Common Ground: TM and Stress-Free Schools

June 2004

TM and Stress-Free Schools

What a New Federally-Funded Study Says About Transcendental Meditation and African-American Students

by Patricia King

Nick Fitts considered himself an unlikely subject for a study on whether Transcendental Meditation (TM) could lower blood pressure. Even when Fitts — an African-American high-school track and football athlete from Augusta, Georgia — learned that his blood pressure put him at risk for cardiovascular disease, he didn’t think meditation held much promise as a remedy: “I thought it was a pushover thing, a crazy idea I didn’t believe in at all.”

Despite his skepticism, Fitts participated in a study run by the Georgia Prevention Institute of the Medical College of Georgia. He began a daily regimen of two fifteen-minute meditation sessions, one at his inner-city high school and a second sitting at home. During this federally funded study, Fitts’ elevated blood pressure returned to normal.

But Fitts was most impressed with TM’s effect on his personality. Fitts says he used to “snap” easily when angry. Now he’s more even-keeled when he confronts stressful family relationships: “Some things you can’t change. I’m learning how to deal with that and not have a problem or be angry.”

Fitts, who says he’s committed to meditating “pretty much twice a day for the rest of my life,” also believes that TM helps him handle his financial struggles better: “I didn’t have a silver spoon. I deal with plastic.” These days that means trying to get the money to buy a car so he can finish nursing school. “I’m still pulling that rope to get to the top,” he smiles.

Studying How TM Improves Studying

Ever since the Beatles tried Transcendental Meditation, the movement has been a victim of its own success and arguably overzealous marketing. The Beatles quickly broke with their wispy, garlanded guru, “The Fool On the Hill,” but his network grew into a worldwide organization, whose research-based claims have often been dismissed as self-serving promo. However, new studies, like the one Fitts took part in, are boosting TM’s credibility beyond its best-known followers — the celebrities and middle-class seekers who have gravitated to the Indian guru for decades. In particular, meditators are renewing their efforts to bring TM into inner-city and suburban schools.

TM is only one of a number of Eastern meditative techniques that are making significant inroads into secular, US institutions. A new report from the Northampton, Massachusetts-based Center for Contemplative Mind in Society titled “A Powerful Silence” concludes: “We are in the midst of a massive demystification and democratization of contemplative practice.” The report says the increasing availability of mind-body practices — including yoga and tai chi — has “allowed contemplative practices to become untethered from religious traditions and monastic settings” and “created fertile ground for their application in secular society.”

Much of this demystification has been propelled by an explosion of increasingly sophisticated mind-body research. Since 1988, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded Fairfield, Iowa-based Maharishi University of Management (MUM) $22 million to study Maharishi Consciousness-Based Healthcare, the organization’s trademarked name for remedies that include meditation and herbs from the ancient Indian system of medicine, Ayurveda.

Vernon Barnes, a physiologist at the Georgia Prevention Institute of the Medical College of Georgia, says that federal money has moved TM from the “fringe,” where it was 32 years ago when he started meditating, to the mainstream. Barnes, who received his Ph.D. from MUM, was the lead author of the new blood-pressure study, one of the NIH-funded “randomized clinical trials,” whose rigor, says Barnes, is winning over skeptics.

More than half the federal dollars that have come MUM’s way have been earmarked for studies in underserved minority communities. MUM’s Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention is one of 12 research centers funded by NIH’s five-year-old Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the only one that focuses exclusively on high-risk minorities. In addition to a number of studies of African-Americans, the Institute is collaborating with the University of Illinois and the University of Hawaii to evaluate TM’s effect on hypertensive Mexican-Americans and Native Hawaiians.

The Georgia Prevention Institute’s Augusta study monitored 100 African-American adolescents, including Fitts, with high normal systolic blood pressure. One group of students meditated twice a day; a control group simply attended health-education classes. According to results published in the April issue of the American Journal of Hypertension, the meditators’ systolic (top reading) blood pressure dropped 3.5 millimeters and their diastolic (bottom reading) pressure dropped 3.4 millimeters after four months. There were no significant changes in the control group. While the drop in blood pressure was modest, Barnes says: “Even if your blood pressure comes down a few millimeters when you are young, if you can maintain that into adulthood, you can significantly reduce your risk for cardiovascular disease.”

Young African-Americans were singled out for the study because they are twice as likely to suffer from high blood pressure as whites. Dr. Robert Schneider, director of MUM’s Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention, says African-Americans are open to non-traditional methods of dealing with their increased risk of cardiovascular and other diseases: “African-Americans have a long tradition of interest and practice in natural medicine. Some people call it folk medicine.”

Chinelo Haney, project director for the Charles R. Drew Center for Natural Medicine in Los Angeles, who has recruited hundreds of African-Americans for NIH-funded, Drew-MUM studies, agrees. Haney is particularly gratified by the fact that African-Americans are participating in the studies because in the 30 years he has been meditating, he has often been only one of a handful of African-Americans in TM groups: “Like everything else, we don’t have equal access,” he says. He is also pleased that his family has come around: “I love my family,” Haney admits, “but some of the biggest resistance I got came from my family.”

