Wellness Wednesday: What is Transcendental Meditation?

What is Transcendental Meditation, how do you do it, where do you do it, how do you stop your thoughts and why, like me, should you do it too?

I have been doing the Transcendental Meditation (TM) method for about two years now and although I love it and it has really helped me, the noise around can be distracting so I hope to impart my personal experience and opinions in case they help you.

TM has really helped me, along with yoga, to calm my mind, calm my anxiety, eliminate my insomnia and generally helps me stay more focussed. When I researched TM before I signed up to do it I reacted positively to the lack of insistence on clearing your mind of all thoughts. In TM, thoughts during meditation are treated as perfectly normal and natural and that the end goal way down the line after years of experience is meditation with a clear mind.

In TM you are given your own personal mantra and guided through a method to rapidly take you into deep meditation. Payment is on a sliding scale depending on your financial position but some people find it quite steep. I feel that the money is worth it as it’s an investment in yourself, after all what are we without a clearer head and a good night’s sleep? I like to describe TM as part of my wellness toolbox and not a miracle cure.

I’m quite a nerd and I have meditated almost without fail, for twenty minutes twice a day like a good student and teacher’s pet. However, if you can’t manage that it’s better to squeeze as many minutes as you can rather than skip it altogether. I used to host a lovely group meditation at our boutique in London but of course coronavirus put a stop to that. Meditating alone is lovely but if you join a group occasionally you might find, like I did, that my individual meditation was better quality afterwards.

You’ll also be taught that over time, you’ll be able to meditate anywhere. You don’t need a special room, incense and darkness to meditate. After I had been meditating for a while I became experienced enough to be able to squeeze my meditation into travel journeys on the London underground, on planes, trains…anywhere really.

Those are the good outcomes from TM.

Now for the not so good.

Maharishi, the founder of TM, is dead. He grew his school and movement to global popularity and stardom with celebrity followers such as the Beatles, Jerry Springer, Ellen and the Who’s Who of Hollywood and pop music. The legacy and school he left behind comes across to me as commercial with cult-like tendancies. In fact when I went to the introductory group meeting I asked if TM was like Scientology. I was told it isn’t but it didn’t help that the TM centre in Edinburgh where I was taught was in fact a hop and skip away from Edinburgh’s Scientology centre.

I didn’t learn TM to enter the TM ecosystem, to learn about or embrace another religion or to dive into the TM lifestyle. If you’re feeling lonely the TM world can suck you in as much as you want with retreats, group meditations and more. The reason I started a group meditation in our boutique was to keep the group meeting to 30 minutes. TM meetings can last over three hours and I just don’t have the time or interest to sit there for that long.

Another slightly strange experience during my training is that my teacher told my group that we would feel annoyed and angry if we got interrupted during meditation and that’s normal. Indeed in my first days meditating I did get annoyed of someone disturbed me but that feeling didn’t feel natural to my personality. A few times my darling nephew, five years old at the time, found my meditation strange and interesting and used to creep up to me to try and interrupt me but I didn’t feel annoyed with him at all and just whispered to wait, which he did and then eventually learned to leave me alone.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can experience the benefits of TM, as I truly have, without turning into a dyed-in-the-wool TMer if you don’t want to!

Find your nearest Transcendental Meditaiton Centre here.