TM and Mindfulness: How the Two Practices Are Taught

Transcendental Meditation and mindfulness are two of the styles of meditation most often offered to office workers in the United States. They are taught in different ways, and their teachers make different claims for them. This page explains the practical differences, what one well-known paper said about types of meditation, and what independent reviewers have been able to conclude.

How each is practiced

In TM, a student sits with eyes closed for about 20 minutes, twice a day, and silently repeats a mantra: a sound with no meaning, chosen by a certified teacher during a one-to-one lesson. The course follows a fixed format wherever it is taught. Teachers say the practice takes no effort and that students should not try to concentrate or push thoughts away.

Mindfulness asks something else. A person rests attention on the breath, or notices thoughts, feelings and sounds as they come and go, and brings attention back when it drifts. It is taught in many formats, from short guided sessions to group courses lasting several weeks. When the Financial Times columnist Charles Wallace compared the styles in 2014, he described mindfulness as focusing on the breath for set periods and TM as a mantra used twice a day for 20 minutes.

The 2010 paper on three kinds of meditation

The old page at this site leaned on a paper in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. It described the paper as published “this past summer”; in fact it appeared online in February 2010, in the December 2010 issue, by Fred Travis and Jonathan Shear.

The authors sorted meditation into three groups. Focused attention keeps the mind on one object. Open monitoring keeps the mind watching whatever arises, which is close to mindfulness. The third group, which they named automatic self-transcending, covers techniques meant to go beyond their own activity, and it includes TM. They linked each group to a pattern of brain waves reported in earlier EEG studies: faster beta and gamma waves for the first, theta for the second and alpha for the third.

Two cautions apply. The paper was a way of classifying earlier findings, not a new trial of whether one style helps people more than another. And Travis worked at Maharishi University of Management, a school founded by the man who brought TM to the West. The journal printed a comment on the paper alongside it.

What reviewers can say

Independent reviews have not found that either style beats standard treatments.

A 2014 Johns Hopkins review of 47 trials, mostly of mindfulness programs, found moderate evidence that mindfulness programs eased anxiety, depression and pain, and no evidence that meditation programs did better than active treatments such as drugs or exercise. Our page on the research gives the details.

The American Heart Association’s 2013 statement on blood pressure rated TM Class IIb, meaning it may be considered, and other meditation techniques Class III, meaning no benefit was shown. The Class III rating for other techniques rested on Level C evidence, the association’s term for very limited data. Our guide to the statement explains the ratings.

A 2007 report for the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality sorted meditation into five broad families, from mantra meditation to tai chi, and found most of the research poor in quality.

This page is general information, not medical advice. The Manhattan Business Review is not affiliated with the David Lynch Foundation or any Transcendental Meditation organization, and it does not sell courses. Transcendental Meditation and TM are trademarks of their owners.

Read next

• What is Transcendental Meditation? A plain guide for professionals
• What the research says about Transcendental Meditation
• From Maharishi to the boardroom: a short history of TM in business