The Quiet Power of Transcendental Meditation

Below is a summary of a January 3 CBS Sunday Morning News report on meditation. To watch the full video visit here: The Quiet Power of Meditation

Transcendental Meditation (TM) is no longer a strictly alternative practice. Today daily practice of TM is embraced by health professionals, celebrities, and educators alike for its scientifically validated benefits and its ability to calm the mind.

Acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch has been practicing TM for over 40 years. “People see things like stress, traumatic stress, tension, anxiety, sorrow, depression, hate, anger and fear start to lift away,” Lynch said. “So it’s like pure gold coming in from within and garbage going on.”

In 2005 Lynch set up the David Lynch Foundation to help bring Transcendental Meditation to students and at-risk populations.

Principal Jennifer Garcia says her school — like 43 other schools that have adopted the program — has changed for the better.

“Kids are calm, and they’re not taking stuff out on each other,” said Garcia. “And they’re really engaged in wanting to be helpful with each other. It’s a different place.”

And the benefits of TM go beyond the classroom. Scientific research shows that regular practice of TM has a wide range of health benefits benefits like lowering the risk of heart attach and stroke. Meditation has even been shown to impact the cellular level of the body, slowing the effects of aging and increasing neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to grow new brain cells.

“They thought that once you were an adult, neuroplasticity was gone,” said Dr. John Denniger, director of research at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. “That has clearly been shown not to be the case. One of the clear findings is that meditation has the ability to actually make certain brain regions thicker, and that means that there is a growth of brain cells.” This means that the practice of meditation improves the brain’s ability to develop new connections and strengthen existing ones.

It’s because of the calming effect Transcendental Meditation and the benefits shown by researchers like Dr. Denniger that people all across the globe practice Transcendental Meditation.

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Original article and video featured on CBS Sunday Morning