Transcendental Meditation

In my last blog, I wrote about the virtues of an approach called mindfulness developed by a brilliant professor named John Kabat-Zinn. Today I want to talk about a more popular spiritual approach developed in India in the last century. All this is on my mind, as we gear up towards our own meditation retreat in Martha’s Vineyard this summer.

Transcendental Meditation or TM is a mantra-based technique popularised by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It is an effortless procedure for allowing the excitation of the mind to settle down until a state of calmness is reached. This is a state of alertness and relaxation with no object of thought or perception. It has been described as a state where the person is aware of his/her consciousness and its unbounded nature. It is practised, 15-20 minutes, twice-a-day, under the guidance and support of the TM community.

As an addiction psychiatrist, I am very attracted to the ability of meditation to help my patients struggling with chemical or behavioural addictions. In a 1975 article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, in a convenience sample, Shafil found 40 percent of people who did TM for 2 years reported discontinuation of beer and wine within the first 6 months. After 25-39 months of meditation, this figure increased to 60 percent. In addition, 54 percent of this group, versus 1 percent of the control group, had stopped drinking hard liquor. 

The authors suggested that TM could be an effective preventative tool in the area of alcohol abuse. Studies on TM that were related to substance abuse were reviewed and nineteen studies were included for a total of 4,524 subjects of which 3,249 were TM participants. These included a range of retrospective, cross-sectional, controlled, uncontrolled and longitudinal studies in students, general population, incarcerated people, war veterans, and skid row alcoholics among others. Six studies used random assignment as a research design. The longitudinal studies included a follow-up of 3-20 months duration. The net sum is that while it is no panacea, TM helps create positive psychological outcomes and reduce addictions and mental disorders.

In the next blog, we’ll talk about yet another approach from the Art of Living Foundation.

All the best,

Ken Rosenberg, MD

uppereasthealth.com