Strength in Stillness INTRODUCTION Picture someone who teaches meditation, and I am probably not that person. I am often dressed in a suit, for one, and my offices are in Midtown Manhattan. I am not at all New Agey. I am a natural skeptic, and I am even more obsessed with science than I am with baseball, which is to say, very. I am not into woo-woo stuff. My friends have a running joke about me: "How can a vegetarian be such a meat-and-potatoes guy?" I like things to be simple, practical, and thoroughly, unassailably logical. And for more than forty-five years, teaching the Transcendental Meditation technique has been my full-time job. The technique comes from the oldest continuous meditation tradition in the world.

There is no philosophy, change in lifestyle, or religion involved in its practice. For well over five thousand years, the TM technique was passed down from teacher to student, one to one: never in groups, never from a book. It has roots in the ancient noble warrior classes, where acting out of fear or anger brought disaster and defeat. Today it is for all of us who seek greater balance in life as well as more creativity, better health, less stress--and happiness. Over those thousands of years, the TM technique has been honed to twenty minutes, twice a day: once in the morning, ideally before breakfast; and again in the late afternoon or early evening, ideally before dinner. You learn this meditation from a professionally trained teacher who will instruct you in a one-to-one session. He or she will give you your own mantra--a word or sound that has no meaning associated with it--and teach you how to think it properly, which means easily, effortlessly, and silently. You''ll learn that you don''t need to push out thoughts, or watch your breath, or monitor sensations in your body, or visualize anything.

You''ll also learn that there is no need to sit in any particular position. You can sit up comfortably in a chair at home, at work, on a train or plane; on a park bench--basically, wherever it''s comfortable. The morning session wakes up your brain and gives you energy and resilience so that the demands and challenges of the day don''t stress you out. Then you meditate once again, ideally in the late afternoon or early evening before dinner, to start the next part of your day fresh. Twice a day, TM gives you a reset. I have taught many thousands of people to meditate. My students are the leaders of Fortune 100 companies and are cashiers in small family shops. They go to private colleges and urban schools.

They are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus, or they practice no religion whatsoever. They run the gamut from professional athletes to people living in homeless shelters. Whomever I am sitting across from--whether it''s a CEO of one of the world''s largest financial institutions or a single working mom with two young children at home or a veteran who hasn''t slept more than two hours a night for months--they have the same look in their eyes when they come to me to talk about meditation. They are ready for something better, they are ready for a change. I was in their shoes once, and I was perhaps more skeptical than any of them. In 1969 I was a university student with a nagging sense that there had to be something more I could be doing to be happier, healthier, more productive. I saw far too many people who had acquired the things that are supposed to make you that way, and yet they were often too stressed with too much worry, and, too often, unhappy. A friend whom I trusted, who had observed my own spiking stress levels from too much school pressure, suggested I might like Transcendental Meditation.

I balked. I wasn''t interested. Meditation wasn''t even a word in my vocabulary. I was (and am) a very practical, down-to-earth, active kind of a guy. My trajectory was to go to law school so that I could run for public office and ultimately become a US senator. I wanted to help change the world. (Yes, we thought those things then.) Sitting around "meditating" didn''t fit into my life view.

But I wasn''t sleeping well, and my memory was flagging, and I did respect my friend''s opinion, so I decided to at least give TM a try. Despite my initial reticence and skepticism, I found the experience to be marked, significant, real. It was astonishingly easy to do, deeply relaxing, and yet incredibly energizing, like nothing I had experienced before. From the very start, I knew that, somehow, I wanted to teach this to people; and, in particular, I wanted to teach it to inner-city school kids. A few years later, in January 1972, I took a semester off from my studies and enrolled in a graduate-level five-month TM teacher training course led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, himself a university-trained physicist and the foremost meditation teacher of this generation. During the course, Maharishi and a team of brain scientists, physicians, and psychologists explored ancient and modern insights into the science of consciousness, as well as the impact of stress and trauma on the brain and nervous system. We learned the unique mechanics of the TM practice and the role of this meditation for unfolding the seemingly limitless creativity and intelligence within the human mind, as well as its ability to address effectively many of society''s intractable ills. Most importantly, Maharishi taught us the simple yet precise technique of how to personally teach any individual to transcend--to effortlessly access the deep stillness that lies within every human being--in a way that was tailored specifically for that person.

From his earliest days of teaching TM in the world in 1958, Maharishi focused on researching and understanding the science of Transcendental Meditation. He challenged doctors at Harvard, UCLA, and other medical schools to study the neurophysiological changes both during and after the technique. The results are abundantly clear today. Since then, more than four hundred scientific studies have shown the wide-ranging benefits of the TM technique for improving brain and cognitive functioning, cardiovascular health, and emotional well-being. These studies have been published in top peer-reviewed science journals, including the American Medical Association''s JAMA Internal Medicine, and the American Heart Association''s journals Stroke and Hypertension. (To be clear, it matters greatly that this research is peer-reviewed. Medical peer review means that experts are evaluating the credibility of the study, and also ensuring that the clinicians involved meet established standards of care.) The US National Institutes of Health has provided tens of millions of dollars to study TM''s effects on stress and heart health, while the US Department of Defense has awarded several million dollars to study its impact on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The change has taken time, but the Transcendental Meditation technique is now recognized as a powerful treatment and preventative modality for so many of the stress-based disorders of our time--as well as an immensely practical tool to markedly improve health and performance. In the same way that we now recognize the importance of exercise and eating healthy, the world has come a long way with regards to understanding the critical importance of meditation in general and Transcendental Meditation in particular. That certainly was not always the case. When I first began my work, sometimes the fastest way to end a conversation was to say I was a meditation teacher. Now, if someone asks me what I do, they lean in as I say that I run a nonprofit that teaches Transcendental Meditation. The person''s eyes usually widen, and he or she says, "Oh, I could really use that." So what happened? Why is there so much interest in meditation? I attribute it to a perfect storm of three factors: One, we are living in an epidemic of stress. We face more toxic stress now than at any other time in history.

It compromises the immune system, stunts cognitive and emotional development, and raises blood pressure, the latter of which puts tens of millions of people at risk for cardiovascular disease--the number one killer of our age. Toxic stress also helps fuel a challenging range of disorders: eating, sleeping, learning, obsessive-compulsive, bipolar, and more. It speeds the aging process and shortens life spans. Day to day, stress fills us with so much tension and anxiety that it is often difficult to even enjoy the little things that used to make us happy. I travel a lot for my work, and I can see this stress in the faces of people I meet. No matter who they are, what they do, or where they come from, they tell me that too often they overreact to small irritants, much less life''s bigger challenges. They admit recoiling from a cell phone''s incessant ring, and they awaken to a jammed email inbox with dread. It''s not their imagination: stress, in fact, heightens our sensitivity to new stress triggers.

In other words, stress begets more stress. Without any exaggeration--and to be brutally blunt about it--stress kills. And now we are in constant contact, living in a 24/7 plugged-in world that never, ever stops. We are glutted by information, demands, and sensory input. We are on an endless loop of requests to read, review, make a decision, keep, delete, reply, and move to the next request. The more success we achieve, the more high-stakes decisions we are forced to make. Yes, a lot of people are serio.