I’ve been a meditator for years. In much of my content, I’ve spoken about the importance of mindfulness and learning to stay in the present. Much of our anxiety is based on a fear of what has yet to come and on feelings of embarrassment, shame, fear, or otherwise stemming from one trauma or another in our past. But the past is over, and the future hasn’t actually happened, so technically, the only real thing there is, is right here right now.

Being mindful and present is the solution to many of our woes. Being “here for it” is a major challenge now when the world economy is built on distracting you from anything that could be considered boring, present, etc.

Your children are screaming for your attention. They’re attached to screens. So are you. Your boss messaged you on Slack. Friends send you videos and memes. Another email just binged your inbox. Someone DMed you on LinkedIn or Instagram, and so on. 

Others suffer from this. Others profit from this. And thus we are bombarded with a constant assortment of options to worry about, distracting us from other things we’ve seen and heard in other places we’ve been bombarded with. And so on.

So it’s no wonder, aside from the general horror out there (of course), that we’re distracted, lacking focus, unable to unplug. It just so happens that the only thing I know that can combat this modern state, other than digital detoxes, is meditation.

Meditation forces us to reckon with our thoughts, not to deaden them, but to observe them as a person would observe cars riding down a busy road while sitting on the sidewalk. You can’t control which cars are coming. You can’t control where they’re going either. If you attach yourself to one too fervently, either by forcing focus or ironically by trying too hard not to think about it, you’ll inevitably be hitched to that car and dragged down the road. Honestly… tell yourself not to think about the purple elephant, and it’s all you’ll think about. Those vying for your attention would have it either way. They want to devise all the purple elephants you can stand.

Meditation forces us to shut off most senses and use one point of focus (or later, no point of focus), to anchor you. Usually, in most mindfulness meditation apps, that anchor point is your breath, or some guided body scan. The trick is to focus on whatever the exercise says (guided or not), and when you realize you’ve drifted or started thinking about something other than that focal point, then you’re asked to gently bring your focus back to the breath or whatever. This is both easy and hard, but with practice, you are able to do this, and the effects can be felt in your daily life. You are cultivating the focus that the world has taken from you.

I’ve meditated for thousands of hours at this point. I had a nearly two-year streak going with the Headspace App, then I graduated to setting a timer for myself with no guidance. But I craved something more. I craved some kind of new experience. I craved a “feeling”.

So now I’ve done something that many have that still sounds a bit woo woo and strange. I’ve taken a class on transcendental meditation (TM). Firstly, the instructor was very kind, an old hippie in a linen suit, but he was also a rampant conservative (maybe more on this in a different post…he was a character). The two ideals together created an odd juxtaposition that I had a hard time squaring. But one thing that I’ll say of TM(and please note that I’m not affiliated with them, but this did give evidence to the fact that the technique is apolitical, a-religious, etc, despite the initial ceremony). TM is not a religion after all, more of a tool.

Now I’m going to try to rationalize what the teachings were and how to do TM as a technique, and compare them to the mindfulness meditation that I’ve done before. I think they serve similar and different purposes. TM would say that the purpose is to transcend, literally achieving another level of consciousness, and in doing so, tap into deep wells of energy, clarity, and focus.

I think that this can be achieved through the means of mindfulness meditation, too, but not as quickly.

In TM, one is assigned a mantra, which, after some research, seems to be simply a syllable in Sanskrit, something that sounds distinct, repeatable, slightly exotic (for marketing purposes), and is supposed to, ultimately, just be meaningless. 

The ceremony leading up to the mantra assignment is very interesting, though probably off-putting (or at least out of the comfort zone for many westerners). I found it fascinating. I brought flowers, fruit, and a handkerchief to be offered as a gift. There was incense and candles and a picture of an old Indian man on a placard. The old white hippie sang in Sanskrit for ten minutes and then started chanting one syllable over and over. He turned to me and I repeated it. I simply knew I should. Then I sat down and we began.

As stated, TM differs from other types of meditation that I’ve done in that it’s simpler. However, the commitment is higher (time-wise). For instance, in most mindfulness meditation or guided meditation, you’re asked to focus on the breath or be brought through different visualizations of the body or auras surrounding the body. Most of these Apps and guided meditations start you off with ten-minute daily meditations (though you can go as long as you like).

This is all fine. The primary purpose of these things is to train the self on staying present…thus mindfulness.

