What Is Transcendental Meditation? A Clear-Eyed Look at the Technique, the Science, and the Controversy

On the evening of November 21, 1975, a small Indian man with long hair and a white robe sat cross-legged on a couch across from Merv Griffin and, in the space of a few minutes, introduced millions of American television viewers to a practice he said could end suffering. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had been circulating through Western lecture halls since the late 1950s, and by that point he had already attracted — and lost — the Beatles. But the Merv Griffin appearance hit differently. Griffin, a mainstream entertainer with a massive daytime audience, treated Maharishi not as a curiosity but as a guest worth serious conversation. Within weeks, TM centers across the country reported a surge in enrollment. Clint Eastwood learned. So did the Beach Boys’ Mike Love. The comedian Andy Kaufman had already been practicing for years.

Half a century later, Transcendental Meditation — TM, as its practitioners almost invariably call it — occupies a peculiar position in American culture. It is practiced, according to the organization’s own figures, by more than ten million people worldwide. It has been the subject of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and has received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health. It is taught in inner-city schools in San Francisco, in veterans’ clinics in the Midwest, and in corporate offices in Manhattan. At the same time, it charges nearly a thousand dollars for instruction, guards the secrecy of its mantras with an almost religious intensity, and has faced decades of criticism from skeptics who argue it is, at best, no more effective than sitting quietly with your eyes closed.

So which is it — a genuinely distinctive technique with measurable physiological effects, or a well-marketed brand of relaxation dressed up in Vedic mysticism? The answer, as with most things worth examining, resists simple categories.

The Technique Itself

Describing what happens during a TM session is straightforward. Describing why it is supposed to work differently from other meditation practices is where things get complicated.

A practitioner sits comfortably with eyes closed — in a chair, on a couch, on a train if necessary — and silently repeats a mantra. The session lasts twenty minutes. It happens twice a day, ideally once in the morning and once in the late afternoon. That’s it. There are no visualizations, no breathing exercises, no body scans, no attempt to observe thoughts from a distance.

The mantra itself is a Sanskrit sound — not a word with semantic meaning, TM teachers emphasize, but a vibration selected for its specific quality. The organization maintains that the mantra is chosen individually for each practitioner, though former teachers and researchers have noted that the selection is based primarily on the student’s age and gender, drawn from a set of perhaps sixteen to twenty mantras. Practitioners are told not to share their mantra with anyone. This secrecy has been a source of both mystique and irritation for decades.

The instruction process follows a rigid four-day format. On the first day, the student meets one-on-one with a certified TM teacher for a brief ceremony — the puja — in which the teacher makes offerings of flowers, fruit, and a white handkerchief before a portrait of Guru Dev, Maharishi’s own teacher. The student receives their mantra during this ceremony. The following three days consist of group sessions in which the teacher checks the student’s practice, answers questions, and provides guidance on what to expect over the coming weeks and months.

What makes TM distinctive, according to its proponents, is not the mantra itself but the specific way in which the practitioner relates to it. The instruction is to think the mantra effortlessly — not to concentrate on it, not to push away other thoughts, not to try to keep the mind still. The mantra is meant to become quieter and more refined on its own, drawing the mind inward toward what Maharishi called “the source of thought,” a state of restful alertness the tradition identifies as pure consciousness or turiya. When the mind wanders, the practitioner simply returns to the mantra without effort or judgment.

TM teachers are careful to distinguish this from concentration-based practices (in which the meditator holds attention on a single point) and from mindfulness-based practices (in which the meditator observes thoughts and sensations without attachment). Whether these distinctions hold up under scrutiny is one of the central questions in meditation research.

A Physicist’s Son from Central India

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was born Mahesh Prasad Varma in 1918 — or possibly 1917 or 1911, depending on the source — in Jabalpur, a city in what was then the Central Provinces of British India. He studied physics at Allahabad University before becoming a disciple of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math, one of the most senior positions in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Hinduism. Maharishi spent thirteen years with Brahmananda Saraswati, known reverently as Guru Dev, before his teacher’s death in 1953.

After a period of seclusion in Uttarkashi in the Himalayas, Maharishi began teaching publicly in 1955. His innovation — and it was a genuine innovation within the context of Indian spiritual teaching — was to strip a form of mantra meditation from its traditional monastic framework and present it as a practical technique accessible to ordinary householders. Meditation, he argued, did not require renunciation, moral preparation, or years of study. You needed twenty minutes and a mantra.

He founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in Madras in 1958 and almost immediately began traveling. By 1959, he had lectured in Rangoon, Hong Kong, Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, and Paris. The timing was not accidental. The late 1950s and 1960s saw a broad Western appetite for Eastern spiritual practices, and Maharishi proved an unusually effective communicator — warm, prone to laughter, and willing to frame his teachings in terms that resonated with a secular audience.

The turning point came in 1968. In February of that year, the Beatles — along with Donovan, Mia Farrow, and Mike Love — traveled to Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, for an extended meditation retreat. The images from that trip became some of the most iconic photographs of the 1960s: John Lennon and George Harrison sitting cross-legged in white kurtas, garlands around their necks, the Ganges glinting in the background. The visit ended badly — Lennon and Harrison left abruptly, reportedly over allegations of inappropriate behavior by Maharishi toward women at the ashram, allegations the organization has consistently denied. But the damage to the relationship did not diminish the publicity. Overnight, TM became the most famous meditation technique in the world.

The 1970s were the movement’s golden period. By 1977, the TM organization claimed over a million practitioners in the United States alone. TM centers opened in virtually every major American city. Maharishi appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Universities began offering courses on the “Science of Creative Intelligence,” a theoretical framework Maharishi developed to explain TM’s effects in quasi-scientific terms. And a young graduate student at UCLA named Robert Keith Wallace published a paper that would reshape the relationship between meditation and Western science.

What the Research Actually Shows

Wallace’s 1970 paper in Science, titled “Physiological Effects of Transcendental Meditation,” was a landmark. It reported that TM practitioners showed decreased oxygen consumption, reduced heart rate, increased skin resistance, and increased alpha wave activity in the brain during meditation. Wallace described these changes as evidence of a “wakeful hypometabolic state” distinct from sleeping, dreaming, or ordinary waking consciousness. The paper was among the first to suggest that meditation produced a unique physiological condition, and it generated enormous interest — both in the scientific community and in the TM movement, which promoted the findings relentlessly.

Since then, over 400 peer-reviewed studies on TM have been published in journals including The American Journal of Cardiology, The American Journal of Hypertension, JAMA Internal Medicine, and The International Journal of Neuroscience. The body of research is large. It is also deeply uneven.

The strongest evidence concerns cardiovascular health. A series of randomized controlled trials led by Robert Schneider at the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention (affiliated with Maharishi International University, formerly Maharishi University of Management) examined TM’s effects on African American adults with coronary heart disease. A key 2012 study published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes reported a 48 percent reduction in the combined risk of heart attack, stroke, and death among TM practitioners compared to a health education control group over a median follow-up of five years. The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a division of the NIH.

In 2013, the American Heart Association issued a scientific statement — published in Hypertension — that reviewed existing evidence on meditation and cardiovascular risk. The statement concluded that TM could be considered for clinical practice as an adjunct to standard treatment for hypertension, noting that it had the most consistent and robust evidence among meditation techniques studied. Mindfulness-based approaches were judged to have insufficient evidence at that time.

Research on anxiety reduction has also been relatively strong. A 2014 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that TM produced significant reductions in trait anxiety, with larger effect sizes than most other meditation and relaxation techniques examined. Researchers at the Veterans Affairs system have conducted trials showing benefits for PTSD symptoms in military veterans, though sample sizes have generally been small.

But the caveats are substantial. Critics — notably the psychiatrist and meditation researcher Willoughby Britton at Brown University, and the psychologist Nicholas Van Dam — have pointed out several recurring issues in TM research. Many of the studies were conducted by researchers with institutional ties to Maharishi International University or the TM organization. Blinding is inherently difficult in meditation studies; participants know whether they are meditating. Control groups vary widely in quality. Publication bias — the tendency to publish positive results and shelve negative ones — is a concern across meditation research, and TM research is no exception.

A 2014 review by Madhav Goyal and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, examined 47 randomized controlled trials of meditation programs and concluded that mindfulness meditation had moderate evidence for reducing anxiety, depression, and pain. TM had fewer eligible trials but showed comparable or stronger effects for anxiety. The review cautioned, however, that overall evidence quality was moderate at best and that many studies suffered from methodological limitations.

