More than 350 schools all over the world have begun to incorporate the Quiet Time / Transcendental Meditation program as part of their curriculum during the past five years—thanks to the work of the David Lynch Foundation. David started his Foundation to make the TM technique available to help students reduce stress, improve academic performance and, most of all, to enliven their full creativity and intelligence.
The Museum of Art School in Tucson, Arizona, was one of the first schools to adopt Quiet Time. Program manager Katie Samson thought it would be especially useful to help calm keyed up students. “Our kids are right brain thinkers, they’re visual artists and they sometimes need to settle down a little bit,” Ms. Samson said. “I thought this would be a great opportunity for our students to not only learn intellectually about meditation, but I thought it could really help their artwork and their creativity as well.”
Check out this video of the students, teachers, and administrators talking about their experiences with the TM program.
Said Alice, a 17-year-old student at the Museum of Art School, “I find I have clearer visions for my paintings after I meditate.”
Jonathan, 16, added: “My creativity has opened a lot because of meditation.”
Another Tucson school, Arizona High School, incorporated Quiet Time with similar, excellent results. Said the School’s athletic director, “Our kids are inundated with noise all day long. They’ve got iPods, video games, and videos on TV. I believe they need some time every day to just shut all that out and focus a little bit on themselves—and then along came this opportunity for TM.”
School administrators were pleased with the effects of TM practice on reducing negative student behavior. These experiences were confirmed by a recent study published in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes which found that meditating students showed decreased absenteeism, suspensions, and rule infractions.
(Writer’s note: I must interject here, speaking from my own experience as a student who grew up attending a school that offered the TM program. I know it is very important that students are inspired to attend school and not act out in class. But that does not tell the whole story about Quiet Time. What is most important is that students have the ability to dive deep within their own consciousness to experience real freedom inside, and then return to activity 10 minutes later feeling wide awake inside with their mind crystal clear, focused, and creative.)
David Lynch says it best in the introduction to his wonderful book, Catching the Big Fish: “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful… Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness—your awareness—is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you will catch.”
