don’t like to read business or self-help books,” says Nancy. “No one is really talking or writing about the real sources of dysfunction that threaten to undermine the kind of core values that all businesses need to establish and maintain. Far too many businesses are on the verge of failure or are just holding on under enormous financial pressures. Too often the true sources of problems are ignored. A ‘what’s in it for me’ mentality, overreliance on technology, epidemic levels of stress, and toxic relationships are turning our workplaces into virtual battle zones. My goal was to write about very common workplace problems in a format that was a light, and fun to read, with lessons and workable solutions told through characters and situations that people can easily relate to.”

Nancy Slomowitz

“TM is a very important part of my life,” says Nancy. “It’s given me a competitive advantage in business. I thought it was important to offer TM as a benefit to my employees. At the time, offering meditation classes as a paid benefit seemed to people to be a novel and unorthodox thing to do—something that was counter-intuitive to the culture of high powered management consultants with Type-A personalities. But TM produced tangible, practical benefits in both their professional and personal lives. The workplace environment soon grew from toxic to harmonious among other positive changes. And surprisingly, the company’s cost of healthcare insurance actually went down due to a reduction in sick claims.”

“There was no reason to keep it a secret,” says Nancy. “TM has become mainstream over the past several years. I was also very inspired by the work of the David Lynch Foundation – so much so that I formed my own Foundation to make this powerful tool accessible to others. Since doing so, my support of nature has increased 100-fold.”

Nancy’s success in business and consulting has resulted in her receiving the Women-Owned Business Enterprise Award by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Nancy Slomowitz is also the founder of the Gilbert Slomowitz Foundation, which helps provide financial support to people throughout the US to learn the TM technique.

This past year, Ms. Slomowitz produced a documentary about the effect of the TM program on her company and its workers. Click on the YouTube video below to watch an excerpt of it.

(Click here to view the full 20 minute version.)

RELATED LINKS:
Visit Nancy’s website at www.companyrehab.net
View her film “Meditation Makeover” at www.gsfweb.org

This past weekend legendary singer, songwriter and folk-rocker Donovan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Guns N’ Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Laura Nyro, and The Miracles.

In this recent article in Billboard magazine Donovan talks about the impact that learning the Transcendental Meditation technique had on his music and his life, and his work for the David Lynch Foundation to develop the creativity of children by providing the Quiet Time/TM Program in schools all over the world.

Here are excerpts from that article:

Billboard: Last year we heard a new song from you, “Listen.” As one of the first and most visible people to experience TM in India, how has it affected your music?

Donovan: In the early days when the Beatles and I went to India and returned, we knew our fans should have it and then the world should have it. We needed it. Flash forward 35 years later [April 4, 2009] and Paul [McCartney] and Ringo [Starr] and Donovan and David Lynch are on the stage at Radio City Music Hall announcing to the world how schools have applied this meditation. Fear and anger and doubt have been subdued somewhat. It doesn’t mean that you’ll never be angry or filled with doubt again, but you won’t hold on to it — all things the Maharishi spoke of. This one was designed to be very applicable to the Western way of thinking. My dream was to [figure out] how do we bring in a new generation of songwriters? As it progressed, I wrote songs with meditation in them. The Beatles wrote songs with meditation in them.

Donovan and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Billboard: What was the first song you were aware of writing because of TM?

Donovan: “Happiness Runs” is the most direct one, which I wrote while in India with the Beatles and one Beach Boy (Mike Love) and Mia Farrow. Before India in ’68 I was always looking for songs where people could sing along. It’s part of the job to be a poet, folk singer — children’s songs, rounds, circular songs. And so I made this circular song “Happiness Runs” and it directly references meditation because it says ‘happiness runs in a circular motion/thought is like a little boat upon the sea.’ Simple words, but profound. More rocking was the “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” In the 18th century the hurdy gurdy man played the instrument the hurdy gurdy and he traveled from town to town and he brought the news. So I related the hurdy gurdy man in the song to the teacher, the Maharishi, who brings us songs of love.

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Click below to watch a 1964 video of Donovan singing one of his award-winning songs — “Catch the Wind.”

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Billboard: When you said meditation affected your songwriting, the first thing I thought of was “There is a Mountain.” What’s its origin?

Donovan: It comes from a Zen haiku, but it is a koan as well — the clever question asked of the student by the Zen master. “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” “The caterpillar sheds its skin/to find the butterfly within.” It’s very literal. If we could discard our skin, our hard husk of persona, it’s an obvious description that inside there is a softer human. I found (sayings) in old books and by putting them into songs, I hoped they would trigger a question in the listener. By giving it a rhythm it has an attraction — people were singing my lyrics not knowing what they were about.

Billboard: At some point early on, you made the decision to write songs, which many folk singers of the early 1960s did not do.

