Your Heart Wants TM!
This is the message that Teachers of Transcendental Meditation (TM) will be sharing with their local communities on Friday 26 February - National Heart Day - around the UK.
"If this kind of result was observed for a new prescription drug, it would be a billion-dollar industry to make it available to everyone immediately."
This statement was made by Dr Norman Rosenthal, for 20 years a senior researcher at the US National Institutes of Mental Health, following the announcement at the American Heart Association annual conference last November that a recently completed and rigorously controlled nine-year study funded by the US National Institutes of Health found a 47 per cent reduction in the rate of major clinical events (mortality, heart attacks, and strokes) amongst heart patients practising Transcendental Meditation.
These findings were reported by the BBC and the Telegraph last November. Almost concurrently, a study published in the American Journal of Hypertension reported that TM had reduced high blood pressure in 160 students at American University in Washington, D.C.. The improvements, which occurred over just three months, were associated with improvements in psychological distress, anxiety, depression, anger/hostility, and coping.
Heart patients and everyone will be able to hear at public talks in many major cities and towns how Transcendental Meditation can benefit heart health. “We really want to make this more widely available,” says Tony Miles, Chairman of the Brighton Transcendental Meditation Centre. “We hope it will be made available on the NHS: it would be a side-effect-free treatment! In the meantime we have a sliding scale of fees now and various concessions, so learning TM is affordable for all. TM is a simple, natural technique that absolutely anybody can easily learn and keep up, and, as this research and many other scientific studies demonstrate, it benefits not just mind but body too."
Ranjit Banerji, 71, who learnt to meditate at the Oxford Transcendental Meditation Centre describes how the technique helped him:
"In 1979 I had a heart attack followed by frequent episodes of angina, an agonising chest pain. My GP suggested I try meditation, and I learnt TM three weeks later. The angina slowly subsided; gradually I got some control over it, and then it stopped altogether. My GP stopped the medications I was on, and I had no angina for 20 years.
"In 1999, following a bereavement and the consquent stress, the angina returned. The doctors decided to carry out an angioplasty, and this was done in 2000. After I recovered I was given a 'zapper' to use under my tongue if I got angina. I have never had to use it in almost ten years.
"Although I started meditation for medical reasons, I have carried on regularly for over 30 years because of the peace and harmony it brings into my life. The medical benefits are a bonus."