But even when doing these things, focusing on breathing, scanning our bodies, and listening to the guide, our minds are pretty busy. Thinking still. Thinking about breathing, thinking about counting breaths. The body is fairly engaged in the act of controlling breathing.

TM, on the other hand, makes you bang a mental drum…which, after a time, seems to go on its own. So if your mantra was vroom (it wouldn’t be because you’d be thinking about trucks and race cars all day…so pretend it has no association). You’d mentally say vroom over and over until your mind just kind of did it. And in the first few sessions, you have to think about doing this, but after a few rounds, your mind just produces the mantra subconsciously via the act of repetition.

At any rate, since it means nothing and you’re not concerned about your breath or matters of the body, you just sort of favor focusing on the mantra. Other thoughts still occur, which is normal, but you just kind of tap tap tap your focus back to the ever-repeating, meaningless mantra, much like refocusing on the breath in mindfulness meditation. In this way, we’re both focused and using as little mental energy as possible. You need this focal point to make the whole thing work, as an anchor point to nothing. If you do this for twenty minutes, your thoughts will eventually exhaust themselves, and at some point, you will be left focusing on an ever-repeating mantra that you’re not putting any effort into producing. Eventually, it will be you and the mantra. Which eventually will give way to you and transcendence.

Transcending feels like that moment a magic-eye picture comes into focus, and similarly, you’ve picked a focal point beyond the picture, and the other thoughts seem to drop away as the picture comes into focus. Try to hold the picture or think about the fact that it’s a magic-eye too hard, and you’ll lose the picture. Therefore, once you realize you’ve transcended, you will be pulled back to a regular train of thought…at which point you resume focusing on the matra.

Practically, what will happen is a moment where even the mantra fades away, and you feel like you’ve fallen asleep…which is hard to explain…because if you’re like me, you don’t really remember when exactly you fall asleep. But you do, obviously, because some time later you wake up and time has gone by.

But maybe just maybe you’ve been super tired and put your head down and went to sleep and kind of remember that.

Well, in TM, there is a moment where everything else goes away, and it feels like you’ve gone to sleep, only you’re fully aware that it’s happened. I’m still new at this, so I can’t speak to the long-term effects, but, like a magic eye, as soon as I realize I’m there, if I think about it too hard, I lose it, at which point we simply come back to speaking the mantra.

I look forward to training the process so that I can stay in that state and gently look around without thinking on it too hard, lest I kick myself back to the other state. It most certainly is restful. It definitely is cultivating more focus and clarity. I always feel better and lighter after finishing a meditation.

I do want to see if I can stay in that other place. Poke around in it while not losing it. Perhaps this is achievable through repetition. Once a new state is no longer novel, one might be able to let it be as needed. I think this is essential to point out as I’ve felt the shift from one state of consciousness to the other. Full disclosure, I think I’ve felt something like this in regular mindfulness meditation while focusing on the breath as well, but I believe it just happens so much more readily in TM.

There’s an interesting arc to the time of a twenty minute meditation. I’m looking forward to a state where I stop thinking about the time at all. I’m always in any activity that takes time worried about doing the next thing. It’s an anxiety.  That’s how I am. Go go go go go, always something to do, always a new project, trying to load every minute of every day. Sometimes the twenty minutes is hard because I really want, in my head to get back to what I was doing…but halfway through the twenty, my mind gives in and I unwind the knot and let go. And it makes whatever I needed to get back to go so much smoother when I do. It makes me not even worry about whatever the next asshole needs to say on a zoom call.

And yet…and yet…I, like so many these days, also spend an absorbent amount of time just wasting away scrolling, consuming thirty-second snippets and bits of nothing. Like potatoes chips …low calorie, low value, but tasty tasty tasty, and so easy to just consume another and another.

At the end of the day, it may have practical value simply as an exercise of willpower to unplug from EVERYTHING for twenty minutes, twice a day even if it did nothing else (which I believe it does).

I bet most of you guys couldn’t do it. And if you think you can’t possibly set aside twenty minutes on either side of the day to just do nothing (and I mean nothing. No devices allowed), well you really need to. Therefore, the practical benefit of forcing me to shut my eyes and slow my thinking for forty minutes a day is easy to see.

I’m going to keep riding the TM train and see where it takes me. But I suggest you do something, anything that allows you to cultivate your focus. Headspace. A simple timer. The Calm App. The Waking Up App. The Way App.

The world is at war to own your mind. You need to take the time to take it back.