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In May’s cover story, Katy Perry reveals the secret to her seemingly superhuman success: twice-daily sessions of a mindfulness technique called Transcendental Meditation. “It’s a game-changer,” she tells Vogue’s Hamish Bowles. “I will feel neuro pathways open, a halo of lights. And I’m so much sharper. I just fire up!”
Perry is far from the first high-profile figure to sing the praises of the cult-like practice, known informally as TM. Lena Dunham, whose mother first brought her to a TM teacher to help with her OCD symptoms when she was just 9 years old, has said that TM “has made it possible for me to weather certain challenges and storms and public moments that I didn’t ever imagine would be in my life.” Sky Ferreira adopted it for anxiety and insomnia, but found additional benefits: “It’s already made my life waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better & even with my stage fright,” she wrote on her Tumblr page. “It’s better than any medication or all of the other nonsense I’ve tried.” Gisele Bündchen, Lykke Li, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Miranda Kerr, and, yes, Gwyneth Paltrow have learned the technique; director David Lynch wrote an entire book dedicated to its creative benefits and started a namesake foundation in order to spread its teachings to people in need.
TM has around 6 million practitioners today, but it’s also been a pop-culture staple for decades; its initial rise during the heyday of late-’60s counterculture is interchangeable with that of meditation itself. The technique, which is practiced in two 20-minute sessions per day, was brought to the U.S. in 1959 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose disciples included the Beatles and Ravi Shankar. Its central principle—the use of a personally prescribed word with no meaning, repeated silently—was immortalized in a scene from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) that mocked Hollywood: “I forgot my mantra.”
In this age of anxiety, of course, most people at least know what a mantra is. New methods and venues for calming the mind are everywhere, from adorable smartphone apps to slick meditation mega-studios like Inscape and MNDFL. So what makes TM different from any of these options—or from simply sitting mindfully by yourself? According to Bob Roth, CEO of the David Lynch Foundation—and the man who taught TM to Perry—the difference lies in the specific approach itself as well as the way it’s taught. Learning TM requires four hours of one-on-one instruction with a trained teacher, spread over four consecutive days. That the process is so long and hands-on might explain why it’s not that simple to clarify to the uninitiated what, exactly, TM has you do.
Roth puts it this way: Many mindfulness techniques “attempt to influence or change the type of thoughts, the content of thoughts, and the quantity of thoughts to try and create calm in the mind. This often requires concentrated effort to master over time,” he says. TM, by comparison, “involves no concentration or control of the mind; it simply and effortlessly gives access to a level of the mind that lies deep within everyone, which is already perfectly calm and silent and peaceful and yet wide awake.”
Another way to look at the differences between TM and other mindfulness techniques is to compare them scientifically. According to Roth, many other methods utilize a “focused attention” model, which creates something called gamma brain waves that cycle at 20 to 50 times per second and provide cognitive and energetic benefits. Another common approach encourages the participant to detach from thoughts and observe them. This practice begets slow theta brain waves, four to seven cycles per second, and helps with stress and calming the nervous system. TM, somewhere in between, is a “self-transcending” approach that triggers alpha-1 waves (eight to 10 cycles per second), “and that is a state of deep inner calm, reflection, and yet [a feeling of being] wide awake inside. When that happens your body gains a state of rest and relaxation in many regards deeper than sleep.”
As for the benefits specific to TM, the research speaks for itself. Hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies specific to TM have demonstrated that it can reduce stress, anxiety, depression, cholesterol levels, pain, and chance of congestive heart failure and stroke; and improve intelligence, learning ability, creativity, productivity, and longevity.
Some skeptics wonder why learning to meditate should cost $960 (the four-session course fee for a single adult). Roth points out that psychotherapists often charge more. “It costs money like a hospital costs money or going to school costs money,” Roth says. “You have a certified teacher for the rest of your life to provide personalized instruction. You can learn something for free online, but there’s no evidence that it produces the same benefits.” He also notes that the technique is made available for free to those unable to pay, that TM is a nonprofit organization, and that his foundation has taught TM to half a million at-risk youth, veterans, homeless people, domestic violence victims, and other vulnerable populations.
One thing is certain: The importance of practicing mindfulness is no longer up for debate. “I think that the pressures and the demands of life today, the levels of stress, exceed anything that human beings have ever experienced in the past,” Roth says. “The human nervous system can’t handle it.” While TM is one of many tools—each with their own merits—available to mitigate this problem, the program does offer two specific things: extended personal attention and structure. The harder it becomes to sit still in the modern world, the more there might be to that.