What Is Transcendental Meditation? A Plain Guide for Professionals

What Transcendental Meditation is, how it is taught, how it differs from mindfulness and what independent reviews of the research have found.

Transcendental Meditation, usually shortened to TM, is a seated meditation done twice a day for about 20 minutes each time, once in the morning and once later in the day. The person sits in an ordinary chair with eyes closed. Each student learns it in person from a certified teacher and receives a mantra, a sound with no meaning, which is repeated silently. What it does, and how well the claims for it hold up, is what the pages in this series explain.

This web address once belonged to the Center for Leadership Performance, a New York nonprofit that taught TM to companies and worked with the David Lynch Foundation. The Manhattan Business Review now publishes at this address. The pages listed at the end of this guide cover, in our own words, the subjects the old site dealt with: the technique, the research, the course format, the New York town halls and the press coverage of 2013 and 2014.

How it is taught

TM is taught as a short course rather than from a book or an app. Course pages archived from this website between 2014 and 2022 describe the same shape every time: an introductory talk, a 90-minute one-to-one session with a teacher, and then three group sessions of 75 minutes each on the following days. A course page run today by Summit with the David Lynch Foundation lays out the same four days. Our page on how a TM course worked has the detail and the 2014 prices.

What its teachers say it is

TM teachers describe the practice as effortless. They say it asks for no concentration and no attempt to control thoughts, which is the main way they set it apart from other kinds of meditation. They also say it is not a religion or a philosophy. Bob Roth, who now leads the David Lynch Foundation, made that point to the Financial Times in 2014 and called it a technique for relaxation.

TM reached the United States in 1959 through Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian teacher. The Beatles made it famous in the 1960s. In 2014 the organization said, by its own count, that more than 6 million people had learned it worldwide, 1.5 million of them in the United States. Our short history follows the story from Maharishi to the trading floor.

How it differs from mindfulness

Mindfulness, the other widely taught style, asks people to rest their attention on the breath or to notice thoughts and feelings as they pass. TM uses a mantra instead. A 2010 paper in the journal Consciousness and Cognition sorted meditation into three groups by the brain activity reported for each, and put TM in a group of its own. The authors worked at Maharishi University of Management, a school founded by Maharishi. Our page on TM and mindfulness explains the paper and its limits.

What independent reviews say, in brief

Much of the research on TM comes from scientists linked to the TM movement. Two reviews by outside bodies are the most useful place to start. In 2013 the American Heart Association reviewed nondrug ways to lower blood pressure. It rated TM Class IIb, Level of Evidence B, which in the association’s scale means it may be considered, and it rated other meditation techniques lower. In 2014 a Johns Hopkins team reviewed 47 trials with 3,515 people, mostly of mindfulness programs, in JAMA Internal Medicine. It 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 goes through the studies one by one.

Who teaches it in New York

The film director David Lynch started the David Lynch Foundation in 2005. Lynch died in January 2025, and the foundation continues under Bob Roth, its chief executive. It says it has paid for TM instruction for more than 1.5 million people, among them students, veterans and health care workers. The foundation and TM.org list current courses and fees. The Manhattan Business Review does not run or sell courses.

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.