Written by Michael J Dougherty, originally published on Medium. I felt the angry dog’s presence first around 2012. It lived in my Thai Town apartment’s elevator, or so I thought, and every time I left my place and waited for the elevator doors to open, I was struck frozen with the feeling the angry dog would be there, and it would spring from its muscular haunches and tear into my neck. The angry dog, I discovered, never came out of the elevator, but the specter of it hung over me for years, as absolute as my skin. Days, weeks, months, and year...

Below is an excerpt from author JB Minton’s article about his journey learning the TM technique. You can read the original article on Medium here.  I was nearly run off the road and it was my fault. I flipped the guy the finger. I looked at him across the lanes of highway traffic, looked him right in the eye, and mouthed the words my finger was already saying. And it nearly got me killed. Something had to change. I had to find a way to avoid my anger controlling my behavior, my life. Now, I had been a mindfulness meditator on and off since the ...

“At the beginning of Covid I was going through a difficult time and a friend suggested I do Chris’s Transcendental Meditation course. I’d tried various sorts of meditation before and had had no success so I was sceptical. I was even more sceptical when I learned the course would be via Zoom. How could one possibly learn TM via Zoom? Well, very easily, as it turns out. Chris created a safe and friendly athmosphere in which to learn, individual issues and preferences were respected. Chris’s teaching was clear, straight forward, jargon-free, fasci...

Webmaster: Andrea at Dialogue - Copyright @ 2021 Twenty Minutes Meditation - Independent Transcendental Meditation Teacher - TM classes and courses in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Manchester, York, Ringwood, Southampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and much more. Learn TM online via Zoom.

Webmaster: Andrea at Dialogue - Copyright @ 2021 Twenty Minutes Meditation - Independent Transcendental Meditation Teacher - TM classes and courses in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Manchester, York, Ringwood, Southampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and much more. Learn TM online via Zoom.

“I first learned TM (Transcendental Meditation) nearly 40 years ago when I was in a very dark place after losing my mother. It really helped me a lot, but I did not keep my regular practise up as the years went by. I tried many different meditations, but always came back to TM. It was like an old friend and saw me through many difficult times in my life. It helped me with insomnia too. Several years ago I took a refresher course with Chris Greathead and have been practising regularly ever since. Now there are daily zoom TM meditations online wh...

The following is written by Mark W. Clark, MS, CNP and originally published on Nonprofit Leadership Alliance. Mark is a retired police officer and currently the Executive Director for a nonprofit education foundation in Pennsylvania. Prior to that, he worked for over six years as a Chief Operations Officer for a national leadership education association.______________________________________________________________________________ There are scarce instances in one’s life that qualify as life-changing events. As I go through my sixth decade on t...

Read this series from the beginning.Read the previous installment of this series (Part 2).Recent issue of International Journal of Neuroscience, November 2019Many people are easily impressed by what look like big numbers, and the organizations that offer Transcendental Meditation (TM), including the David Lynch Foundation (DLF), often use numbers in a bid to establish scientific legitimacy among non-scientists and the general public. Here’s a particular paragraph that is part of the preface to one bibliography of research on TM, produced by a T...

David Lynch, Sarina Grosswald,and John Hagelin at a David LynchFoundation press conference,December 2011.Read this series from the beginning.This series continues with Part 3, here.The organizations that have promoted Transcendental Meditation (TM), including the David Lynch Foundation (DLF), have for decades repeated the insistence of TM’s founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that extensive scientific research supports their claims of TM’s validity. As I discussed previously, when their claim that “hundreds of published studies” is examined, it’s c...

TM original research listed on the tm.org website, evaluated over five-year periods. Meditating individuals and affiliated MIU/MUMfaculty have authored the majority of it since 1981.For over a half century now, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the movement and the organizations that he spawned, and now the David Lynch Foundation, have insisted that their claims supporting Transcendental Meditation have been scientifically validated, and are supported by some consensus among many scientists. The prominence of TM, and the reputations of public figures who ...