Donovan: I much more wanted to be recognized as a poet than as a musician. Poetry is still looked upon as something ineffectual, narcissistic. In actual fact, the Bohemian poets in the ’40s, their mission was to return poetry to popular culture. When you bring a poet into popular culture, two lines from a poem can alter a whole nation, it can bring a government down. The beat poets were wrong when they thought poetry would come back on the wings of jazz. Some poets were improvising with jazz improvisers in clubs, but improvisational poetry only works within improvisational music. When folk jumped into bed with rock, the form of the folk ballad would allow the new lyric (to thrive), first with Bobby Dylan then with myself and Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young. The Beatles realized it, too. They were from the Irish tradition of social activism [in poetry] but didn’t know it. I somehow knew it, because my father had brought me up reading poetry to me of social change. Before I heard Woody Guthrie, my father was reading poems of social consciousness to me — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly. I got fired with the zeal that we could bring something [literate] to the fans of pop music to get their teeth into.

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To read the entire article online at Billboard.com, CLICK HERE

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Note: a 90 minute version of the 2009 “Change Begins Within” concert that Donovan participated in and that featured a historic reunion of Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr is scheduled to premier on PBS in NYCity later this month.

CLICK HERE for an announcement of this upcoming PBS program.

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Daniel Westley is a Canadian athlete who won 12 medals while competing in five Paralympic Games—four of which were gold. Westley says he relied on his daily practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique to help him compete in the Paralympics, a biennial event run in parallel with the Olympic Games for elite athletes with a physical disability. He also says that the positive influence of the TM program has extended far beyond sports.

Click on the video below to watch a special report by the Vancouver Sun’s reporter, Tom Hill, about Daniel Westley’s experience with the TM program.

Here’s are excerpts from Tom Hill’s Vancouver Sun’s feature story:

Daniel Westley is a world-class athlete who has won gold medals in both winter and summer sports. But his rise to athletic excellence was sparked by a tragic turn of events.

In fact, he had barely shown any interest in athletics until after a tragic accident forced doctors to amputate both of his legs.

While in the hospital, Westley happened to meet a young Rick Hansen (another future Paralympian) who introduced Westley to wheelchair athletics.

Westley was hooked. After being released from the hospital he started playing sports as much as possible, earning his spot in the 1988 Paralympic Games in Seoul, South Korea.

“I happened to get involved in 1988 and at that time they embraced disabled sports.” recalls Westley, who lives in New Westminster (British Columbia).

But as the Paralympic Games grew in size and popularity, so too did the pressure of training and competing on the world stage. Westley was now participating in both the summer and winter games in a wide range of sports that included everything from wheelchair racing to skiing.

“Any given day I was racing two and three times a day,” he explains. “It was a pretty high level of intensity to be competing at.”

At a young age, Daniel realized that remaining centered was critical to being a successful athlete and maintaining his overall health. He found a technique that suited him perfectly.

“I practice Transcendental Meditation. I learned when I was 20. When I was first getting involved in my sports the other guys were training pretty intensely and I thought that if I wanted to do really well I had to rest really well.”

Transcendental Meditation is a technique that involves two 15- to 20-minute sessions a day. It promises it’s practitioners a cool and quiet calmness. For Daniel it offered the focus he needed to train hard, to perform in high-pressure situations, and avoid burning out.

“So I took up TM and it gave me a chance to settle down and recover from my training, so that I could become fresh again and then get the most out of my next training session.”

With his meditation keeping him centered, Westley certainly did do well, going on to win 12 Paralympic medals – four of which were gold medals – in five Paralympic Games.

And yet, for Westley, who now works in sales for a home medical equipment company, the positive influence of meditation extended far beyond sports and has helped him sustain a positive attitude in all facets of his life.

“If you really step into the moment and are really relaxed then the outcomes take care of themselves.”

© Copyright The Vancouver Sun

CLICK HERE to view this story in the Vancouver Sun.

If you are interested in learning more about Daniel Westley’s story, watch this video in which he discusses the benefits of Transcendental Meditation:

William Wordsworth
1770–1850 • ENGLAND

ON A FRESH MORNING IN EARLY JULY, a 28-year-old man sets out on foot from his home on the southwest coast of England. A writer, he loves walking, traversing the countryside for days at a time. On this excursion, he and his sister are heading up the scenic Wye River Valley, just across the border in Wales, with its many low, forest-blanketed hills.

When they enter the valley, they climb the banks of the river. A few miles below, beside the river, they can see the ruins of Tintern Abbey, built five centuries earlier, now a stone latticework open to wind and sky. As his sister walks ahead, he sits down on the grass among the trees and closes his eyes.

Then the experience comes. He has had it before — and it’s the experience he lives for. Had his sister seen him, she might have thought he was just resting. Deep within, however, he feels something changing. He settles into a state of inner quietness, beyond thought, beyond feeling — simple, natural, yet profound. In a few minutes, it’s over. He opens his eyes, stands up, and walks back down the hill, resuming his tour.

As he crosses the river, words begin taking shape in his mind. The words keep coming until he returns home several days later. There he finally has a chance to set the words down on paper — a poem, nearly one hundred sixty lines. He does not change a single one. “No poem of mine,” he comments later, “was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this.” [1] In the poem he describes:

That blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: — that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. [2]

The young man is William Wordsworth. The year is 1798. His poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” was published later that same year in Lyrical Ballads, which also included several poems by his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge — and which launched the English Romantic movement in literature, altering the course of English literature and poetry.

