Systematic research solidly supports claims made for health (and other) advantages of Transcendental Meditation. These benefits go from reductions in anxiety and depression, enhancements in memory, IQ, ADHD, mental health and moral reasoning to reductions in heart disease and stroke and improvements in general health and even the health of society.

I initially heard this at an introductory lecture in 1975. Later I learned more on my teachers training course in 1978.
I was fascinated that an easy behavior change might have such a broad and positive result on my life and wanted to know why. So I (and my new other half, Vicki) registered at the University of South Africa for 3 years of psychology. In due course I added a psychology major to my engineering degree.

Having an MBA and psychology credits I then launched into a doctoral programme at the University of Cape Town. In the next 10 years I dived into the scientific research. I read hundreds of studies on stress, stress management and the effects of Transcendental Meditation practice on mind, body, behaviour and the meditator’s surroundings.

Since graduating from UCT, hundreds more papers have been added to the literature on Transcendental Meditation and other techniques. My conclusion is that Transcendental Meditation has the largest published literature of any self development programme on earth. The literature on TM is claimed to run to over 600 studies from over 200 institutions published in scores of peer reviewed journals.

There are good studies and there are not-so good studies. And there are quite big numbers of excellent studies. “Excellent”means the researchers are understood to be neutral toward TM, they have used good research design and accepted statistics tools, they have made public their work in reputable scientific publications and it has been subject to review by their peers.

Similarly their work is replicable by other scientists and their observations are explainable by a credible theory. And in a number of cases their methodical modern findings are supported by the testimony of the vedic literature thousands of years old. So anybody asserting that TM’s claims aren’t supported by research either does not know what they are talking about or has a concealed (usually fundamentalist) agenda.

Ultimately, there are some very Very good studies: “studies of studies” actually : meta analyses that compare TM results with those from other types of meditation.

The conclusions of these studies seem extremely clear: TM is different. Effect sizes are generally seen to be larger than for other kinds of meditation, which in many cases demonstrate effect sizes which don’t differ significantly from those seen during straightforward eyes-closed rest. Which is not such a bad thing at all “but TM is obviously better.

If this is true , why should this be so?

Probably because TM is “transcendental”. This means it is a methodology that involves neither active thinking nor any artificial manipulation of the mind-body by external sensory inputs. Somehow TM re-sets the mind-body to a condition of ideal balance “which might have been disturbed by external lifestyle factors.

Dr Richard Broome has a Doctorate in Business Administration from UCT. His scientific research was on stress management at the worksite using Transcendental Meditation.