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Transcendental
meditation makes kids calmer, happier
29
May 2008, Newsweek magazine, By Eve Conant/ Peg Tyre
It might have
been the teenager stumbling into the school hallway bloodied by six gunshot
wounds. Maybe it was the funerals of more than a dozen of his students or
the drug dealers competing for "his kids." In the mid-'90s, George
Rutherford, a devout Baptist who spent 20 years as principal of one of the
toughest middle schools in Washington, D.C., Fletcher Johnson, knew he and
his 1,500 students had reached a breaking point. "That's when I stumbled
onto Transcendental Meditation," says Rutherford. "I feel it is one of the
greatest saviors that I know." Rutherford, his teachers and his students
began meditating in the classroom twice a day for 20 minutes. "Fights
stopped breaking out on the third floor, test scores went up," he recalls.
Now, as principal of a small charter school in the nation's capital, he
makes sure his students, like 11-year Markell Talford, keep up the practice.
"Now when people mess with me I don't hit them," explains Talford. "I sit
down and try to meditate."
That kind of response
is fueling a small but growing movement to bring Transcendental Meditation
(TM), a practice inherited from India and made hip by high-profile devotees
like the Beatles in the 1960s, into more U.S. schools as a stress-buster for
America's overwhelmed kids. TM is the trademarked name of a meditation
technique created by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1958. In the past decade or
so, alternative and Eastern forms of health have been gaining traction in
the mainstream, including for kids. Some schools include yoga in their
physical-education classes, private kiddie yoga classes abound and top
universities regularly publish research on the benefits of meditation and
prayer. TM itself, which is promoted as a 20-minute physiological technique
that calms the mind and nervous system, is also showing profound results
where practiced, according to proponents: better grades and SAT scores, less
bullying, longer attention spans and happier kids. They point to a slew of
recent medical studies to back up their claims.
TM doesn't have a
calming influence on everyone. Critics believe that TM is a repackaged
Eastern religious philosophy that should not be infiltrating public schools.
They argue that TM invokes Hindu deities. TM's private "Puja" initiation
ritual in Sanskrit, involving incense and a candle and the bestowing of
mantras, is a focus of the concern. "TM has always been rooted in the
religion of Hinduism," says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, which keeps a close legal eye on
the TM movement.
Advocates of TM,
however, say that TM practiced by itself is purely a mechanical,
physiological process, that the initiation is a two-minute ceremony of
appreciation for the teacher with no deities invoked, that mantras are
simple sounds without meaning and that the practice pre-dates Hinduism by
5,000 years. "Things have changed over the past 25 years. If you take out
the trivial, ceremonial part of this—and I've seen tapes of the Puja
(initiation) ceremony, it's not religious—you'll see this is not being
promoted as a religion but as a way to physically and emotionally relax,"
says Carter Phillips, a lawyer who represents the TM movement. "This 1-2
minute ceremony of gratitude in India is traditionally done in appreciation
for one's teacher," says Robert Roth, vice president of the David Lynch
Foundation. "Bottom line: One should not confuse something that is cultural
with something religious."
Much of the debate
stems from the growing success of the David Lynch Foundation, which funds TM
training in private and public schools, especially charter schools, with a
focus on inner-city youth. Since 2005, a foundation begun by Hollywood
filmmaker and long-time meditator David Lynch has provided some $5 million
for TM research and voluntary in-school programs for more than 2,000
students, teachers and parents at 21 U.S. schools and universities, with
substantially wider reach overseas. "It's like going from zero to 60 in
terms of pulling yourself away from stress. Intelligence goes up, creativity
flowers and energy zooms forward," says Lynch, who says "receptivity" to the
idea is growing. (Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons appears on the foundation's
introductory video as part of its outreach to inner-city schools). Lynch's
foundation says it now has more than 4,000 students and dozens of U.S.
schools, mostly charter and public, on its waitlist for grants of $625 per
student, parent or teacher.
Despite the criticism,
many parents say they've seen profound results from meditation and that that
they hardly view TM as exclusively, or even overtly, religious. Lynch
himself is a Presbyterian. "When I started doing transcendental meditation,
I found that my relationship with God deepened," says Dick DeAngeles, a
meditator who has had five of his children—all devout Roman Catholics who
regularly attend Sunday school—learn TM at the Maharishi University of
Management in Iowa.
Other parents are open
to anything that might scientifically be proven to reduce stress. The
National Institutes of Health has awarded some $20 million to study TM. A
2004 Medical College of Georgia study of 156 inner-city African-American
teens found that TM helped lower blood pressure, while a 2003 University of
Michigan study found that African-American sixth-graders who practiced TM
daily had better self-esteem and handled stress better than other area
students. The largest study on TM and young people is currently being
undertaken by researchers from American University in Washington, D.C., and
Maharishi University in Iowa. They have been monitoring 250 college students
from American, Georgetown, Howard and other D.C.-area universities who
practiced meditation for nine months. Early results appear to show greater
brain functioning and less irritability and sleepiness.
"There are serious
problems in our schools and a small number of voices trying to Swift Boat TM
should not discourage people from looking at the medical benefits of this
technique," says the Lynch Foundation's Roth. "TM training is offered to
schools that already set aside part of the day for 'quiet time.' A kid can
do TM, or take a nap, pray or do Zen meditation, it's up to them."
At the Kingsbury
School in D.C., a private K-12 for students with learning disorders like
attention deficiency and dyslexia, children have been practicing in-school
voluntary meditation since 2005. One student interviewed by NEWSWEEK this
past winter, 14-year-old Scott Bertaut, who has Asperger syndrome, says that
TM helps him control his sometimes violent temper. "When I stopped doing TM
during summer break [my temper] got bad again."
The transformative power of Buddhist meditation in a US prison
9 May 2008, The Seattle Times, By Tom Keogh
The question of how convicted criminals should spend their time while
incarcerated is one of those evergreen issues on talk radio or in the stump
speeches of get-tough politicians. Prison is punishment, some people argue,
and therefore prisoners shouldn't expect to feel hopeful about their
situation. But at the exceptionally dangerous Donaldson Correctional
Facility in Bessemer, Ala., where assaults are described in the documentary
"The Dhamma Brothers" as a near-daily occurrence, hope appears to be a
viable remedy for ceaseless violence. At least, that is, for a small group
of inmates who participated in an unlikely 2002 experiment with Vipassana
meditation.
Vipassana is an ancient discipline from India rediscovered by Gautama Buddha
and taught by him as a form of rigorous self-observation, leading to mental
and emotional freedom. How it ends up at Donaldson proves a fascinating
story in itself. Hearing that Vipassana had worked in Indian prisons,
Donaldson's officials take a shot at progressiveness despite staff
skepticism and wariness about Buddhism in Alabama's correctional system.
Taught by a pair of optimistic but demanding Vipassana guides, the
round-the-clock meditation regimen is no picnic. For nine days, the inmates
— men who have done pretty terrible things, some facing life without parole
— are required to be silent. They abstain from intoxicants and violence and
assume a meditation stance for hours at a time.
Convicted murderer Grady Bankhead describes the process of relentless
self-examination as harder than years spent on death row. Other prisoners do
a fine job of explaining, in a very personal way, how Vipassana (which one
of the teachers says translates into "seeing things as they are") made them
understand how impulses leading to crimes are reactions to illusions.
Crucially, those impulses can be controlled. Most of these men will never
know freedom beyond prison walls, but they have learned liberation from
within.
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