Relaxation

The founder of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) is a man called Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He was the son of a forest ranger and is said to have graduated from Allahabad University before coming under the religious influence of Guru Dev (which means “Divine Leader”). For thirteen years the two men were together, and before his death Guru Dev charged the Maharishi with the mission of making meditation simple enough to be practiced by anybody. For two years while living alone in the Himalayas, the Maharishi worked on this task, and then, in the mid-1950's, he launched the Transcendental Meditation movement.

The TM movement first gained public attention when the Beatles went to the Maharishi's residence in India, where they took up TM as an alternative to using drugs. A stream of show-business people followed, and soon the Maharishi was big news. In the United States alone roughly three quarters of a million people have been taught TM, and the Maharishi has addressed state legislatures, appeared on TV talk shows, traveled with rock groups, and established Maharishi International University, which trains students to spread the message of TM. His message has spread to cities and especially college towns all over the world, and the movement is still growing.

Perhaps it's the Maharishi's quiet manner that made him attractive. Maybe it is the American (or perhaps human) tendency to always be looking for something new and different. Undoubtedly, however, Transcendental Meditation really caught on when it was discovered that this technique could quickly and effectively alleviate many of the stress symptoms that so plague our hectic-paced society.

For several years a Harvard cardiologist named Herbert Benson and physiologist Robert Keith Wallace have studied the physiological effects of meditation. The results have been dramatic. Blood pressure drops, the heartbeat slows, there is an increase in alpha waves in the brain, breathing slows, and the subjects report and internal sense of relaxation. While there are some technical problems with this research, it is nevertheless impressive.

In another study, non-meditators were compared with meditators in their reaction to a stressful movie. The meditators handled the stress much better. Their heartbeat returned to normal more quickly, and the physiological measures showed that they adjusted to the post-stress situation more easily.