It’s a standard article of faith among many practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, that long-term practice of TM improves moral decision making, and a movement spokesperson has even claimed that donating money to the organization will hasten one’s own “personal evolution.” The recent conviction and imprisonment of a long-term meditator, former Maharishi University of Management trustee and major donor to the cause of TM emphasizes what should be obvious: that meditators are seldom any better off than most everyone else, and the people who ...

I think a lot of people, who are new to the whole field of raising criticism and objections to Transcendental Meditation, may be a bit unprepared for the kinds of reactions that I've long been on the receiving end of. Hostile reactions from meditators, TM teachers and others who are almost reflexively supportive of any effort to spread the practice of meditation far and wide are common, and they usually take the form of avoidance, distraction or personal attacks on the person raising the objection to TM, along with the usual repetition of the "...

The TM organization has for almost a half-century now denied the religious nature of its methods and doctrine, almost to the point of absurdity. The fact of the matter is that almost all of the TM promotional material - books, websites, the content of introductory lectures - is littered with various synonyms for, what people in much of the world call “God.” More specifically, the underlying system is that of a Vedic, or Hindu, cosmology, and there’s a central concept of supreme divinity or ultimate reality in the TM subculture that they repeat ...

Plaintiffs bringing legal action against the David Lynch Foundation (the DLF), a Chicago Public Schools district, and the University of Chicago, seeking redress as a result of the so-called "Quiet Time" program to introduce TM into public schools, have amended their complaint, making it a class action lawsuit. Puja table set up for TM instruction.The framed image is a registered trademark/service mark held by Maharishi Foundation Liechtenstein in the United States.Photo by the author. Previously, from August 2020: Lawsuit in progress: David Lyn...

A lawsuit has recently been filed against the David Lynch Foundation (the DLF), a Chicago Public Schools district, and the University of Chicago as a result of the Transcendental Meditation organization’s effort to orchestrate what it called a “research study,” to demonstrate what they have claimed are the benefits of TM for high school students. The plaintiffs bringing this action include the student, parent and substitute teacher who testified at a Chicago Board of Education hearing one year ago. They alleged that, to participate in the progr...

This is another unsolicited, contributed story from a former TM meditator, Leslie (not her real name). She points out the habits that TM critics are quite familiar with: pervasive narcissism, isolation, avoidance, and dependence on others to live a life that's supposedly "without stress." Ultimately, for some, living with a long-time meditator, who's living a lifestyle centered on TM and adopting the movement's pervasive belief system - a lifestyle and belief that TM's proponents consistently maintain, does not exist - may be hazardous to your ...

There's this widespread misconception about the basic nature of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that shows up in a lot of news reporting and reminiscing about him, even in his New York Times obituary, where they say, "he was often dismissed as a hippie mystic."What doesn't seem to have been mentioned very often is that the yogi detested "hippies." His politics, as much as he ever expressed them, were quite illiberal and entirely supportive of the "establishment," and he maintained ties with right-wing, Hindu nationalist politicians in India. Here in the...

This bingo card is culled from, and inspired by, comments on the TM-Free Blog Facebook page in recent months, and also from my experience online over the past 25 years. Particularly that free square in the middle!This card is mostly based on the comments from meditators defending TM, but two squares are from the Christian, "TM will steal your eternal soul and cause demonic possession" sort of viewpoint, to which we don't subscribe nor support.

Read this series from the beginning.Read the previous installment of this series (Part 4).David W. Orme-Johnson. From "Inaugurating theDawn of the Age of Enlightenment," 1975We here at the TM-Free Blog have received a comment from David W. Orme-Johnson. He’s a former Maharishi University of Management psychology department chairman and a frequent defender and promoter of TM research studies. I’ve mentioned him and his website a number of times in previous parts of this series, “The dubious research claims of Transcendental Meditation.” He submi...

Read this series from the beginning.Read the previous installment of this series (Part 3).Cover of the final volume of the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality. Does this look like a legitimate, independent scientific journal to you?As I’ve discussed in earlier parts of this series, the organizations that offer Transcendental Meditation (TM), including the David Lynch Foundation (DLF), have long claimed scientific legitimacy and validity for all the claims they regularly make for TM on the basis of scientific research. They imply that the...