{"id":10163,"date":"2013-09-30T16:08:19","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T20:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tm.org\/blog\/?p=10163"},"modified":"2013-10-03T16:37:05","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T20:37:05","slug":"the-totally-%e2%80%a8stressed-out-%e2%80%a8mans-guide-%e2%80%a8to-meditation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/meditation\/the-totally-%e2%80%a8stressed-out-%e2%80%a8mans-guide-%e2%80%a8to-meditation\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2028\u201cThe Totally \u2028Stressed-Out \u2028Man\u2019s Guide \u2028to Meditation\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In the September issue of GQ magazine article about the Transcendental Meditation technique leads with this teaser:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most successful, innovative men alive do it. Overworked, very, very busy hedge-fund managers swear by it.\u201d So, writer Josh Dean asks, should you close your eyes for 20 minutes twice a day and join in? Will it work even if you\u2019re skeptical?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are some more excerpts from Mr. Dean\u2019s charming article which seeks to provide an answer to this important question:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The most successful, innovative men alive do it. Overworked, very, very busy (and insanely rich) hedge-fund managers swear by it. So the question is: Should you cross your legs, close your eyes, and join in?<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are a few things Jerry Seinfeld and I have in common: We both wear sneakers far more often than grown men should. We both adore the New York Mets and thus subject ourselves to undue misery. And we both sit quietly for twenty minutes twice a day, attempting to calm our minds. Seinfeld, presumably, is far better at it than I am. He\u2019s been practicing Transcendental Meditation, or TM, for more than forty years. I\u2019ve only recently taken it up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Transcendental Meditation, if you\u2019re not aware, is having something of a moment. Despite being 5,000 years old and in the public consciousness at least since 1968 (when the Beatles traveled to India, took up meditating, and were so mind-blown that they wrote the White Album), TM spent most of the past half century out on the hippie fringe. If people thought anything about it, it was that TM was weird and maybe kind of cultish. But a dedicated core of reasonable people have been practicing it all along, and their ranks keep swelling, so TM is now following the path of yoga\u2014another import from India, once marginalized as a trifle for tempeh enthusiasts\u2014into the mainstream, where it can safely be sampled by even self-conscious, risk-averse people like me.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou know how your phone has a charger?\u201d Seinfeld said last year, during an appearance on Good Morning America. \u201cTM is like having a charger for your mind and body.\u201d Russell Brand, who says TM helped him stay sober, calls it \u201ca shower for your brain.\u201d And gray-pompadoured film director David Lynch\u2014whose eponymous foundation is the driving force behind the recent boom in the popularity of TM in America, converting everyone from Oprah to Rupert Murdoch\u2014says that his twice-daily meditations give him \u201ceffortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity, and happiness deep within.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But the name that jumped out most when I started looking at TM\u2019s fans was Ray Dalio, founder and chairman of Bridgewater, the world\u2019s largest hedge fund. Dalio is a superhero of the financial world. And what the 63-year-old has to say about TM\u2014which he started doing forty years ago, in college\u2014is not ambiguous: \u201cI think meditation has been the single biggest reason for whatever success I\u2019ve had.\u201d This from the thirty-third-richest man in America.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over nearly forty years of living, I\u2019d never once given meditation even the slightest consideration. Though I\u2019m very liberal and (I think) pretty open-minded, it always seemed way too hippie-dippy and, to a guy who struggles to sit still, like a form of torture. But these weren\u2019t the names of weirdoes. And Ray Dalio is hardly the kind of guy who\u2019d waste forty minutes of every day for forty years on a fad. I decided to kick TM\u2019s tires.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re skeptical, fabulous! You should be. I was skeptical.\u201d This is Bob Roth talking. Roth is the executive director of the David Lynch Foundation, and my TM teacher. He is a tall, slender man with charcoal-colored hair and, at least in April, a healthy tan; he bears a slight resemblance to George Plimpton, but with flashier teeth. Roth has been practicing TM for forty-four years and teaching it for forty-one. He took it up at the suggestion of a close friend but says that his initial reaction was to recoil because of TM\u2019s flower-power-y taint. \u201cThe thing I asked my teacher was, how much of this do I have to believe in for it to work? He said you can be 100 percent skeptical and it\u2019ll still work.