The question of whether TM produces a physiologically unique state — the core claim that separates it from simple relaxation — remains contested. Fred Travis, a neuroscientist at Maharishi International University, has published EEG studies reporting distinctive patterns of frontal alpha coherence during TM practice, which he interprets as evidence of a specific “transcendental” state. Other researchers, including some at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin, have argued that similar EEG patterns can be observed during other relaxation states and that the evidence for a unique fourth state of consciousness is not conclusive.

The Money Question

Transcendental Meditation costs $980 for a standard adult course in the United States as of 2025. For a college student, the fee drops to $480. Partial scholarships and reduced rates are available for veterans, active-duty military personnel, individuals with financial hardship, and through various grant-funded programs. The fee covers the initial four-day instruction, a series of follow-up sessions over several months, and what the organization describes as lifetime access to TM centers worldwide for checking and advanced programs.

The price has long been one of the most common criticisms of TM. When the technique was first introduced in the United States in the early 1960s, instruction was offered on a donation basis. By the mid-1970s, a standardized fee structure had been introduced. By the early 2000s, the course cost had risen to $2,500 for adults — a figure that prompted significant backlash and, many observers believe, contributed to a decline in new practitioners. The organization reduced the fee to $1,500 in 2008 and then to its current level in subsequent years.

TM advocates argue that the fee ensures quality instruction, supports the infrastructure of teaching centers, funds outreach programs (including free instruction for at-risk populations through the David Lynch Foundation), and reflects the value of one-on-one personalized teaching. They point out that the cost is comparable to other professional health programs and that the lifetime follow-up distinguishes TM from meditation apps or drop-in classes.

Critics counter that the core technique — silently repeating a mantra for twenty minutes — should not require a thousand-dollar price tag, that the organization’s finances are opaque, and that the fee creates a barrier that disproportionately excludes the very populations (low-income, high-stress) that might benefit most. Some former TM teachers, including the author and instructor Bob Roth (who has publicly supported the fee), and defectors who have become critical of the organization, have offered sharply diverging views on whether the cost is justified.

Secrecy, Religion, and the Courtroom

The question of whether TM is a religious practice or a secular technique has genuine legal and cultural significance.

In 1977, a federal court in New Jersey ruled in Malnak v. Yogi that TM was fundamentally religious in nature and that its teaching in public schools therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The court pointed to the puja ceremony, the invocation of Hindu deities, and the Vedic origins of the mantras as evidence that TM could not be separated from its religious roots. The TM organization appealed and lost.

The ruling effectively shut down a wave of TM programs in public schools during the late 1970s and cast a shadow over the movement’s claims of scientific secularity. The organization has spent decades since attempting to reframe TM as a purely evidence-based mental technique — a “technology of consciousness,” in Maharishi’s phrase — that anyone can practice regardless of religious affiliation.

Whether that framing is persuasive depends largely on how you define religion. The puja ceremony is still performed. The mantras are still drawn from the Vedic tradition. Advanced TM programs, including the TM-Sidhi program introduced in 1976, include practices such as “yogic flying” — a form of hopping that practitioners claim is a precursor to levitation — that are rooted in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The organization maintains separate entities, including the Global Country of World Peace, that advance explicitly spiritual and political goals.

At the same time, millions of TM practitioners describe their experience in entirely non-religious terms. They sit. They close their eyes. They repeat a sound. They feel calmer. The question of whether the tradition behind the technique matters — whether the puja is essential or vestigial, whether a Sanskrit mantra is qualitatively different from any repeated syllable — is not one science has definitively answered.

TM Versus Mindfulness: A Useful Comparison, Up to a Point

The comparison between TM and mindfulness-based practices — particularly Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979 — is instructive, though partisans on both sides tend to oversimplify it.

The techniques differ in their core instructions. MBSR teaches practitioners to bring nonjudgmental awareness to present-moment experience — bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions, sounds — without trying to change anything. The emphasis is on observation and acceptance. TM teaches practitioners to use a mantra as a vehicle for allowing the mind to settle inward. The emphasis is on effortlessness and the natural tendency of the mind to move toward greater satisfaction.

Fred Travis and Jonathan Shear published an influential 2010 paper in Consciousness and Cognition proposing a three-category framework for meditation techniques: focused attention (such as Zen concentration practices), open monitoring (such as mindfulness and Vipassana), and automatic self-transcending (TM). They argued that each category was associated with distinct EEG signatures. The paper was widely cited, though some researchers questioned whether the categories were too rigid or whether the EEG differences were as clear as claimed.

