The New York Times and Washington Post bestseller Transcendence: Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation has just been named a Nautilus Book Award Silver Winner for 2012.
The Nautilus Awards are given out each year to “books that promote spiritual growth, conscious living & positive social change, while at the same time stimulating the imagination of the reader and offering them new possibilities for a better life and a better world.”
The author of Transcendence, Dr. Norman Rosenthal, is a prominent Washington, DC-area psychiatrist and medical researcher who first gained international renowned for his work describing seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and pioneering the use of light therapy. Dr. Rosenthal also serves as clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine.
I wrote Dr. Rosenthal and asked him why he authored Transcendence—and how he feels about the honors his book is receiving. Below are some of his answers.
Dr. Norman Rosenthal:
“As I look back on how I came to write Transcendence, it feels as though I followed the clues in a treasure hunt. A patient of mine tells me that Transcendental Meditation has changed his life. I tell him I learned TM long ago, but dropped the practice. He encourages me (nags me, really) to get back to it. So I do. Then it transforms my life, makes me calmer, happier, more creative. So I do research on it – and it works. And I recommend it to patients – and it works again. Before I know it, I have broken a resolution not to write any more books (what are resolutions for anyway, but to break?) and, voila! Transcendence.
“It has been fulfilling to witness the book’s effect. Here’s the kind of message I have received from people who learned TM as a result of reading Transcendence and wanted to thank me for writing it.
‘Anxieties are essentially gone. I feel true joy, natural and unforced, coming from within. I have clarity of thoughts with a pro-active and enthusiastic vision toward the future. I experience real or perceived increased mental acuity and sharpness.
‘I feel relaxation and peacefulness that lasts through the entire day. I feel like I am being “real,” perhaps for the first time (a scary thought) and it feels fantastic!
‘I have always been considered by others to be a very positive and well-adjusted person. Now, I feel that I really am that person.
‘It is hard to get me upset about anything.
‘I feel like a different person… someone I like very much.
My wife doesn’t know quite what to make of all this yet.’
“Just yesterday I was talking to a fellow psychiatrist, who read Transcendence and is now practicing TM and recommending it to his patients. “It’s just so pleasant,” he said, echoing my own surprise that something that has been so good for me and others could also be so pleasurable. I commented that when you visit a place inside yourself that feels so pleasant, it is natural to begin to think, “I’m not such a bad guy after all if there’s such a happy place inside of me.”
“These, then, are some of the greatest rewards that writing Transcendence has brought me – the knowledge of passing along something that can be so helpful and, in some people, transformational.”
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Transcendence has been published in British English for distribution in Great Britain and throughout the British Commomwealth, and is currently being translated into Swedish, Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese and Greek.
If you haven’t yet purchased a copy of Transcendence, you can order it online at Amazon.com. Or you can pre-order the new paperback edition which features an excellent new chapter by Dr. Rosenthal on the use of the TM technique in businesses and organizations.