\u201d Roth is generous with his smiles, and he shot me a big one. \u201cThe cool thing about this is you don\u2019t have to believe in anything. There\u2019s no philosophy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Other forms of meditation require a far greater commitment and can be more difficult to adopt. They teach either extreme concentration (an intense focus on one particular thing, and only that thing) or contemplation (thinking as hard as you can about the present, which is often referred to as mindfulness), but what makes TM so user-friendly is that you don\u2019t have to do either. It\u2019s easy\u2014\u201ceffortless,\u201d as Roth is fond of saying.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roth was scheduled to run across midtown Manhattan to talk to a hedge fund whose founder wished to introduce the concept to his employees, and I asked if I could tag along. Nigol Koulajian, 46, is the founder of Quest Partners, an $850 million hedge fund. He was exactly the kind of person I most wanted to meet\u2014a successful entrepreneur in a very conservative business that doesn\u2019t exactly encourage deviation from the norm. So why does he do it?<\/span><\/p>\n

Koulajian works out and does yoga, but he later told me that TM is the most important piece of his wellness regime: \u201cI do it every day, no matter what. I feel like if I don\u2019t do it, then something in my actions that day will not be of the same quality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/a><\/span>

Click To Enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

He said that he\u2019s come, over two decades of working in finance, to see that most people are afraid to think independently, and follow their instincts. Instead, their decisions are based too much on external influences. \u201cWhen you do that, you don\u2019t have your own sense and convictions,\u201d he said. \u201cTM has given me some sense of what my real inner feeling is about something. If I wasn\u2019t practicing, I\u2019d just be going along with the crowd.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I learned to meditate on an overstuffed lounge chair in an otherwise bare interior office that might also have been an old closet in its previous life. I\u2019d imagined my TM lessons would be held someplace better smelling and more womblike, the kind of place that would encourage peaceful inward thinking. But one of the primary selling points of TM is that it\u2019s easy to learn and practice. Once you\u2019ve learned, Roth says, you can do it in a taxi. (And he has.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn TM, we learn how to give the attention of the mind an inward direction rather than out there,\u201d Roth said. \u201cIt\u2019s like teaching a child how to dive: Take the correct angle and the rest is automatic. You don\u2019t have to say, \u2018Don\u2019t stop.\u2019 It\u2019s just gravity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

If TM is the one form of meditation that has successfully gone mainstream, the reason is that it seems to work. And the science backs that up. To date, there have been more than 340 research studies into the benefits, and one of the David Lynch Foundation\u2019s primary goals is taking those benefits to people who need them most\u2014prisoners, victims of abuse, war veterans, underprivileged children.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most tangible result of practicing TM is the way it reduces stress. If the only thing it did was cause you to sit quietly with your eyes closed, this would reduce stress in your life, providing a forced break from the furious fire hose of data and stimulation blasting you on a second-by-second basis. But TM\u2019s effect appears to be far more powerful than that. Some psychologists have taken to calling stress the \u201cBlack Plague of the twenty-first century,\u201d because it is a runaway condition with no obvious cure. Stress causes inflammation, weakens the immune system, and is a risk factor for all kinds of serious health problems, from heart disease to depression. TM has, over many studies, helped cut stress and lower blood pressure. It has been shown to ease depression, curb violent impulses, and lessen symptoms of ADD and ADHD. It has even, as the TM adherent Dr. Mehmet Oz pointed out, been found to reduce skin lesions in some patients.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stress also affects the prefrontal cortex, home of the higher brain and the source of what is sometimes called executive function; here lie judgment and problem solving. Being stressed can cause us to make poor decisions, and being under stress is a given of doing business. The power of TM, it seems, is in teaching the brain to maintain what Ray Dalio, king of the hedge-fund world, calls a \u201ccalm, clearheaded state.