What I’ve Learned From Three Years Of Daily Transcendental Meditation

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.

I was deep into writing the first draft of my book A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks and, for research, I was reading David Lynch’s book on TM Catching The Big Fish about creativity and meditation, Transcendental Meditation specifically. Lynch has famously credited TM with saving his life, his career, and as being the foundation from which his incredible creativity springs from and that sounded pretty great to me.

Now, I had been a mindfulness meditator on and off since the end of the last century, but the results were ephemeral at best. After all, I still ended up screaming at strangers in traffic. So, if a new technique was going to work, that was going to be the measure, me not screaming at strangers in traffic.

Long story short, it has worked better than I could have imagined. Fast forward three years and not only am I not screaming at strangers, my wife and children require me to meditate the difference is so dramatic. Kurt Vonnegut once said, when asked about his wife and daughter learning TM, “Nothing pisses them off. They are like bass drums with light bulbs inside.” I can confirm that I still get pissed off, but now I have a small space in which to let that emotion filter and mostly pass before it becomes behavior and something I need to apologize to another person about.

Given the state of the world, with its unprecedented level of stress and trauma, I want to share the notes and thoughts I’ve taken about TM over these three years with you in hopes that if it can help, then let it be done. This information comes from many introductory lessons I’ve participated in and from Bob Roth’s talks and from conversations with my TM Instructor, who is a very kind and wise soul that I’m lucky to have crossed paths with in life.

Many of these notes are in the form of questions because I questioned everything about TM as I was learning it and that was and is encouraged. After all…