Now Haney’s family comes to him for advice because he has been able to avoid their health problems. He’s not overweight, he doesn’t have high blood pressure, and he no longer suffers from the ulcer and sinus problems that he had when he started meditating. Haney, who is a vegetarian, says these days there’s not as much teasing at Thanksgiving when he passes up the turkey. When it comes to a healthy lifestyle, Haney grins, “I am a living, breathing, walking example. That’s pretty typical of people who meditate. They tend to make better life choices.”

One Drew-MUM study (published in 2000 in the American Heart Association journal Stroke) found that TM may reduce arteriosclerosis, the hardening of the arteries and buildup of fat deposits that leads to cardiovascular disease. Sixty African-American men and women took part in the controlled study, which found that TM’s effect on arteriosclerosis was comparable to lipid-lowering medication and intensive lifestyle changes, including a leaner diet and increased exercise.

In addition to federally funded studies like those conducted at Drew and the Georgia Prevention Institute, private donations are also increasing TM’s profile in the schools. In the last seven years, for example, TM supporters have raised $375,000 to bring TM to the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit, an African-American charter school. The money has come from a variety of private sources, including the DaimlerChrysler and General Motors foundations.

About 100 Nataki Talibah middle-schoolers meditate for ten minutes, twice a day in the school gym. Longtime meditator Jane Pitt, who teaches TM at Nataki Talibah, says many adults have forgotten what silence is like, but “the kids are at an age where they realize that we’re supposed to have these moments when we can just stop.”

Is TM a Religion?

Some parents in the schools where TM has been introduced have elected not to have their children participate, because they believe TM is a Hindu-based religion. Carolina International, a charter school that is scheduled to open in Cabarrus County, North Carolina in the fall, intends to offer ten minutes of TM to fifth through 12th graders each day. After complaints from a few parents, the school’s advisory board has ordered the school to remove all religion from its curriculum or lose its charter.

TM originated in India, from the Vedic tradition, which features many gods and gurus, including Maharishi, who is referred to as “His Holiness.” But MUM’s Institute director Schneider describes TM as a universal practice that is compatible with all religions and works for “everybody with a human nervous system.” Nor should the fact that TM originated in the East be a barrier for Westerners, says Schneider: “Penicillin was discovered in France,” Schneider adds, “but that doesn’t mean it applies just to Frenchmen.”

Many meditators say that TM is compatible with their non-Hindu religious beliefs. African-American public school principal George Rutherford says both he and his wife (who has a doctorate in Christian education) are meditating Baptists. In 1994, when Rutherford brought TM to the Fletcher-Johnson Educational Center, a public school located in a high-crime area of Washington D.C. religion was not discussed. What was discussed was the much-needed peace TM brought to the school: “The building became very quiet,” Rutherford recalls. “Our studies were able to go along better. We didn’t have all the fights. Stress management is what we need in our schools.”

The Storm Before The Calm

While stress management would be welcome in many schools, TM’s high price tag could be a barrier. The cost for an introductory TM course has skyrocketed to $2,500. The TM organization makes no apologies for its high costs, arguing that its proven preventive health benefits make it a bargain compared with western medicine’s later-stage interventions — like $30,000 bypass surgeries and $300,000 heart transplants. MUM’s Schneider says that 600 studies over 40 years have found that TM improves health, raises intelligence, creativity, and academic performance and is twice as effective on average as other varieties of meditation.

The early TM studies do not have the credibility of the recent, NIH-funded research, but there is no doubt that there is more data available on TM than any other meditation technique. “Empirically, it [TM] is the best stress reduction approach around,” says Frank Treiber, director of the Georgia Prevention Institute.

Though TM has a jumpstart, other meditative methods are catching up. State-of-the-art research is being conducted on a variety of other contemplative practices, including yoga and tai chi, says Treiber, whose favored relaxation techniques include surfing, running, and tennis: “There are going to be a lot of other meditative techniques bubbling up with good empirical evidence of their benefits.” Treiber’s Institute, for example, just completed a promising pilot study that monitored the effect of mindfulness meditation on children’s blood pressure.

Other meditative techniques do not come with the controversies that have dogged the TM movement. A number of critics, armed by information from TM dropouts, say the group is a cult. Critics have zeroed in on the advanced TM-Sidhi course, which once promised to teach students to levitate and fly. After an ex-student sued, TM now concedes that “first stage” yogic flying looks more like hopping in a cross-legged position. Maharishi maintains that if enough of those hoppers meditated collectively, there would be peace in the world: “Every hop becomes a cosmic smile for the whole creation.”

But such controversies have been overshadowed by the new studies that have fueled initiatives to get TM into schools. At an April 2 press conference in Hollywood touting the Augusta study, director David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive) spoke on behalf of the Los Angeles Committee for Stress-Free Schools, one of several groups around the country lobbying for TM in the schools. In a follow-up interview Lynch said he hasn’t missed a meditation session in 30 years and has found TM to be a stress-buster that enables him to be more creative. “You start seeing a bigger picture. Everything is easier,” he said: “You have way more energy, way more awareness.”

At the Los Angeles press conference (speaking by phone from Holland), Maharishi sounded irked that TM has not been even more widely embraced: “Research has no meaning in the United States....absolutely no meaning,” he complained. Forty-five years after he arrived in this country Maharishi, who is in his 90’s, is still goading his followers to make no small plans: “Let’s raise ourselves to enlightenment — and let’s create an enlightened world around us. And let’s do it quickly without delay,”

Patricia King is a freelance writer and former Newsweek San Francisco Bureau Chief

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