\u201d He says that mastering TM made him feel \u201clike a ninja,\u201d so that problems come at him in slow motion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bob Roth is of the belief that TM taps an inner calm we all have, a calm that gives the brain a chance to settle and repair its frazzled neurons. During our first classes, he was quick to point out that newbie meditators can\u2019t expect to achieve some perfect transcendent state. Distracting thoughts occur and are expected, and you need not try to push them out. They are the manifestation of the brain shedding stress, he says, and they\u2019re just part of the process.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe hypothesis\u2014and I love to tell people that you don\u2019t have to believe in it\u2014is that every single human being has a level deep inside the mind that\u2019s already calm,\u201d Roth said. \u201cIt was that way yesterday, it\u2019s there now, and it will be there tomorrow. Everybody\u2014the kid in the inner-city school, the skeptic working on a hedge fund\u2014everybody\u2019s got that. We\u2019ve just lost access.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing everyone asks you, when you share the news you\u2019ve taken up meditating, is: Does it work? My wife in particular liked to ask me this, and I tended to tell her one of these things: I think. I\u2019m not sure. I can\u2019t tell. The honest truth is that this is a very hard question to answer. (She also laughs at me\u2014still!\u2014every time I tell her I\u2019m going to meditate.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The question I was asking two months after my first session, when I went for a follow-up, was about the mixed quality of my meditations. Sometimes, when my mind is most at ease, and not preoccupied by thoughts\u2014especially the annoying meta-thoughts, such as \u201cI wonder how much time is left?\u201d\u2014the time flies by. TM can be like a tour through your subconscious, and in twenty minutes you can cover a lot of ground traipsing past the various things agitating your psyche. It can also be trippy, and I am sometimes startled to find myself a few minutes into a lucid dream.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other times, I struggle greatly. Then, time crawls. I\u2019ve taken some relief in Ray Dalio\u2019s experience. He says that it took him \u201ca while, probably months,\u201d to get past meditations that were basically a tennis match between conscious thoughts and the mantra to a point \u201cwhere I could clear my mind of thoughts and start transcending.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the fact that Roth had told me, repeatedly, not to use the mantra as a club with which to bat away thoughts, I admitted that at times I was doing exactly that. And the worst part was that I was quick to observe myself doing this, and this would immediately cause me to commence thinking about all the ways I was doing it wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roth stared at me with no expression. \u201cAre you enjoying it?<\/span>
\n Do you generally feel good after?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I said that I did, nearly always.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201dThen don\u2019t worry about it. This should be simple. It\u2019s not like it only works if you do it, absolutely and without fail, for twenty minutes twice a day.\u201d Roth was, as good teachers are, gentle and reassuring without taking himself or the subject too seriously.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s an old saw about golf\u2014that it takes only one great shot in an otherwise awful round to keep you coming back\u2014and similarly, the meditations that work best, that feel easy and pass quickly, make you want to keep going. And those in particular do seem to provide more tangible benefits, in particular a more restful and focused mind. I am finding myself able to concentrate more fully on the task at hand, to better adjust the volume on distracting background noise. Now, I still haven\u2019t reached the ninja realms of Ray Dalio and David Lynch, and I\u2019m skeptical that I ever will\u2014I can\u2019t help myself. But that hasn\u2019t kept me from closing my eyes every day [and meditating].<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a9 2013 by GQ Magazine<\/em>
\n———————————————<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Josh Dean has written for GQ, Outside,<\/strong> and Rolling Stone<\/strong>.
\n
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\u201cThe most successful, innovative men alive do it. Overworked, very, very busy hedge-fund managers swear by it.\u201d So, writer Josh Dean asks, should you close your eyes for 20 minutes twice a day and join in? Will it work even if you\u2019re skeptical?\u201d Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,3],"tags":[57,67,78,295,32],"class_list":["post-10163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloggers","category-meditation","tag-celebrity","tag-david-lynch","tag-happiness","tag-meditation","tag-stress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}