Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
Transcendental Meditation (TM) is a form of silent, mantra meditation advocated by the Transcendental Meditation movement. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi created the technique in India in the mid-1950s. Advocates of TM claim that the technique promotes a state of relaxed awareness, stress relief, and access to higher states of consciousness, as well as physiological benefits such as reducing the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was an Indian yoga guru, known for developing and popularizing Transcendental Meditation (TM), and for being the leader and guru of a worldwide organization that has been characterized in multiple ways including as a new religious movement and as non-religious. He became known as Maharishi and Yogi as an adult.
Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health (MVAH) is a form of alternative medicine founded in the mid-1980s by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who developed the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM). Distinct from traditional ayurveda, it emphasizes the role of consciousness, and gives importance to positive emotions. Maharishi Ayur-Veda has been variously characterized as emerging from, and consistently reflecting, the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, representing the entirety of the ayurvedic tradition.
The Transcendental Meditation movement (TM) are programs and organizations that promote the Transcendental Meditation technique founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India in the 1950s. The organization was estimated to have 900,000 participants in 1977, a million by the 1980s, and 5 million in more recent years.
Yoga nidra or yogic sleep is a state of consciousness between waking and sleeping, like the "going-to-sleep" stage (hypnagogia), typically induced by a guided meditation.
A relaxation technique is any method, process, procedure, or activity that helps a person to relax; to attain a state of increased calmness; or otherwise reduce levels of pain, anxiety, stress or anger. Relaxation techniques are often employed as one element of a wider stress management program and can decrease muscle tension, lower the blood pressure and slow heart and breath rates, among other health benefits.
Diaphragmatic breathing, or deep breathing, is breathing that is done by contracting the diaphragm, a muscle located horizontally between the thoracic cavity and abdominal cavity. Air enters the lungs as the diaphragm strongly contracts, but unlike during traditional relaxed breathing (eupnea) the intercostal muscles of the chest do minimal work in this process. The belly also expands during this type of breathing to make room for the contraction of the diaphragm.
Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is a non-pharmacological method of deep muscle relaxation, based on the premise that muscle tension is the body's psychological response to anxiety-provoking thoughts and that muscle relaxation blocks anxiety.
Herbert Benson was an American medical doctor, cardiologist, and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. He was a professor of mind/body medicine at Harvard Medical School and director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute (BHI) at MGH. He was a founding trustee of The American Institute of Stress. He contributed more than 190 scientific publications and 12 books. More than five million copies of his books have been printed in different languages.
TM and Cult Mania is a non-fiction book that examines assertions made by the Transcendental Meditation movement (TM). The book is authored by Michael Persinger, Normand Carrey and Lynn Suess and published in 1980 by Christopher Publishing House. Persinger is a neurophysiologist and has worked out of Laurentian University. He trained as a psychologist and focused on the impacts of religious experience. Carrey is a medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry. He focused his studies into child psychiatry with research at Dalhousie University, and has taught physicians in a psychiatry residency program in the field of family therapy. Suess assisted Persinger in researching effects of geological phenomena on unidentified flying object sightings in Washington; the two conducted similar research in Toronto and Ottawa.
The psychological and physiological effects of meditation have been studied. In recent years, studies of meditation have increasingly involved the use of modern instruments, such as fMRI and EEG, which are able to observe brain physiology and neural activity in living subjects, either during the act of meditation itself or before and after meditation. Correlations can thus be established between meditative practices and brain structure or function.
Acem Meditation is a meditation technique developed in Norway since 1966 by the Acem School of Meditation and is now taught in many countries.
The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace is a global charitable foundation with offices in New York City, Los Angeles, and Fairfield, Iowa. It was founded by film director and Transcendental Meditation (TM) practitioner David Lynch in 2005 to fund the teaching of TM in schools. Over the years it has expanded its focus to include other "at-risk" populations such as the homeless, U.S. military veterans, African war refugees and prison inmates.
David W. Orme-Johnson is a former professor of psychology at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. He is the author of over 100 papers investigating the effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique.
Relaxation in psychology is the emotional state of a living being, of low tension, in which there is an absence of arousal, particularly from negative sources such as anger, anxiety, or fear. According to Oxford Dictionaries relaxation is when the body and mind are free from tension and anxiety. Relaxation is a form of mild ecstasy coming from the frontal lobe of the brain in which the backward cortex sends signals to the frontal cortex via a mild sedative. Relaxation can be achieved through meditation, autogenics, and progressive muscle relaxation. Relaxation helps improve coping with stress. Stress is the leading cause of mental problems and physical problems, therefore feeling relaxed is beneficial for a person's health. When we are stressed, the sympathetic nervous system is activated because we are in a fight-or-flight response mode; over time, this could have negative effects on a human body.
The History of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and the Transcendental Meditation movement originated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the organization, and continues beyond his death (2008). In 1955, the Maharishi began publicly teaching a traditional meditation technique learned from his master Brahmananda Saraswati, which he called Transcendental Deep Meditation, and later renamed Transcendental Meditation.
The Transcendental Meditation technique is the technique associated with the practice of Transcendental Meditation developed by the Indian spiritual figure Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The practice involves the use of a private mantra, and is practised for 20 minutes twice per day while sitting comfortably with one's eyes closed. Unlike some other approaches to meditation, TM instruction encourages students not to be alarmed by random thoughts which may arise, but to easily return to the mantra when one becomes aware of this.
Transcendental Meditation in education is the application of the Transcendental Meditation technique in an educational setting or institution. These educational programs and institutions have been founded in the US, United Kingdom, Australia, India, Africa and Japan. The Transcendental Meditation technique became popular with students in the 1960s and by the early 1970s centers for the Students International Meditation Society were established at a thousand campuses in the US with similar growth occurring in Germany, Canada and Britain. The Maharishi International University was established in 1973 in the US and began offering accredited, degree programs. In 1977 courses in Transcendental Meditation and the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI) were legally prohibited from New Jersey (USA) public high schools on religious grounds by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This "dismantled" the TM program's use of government funding in U.S. public schools "but did not constitute a negative evaluation of the program itself". Since 1979, schools that incorporate the Transcendental Meditation technique using private, non-governmental funding have been reported in the US, South America, Southeast Asia, Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel.
Bob Roth is an American Transcendental Meditation (TM) teacher and author. He is the CEO of the David Lynch Foundation and a director of the Center for Leadership Performance.
