If you were to ask a few people who practise TM what it actually is, you would probably get a number of different replies.
One person might say, ‘I have high blood pressure and it was recommended to me by my doctor. It is my anti-hypertensive practice’.
A business person might call it their ‘personal productivity tool’.
For an artist it might be ‘the way I unlock my creativity’.
For others it could be a stress management technique, an aid to sleep, a natural progression from yoga, or a way to experience balance and harmony and live more in tune with Nature.
An experience, not a belief system
The truth is that it doesn’t matter how you describe TM. The main thing to understand is that it is an experience. It is an experience of the quietest level of your own mind. It is the state you achieve when all the busy activity of every day thinking has settled down and come to rest, where the mind is awake but non-active. This is an experience of your inner Self.
You can think of TM like turning the volume down on a radio: the music becomes quieter and quieter, until you can’t hear it any more. In the same way during TM the thinking process naturally settles down until you are left is a state where the mind is quiet, but still awake.
The benefits from TM are many, and they come from regularity of the practice: normally two 20-minute sessions each day. And for most people it works to do the morning one as part of a getting up routine, and the evening one late afternoon or early evening. However these are not hard and fast rules and you can fit it in according to your own routine and circumstances.
Most of us spend our entire lives being busy, busy, busy, with so many responsibilities and demands on our time that it may sometimes be hard to find time for ourselves. Two regular periods of meditation each day will give you a chance to settle down and recharge your batteries, and in doing so bring perspective and balance to life.
Although the words Transcendental Meditation sound fairly complicated, in fact TM is very easy. It is easier to do than to say! The practice really involves learning how not to interfere with a natural tendency that the mind already has. This effortlessness and naturalness is the key to its effectiveness.
Some people know that they want to learn TM immediately but others prefer to do some reading around the subject, talk to others, and come to their own conclusion over a period of time. In fact it was about six months after I first heard about TM that I took the course. So I encourage you to take your time. I am very happy to have a chat, answer any questions you may have, send you information, whatever it is that you want. In this way you can decide if you’d like to take a course.