Transcendental Meditation (TM) is a simplistic mantra meditation which was popularized in the early 1960s by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It involves mentally chanting a beeja mantra with every breath. This, I was told, tricks the mind, helping us bypass it and making meditation much easier than usual.

I had been hearing about TM for a very long time, but I didn’t feel drawn to it up until a month ago. Usually, I practice mindfulness and it has brought a fair bit of balance into my life. I must mention before I proceed with my views on TM, that these are my personal views, and it might be different for different people.

The Initial Reaction

Now, for most part, mindfulness can be quite torturous. The mind bombards you with thoughts, and you try desperately to keep your head above water. There are moments of stillness of course, but it can be quite hard to grapple with the mind sometimes.

TM, I realized, did trick the mind. It was such a joy to be able to just bypass it. It was almost like a relief, after practicing mindfulness for so long. It was actually so easy, that I should have been suspicious.

… And then…

Time flies much faster when you do TM. This was my experience, and I’ve been told this by others as well. I enjoyed the practice in itself, but I found myself becoming increasingly un-grounded everyday, at quite an alarming rate by my standards. I found my mind much more active the whole day, and I don’t mean this in a nice way. I’d drift off in my thoughts, losing touch with the present. It was as if I lost touch with presence. I was also sleeping more, and not feeling completely rested when I woke up.

One month later, it just became too much for me to handle, and I stopped. I switched back to my mindfulness practice. Before I tried TM, I was meditating easily for an hour without problems. After a month of TM, I could do just 20 minutes, after which I got up, feeling completely frustrated and unable to continue. 2 days of the mindfulness practice and my mind is already calming down during the day. The meditation practice of course, is back to being a difficult period.

The Conclusion

TM is a very effective tool. But like all tools, it must be used at the right time for it to be useful. I think if people are spending a lot of time doing physical work – gardening, farming, construction, etc., then this is a wonderful technique to lift them up and bring them into balance. For a person who travels a lot and spends a lot of time on electronic devices, I’m not sure this is going to be helpful.

It may even be a decent place to start meditation at. When a person is totally trapped by the mind and has lost all control, then probably it is easier to start with TM. There are several studies that show TM to help with reducing blood pressure and several other stress induced health problems. But for the long term, I don’t see this as a complete path in itself – for a generation which has lost touch with the earth, it needs a method that is more grounding in reality, than something with takes them further away from it.