From a practical standpoint, MBSR is typically taught in an eight-week group course, is widely available through hospitals and community centers, and costs significantly less than TM. Its research base is extensive and growing, with particularly strong evidence for chronic pain, recurrent depression, and general psychological well-being. It does not require a personal mantra or a one-on-one initiation ceremony.

TM’s advantage, its proponents argue, is simplicity. There is one technique, taught the same way everywhere, with no requirement for ongoing group participation, body awareness exercises, or homework beyond the twice-daily practice. The standardization of instruction — every TM teacher worldwide follows the same protocol — is presented as a feature, not a limitation.

Whether one approach is “better” than the other is almost certainly the wrong question. Different people respond to different practices. Some find the open, exploratory quality of mindfulness engaging. Others prefer the simplicity of a mantra. The research does not clearly establish the superiority of either approach across all populations and outcomes, though the evidence base for mindfulness is broader simply because more independent researchers have studied it.

Where TM Stands Now

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died on February 5, 2008, in Vlodrop, the Netherlands, where he had lived in relative seclusion since the mid-1990s. Leadership of the TM movement passed to Tony Nader, a Lebanese-born neuroscientist whom Maharishi had designated as his successor and crowned — literally, with a gold crown — as “Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaraam.” Nader has continued to lead the organization, maintaining Maharishi’s emphasis on the scientific validation of TM while also developing the more esoteric aspects of Maharishi’s Vedic Science.

The organization today is a sprawling, multinational operation. Maharishi International University (formerly Maharishi University of Management) in Fairfield, Iowa, offers accredited undergraduate and graduate degrees. The TM organization operates teaching centers in most major cities worldwide. The movement’s presence in Fairfield itself — a small Iowa town that became an unlikely hub when Maharishi directed thousands of followers to relocate there in the 1970s — remains a fascinating case study in the intersection of spiritual community and rural America.

The David Lynch Foundation, established in 2005 by the filmmaker David Lynch, has been the most visible vehicle for TM outreach over the past two decades. The foundation has funded TM instruction for hundreds of thousands of at-risk students in schools across the United States, Latin America, and Africa. It has also funded programs for veterans with PTSD, women who are survivors of domestic violence, and incarcerated individuals. Lynch himself — who has practiced TM since 1973 and has been its most prominent public advocate — has brought a degree of cultural credibility that the organization’s own efforts might not have achieved.

In schools, the results have been notable. The Visitacion Valley Middle School program in San Francisco, launched in 2007, reported dramatic reductions in suspensions and improvements in attendance and academic performance after introducing TM as part of its “Quiet Time” program. The results attracted widespread media coverage, including a segment on NBC Nightly News, and contributed to the expansion of similar programs in other districts. Peer-reviewed research on school-based TM programs, however, remains limited, and critics have noted that many of the most widely cited outcomes are based on observational data rather than randomized controlled trials.

Celebrity endorsements continue to play an outsized role in TM’s public profile. In addition to Lynch, public figures including Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, and Ray Dalio (the founder of Bridgewater Associates, who has funded TM research and programs) have spoken about their practices. Dalio, in particular, has credited TM with shaping his approach to decision-making and has supported the introduction of TM in Connecticut public schools through philanthropic donations.

The tension at the heart of TM has not resolved. The organization continues to present the technique as a universal, evidence-based practice available to anyone regardless of background or belief. And simultaneously, it remains embedded in a larger system — Maharishi Vedic Science, with its theories of cosmic consciousness, its model of the unified field of natural law, and its program of yogic flying — that most mainstream scientists regard with deep skepticism.

Perhaps that tension is the point. Or perhaps it is simply the inevitable consequence of transplanting a practice rooted in one of the world’s oldest spiritual traditions into the clinical language of Western medicine and expecting it to fit neatly. TM is not the only meditation technique to face this dilemma. It is simply the one that has faced it longest, most publicly, and with the most money on the line.

What is not in serious dispute is that millions of people sit down twice a day, close their eyes, and silently repeat a Sanskrit sound — and that a meaningful number of them report feeling genuinely, measurably better for it. Whether that outcome requires a specific mantra, a certified teacher, a thousand-dollar fee, and the theoretical framework of Vedic science, or whether any quiet twenty minutes would do roughly the same thing, is a question that five decades of research have narrowed but not closed.

It may be the kind of question that meditation, by its nature, is not designed to answer.