What was he experiencing?

Wordsworth’s experience lasted only a few minutes, but his words have been admired for two centuries. What was he experiencing?

His description is remarkable for its exactness. He settles into a state of increasing tranquility. The “weary weight” of the “unintelligible world” grows lighter and eventually fades away. Describing the unique condition of his body, he tells us he feels deeply rested. His breath and even his blood flow seem “almost suspended,” and he feels as if “laid asleep in body.”

But is he asleep? On the contrary, he seems more awake than ever. He feels he has “become a living soul” — as though in his prior state he had not been fully alive. From this deep level he is able to “see into the life of things.”

Clearly this is more than a moment of relaxation — it is a unique mode of knowledge. From deep within, he experiences “harmony, and the deep power of joy.” In all, he feels “blessed.”

Wordsworth was known to be of good health and sound mind, not given to far-out fancy. By every indication, he is trying to describe a concrete experience as precisely as he can. His body is deeply relaxed, his mind profoundly settled and awake within itself.

This was not an isolated experience for Wordsworth. He had many such moments. They affected him powerfully. He found them physically and mentally revitalizing and believed they helped make him the great poet he was. And he celebrates them everywhere in his poetry, to the extent that the term Wordsworthian experience is sometimes used to refer to experiences of this type.

Yet Wordsworth speaks of we, us, and our, implying this is a universal experience, one for all humanity. Indeed, he offers us an excellent description of a whole category of experience that people have reported throughout history and around the world.

A fourth major state of consciousness

Wordsworth seems to have experienced a state of consciousness that is simple and natural yet uniquely different from the familiar states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping. In fact, it is a fourth major state of consciousness. Maharishi calls this state Transcendental Consciousness. In restfully alert state, mental activity has settled down, like waves settling on the ocean, leaving the experience of consciousness in its most silent, wakeful state — unbounded awareness. At the same time, physiological activity spontaneously settles down and one experiences a state of deep relaxation that enables the body to dissolve stress with exceptional efficiency.

Maharishi also provided a simple, natural, effortless technique by which anyone could have this experience on a regular basis — 20 minutes twice each day, in fact. This is the Transcendental Meditation technique, which has now been learned by millions of people around the world, of all ages, cultural backgrounds, and walks of life.

A flood tide of scientific research — a broad spectrum of benefits

Maharishi vigorously encouraged scientific research on the Transcendental Meditation technique and on the fourth state of consciousness it so effortlessly elicits. Since the first studies in the late 1960s, there has been a flood tide of research. Some 650 studies have been conducted to date, at 250 universities and research institutes in 33 countries, by researchers in such fields as physiology, biochemistry, neuroscience, psychology, medicine, sociology, and criminology. The results have been published in 150 leading scientific and scholarly journals.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has invested more than $25 million in research on the Transcendental Meditation program, particularly on such beneficial effects for cardiovascular health as reducing high blood pressure. The technique is widely prescribed by doctors and is also used in a growing number of schools across the U.S. and worldwide to reduce stress, promote learning ability, and develop full creative potential.

What has this research found? With regular, twice-daily experience of this fourth state of consciousness, every facet of life is enriched. Intelligence and creativity increase, health improves, one’s personality develops, personal relationships are enriched. When even 1% of the population of a city has learned the Transcendental Meditation technique, the quality of life for the whole city improves, reflected in reduced crime rate and other measures.

Maharishi compares the experience of Transcendental Consciousness to watering the root of a tree. Just as watering the root nourishes all the branches of the tree in a single stroke, so too the experience of transcending nourishes every branch of life.

Available to everyone

And though Wordsworth may not have been aware of it, this state forms the portal to still higher states of consciousness — higher modes of knowledge, power, and fulfillment. Wordsworth describes for us the gateway into those higher worlds. And Maharishi has described the nature of these higher states in fine detail.

“Tintern Abbey” has appeared in countless anthologies. It has been required reading in college classes decade after decade. These lines in particular have been singled out in numberless essays. Yet few readers have suspected what Wordsworth is really describing.

Now we know. We also know that this extraordinary — and extraordinarily natural — experience need not be left to chance. Nor is it restricted to Romantic poets — it is now available to everyone.

REFERENCES
[1] William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798, London: Duckworth, 1898, 252 (Notes: W.W. 1843).

[2] William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (London, Bristol: Biggs and Cottle, for T.N. Longman, Paternoster-Row, 1798), 203-204.

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Dr. Craig Pearson is Executive Vice-President of Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. He has served the University in a variety of roles over the past 33 years, including Dean of Faculty, Dean of Students, Director of Maharishi University of Management Press, Director of Freshman Composition, and Professor of Professional Writing.

He holds a PhD in Maharishi Vedic Science from MUM and is the author of two books on the development of full human potential, The Complete Book of Yogic Flying and The Supreme Awakening: Developing the Infinite Potential Within (forthcoming). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment.