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Transcendental Meditation: Were the hippies right all along?

The Independent on Sunday by Laura Tennant

For years, it has been ridiculed as a 1960s embarrassment. Now Transcendental Meditation is back in a big way. So were those hippies on to something all along?

... For strange as it may sound, among those of us who seek to surf the zeitgeist, the most fashionable thinker of 2011 may turn out to be Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement – and the fact that he passed to a better place in 2008 doesn't appear to have discouraged us one bit.

TM, as its followers call it, is rapidly moving from kooky margin to respectable mainstream thanks largely to a burgeoning body of scientific research which indicates that regular meditators can expect to enjoy striking reductions in heart attack, stroke and early mortality (as much as 47 per cent, according to one study). And the apparent benefits don't stop there: according to a pilot study just published in the US journal Military Medicine, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars showed a 50 per cent reduction in their symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after eight weeks of TM.

Meanwhile, educational establishments which introduce a "quiet time programme"– as did Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco – report drops in fights and suspensions, increased attendance and improvements in exam results. In this country, the Maharishi School in Ormskirk, Lancashire, gets glowing reports from Ofsted and achieves exceptional academic results.

An estimated four million people now practise TM globally – 20 minutes twice daily, as per the Maharishi's prescription – many of them over the course of many decades, and there are some famous, and rather surprising, names on the list. Clint Eastwood, for example, has been doing it for 40 years ... Other celebrity adherents include Paul McCartney, Russell Brand, Martin Scorsese, Ringo Starr, Mary Tyler Moore, Laura Dern and Moby.

Read the full article at The Independent on Sunday.

This is an edited excerpt from The Independent on Sunday

 


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