A New Daily Practice by Ray Kamrath

Sarah recently asked the kids and me, “Guess what the following people have in common? … Oprah, Katy Perry, Clint Eastwood, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney.  Oh, and add Ray Dalio from Bridgewater to that list.”  Hmm, Ray Dalio is certainly not an entertainer but he is one of the richest hedge fund managers of all time. Okay, my guess, they’re all incredibly successful and wealthy.

Not appreciating that my family had just stepped onto a new path, I didn’t connect the dots.

Transcendental Meditation (TM).  Turns out all of these people practice it on a regular basis and as Sarah read their endorsements it was hard not to be impressed. When Ray Dalio says, “It’s the single biggest reason for whatever success I’ve had,” we all should probably be a bit impressed.   

With our family about to embark on our OTB year, we decided that we want to make a meditation practice part of our daily life and after making the decision the universe began flooding TM messages in my direction … I decided to check it out.

I reached out to a good friend and colleague who had told me about it in the past and is closely involved with the David Lynch Foundation (an amazing non-profit which teaches the practice to at-risk youth and veterans) and soon after, Sarah, Lukas, Nadia and I found ourselves in their Midtown Manhattan office for a week-long training.

So what is this TM business?  First, you schedule a one-on-one private session where you are given a mantra specifically for you. The rest of the training is made up of group sessions where we checked in with one another, meditated together, asked questions and listened to short lectures.  The website www.tm.org says, “It's an effortless technique for ‘recharging your mind and body’ — and creating a brighter, more positive state of mind. Hundreds of published research studies have found that TM is highly effective on stress and anxiety, brain function  and cardiovascular health.”

Here’s a cool stat … research shows that cortisol (the stress hormone) levels drop 30% during 20 minutes of TM. To put this into perspective, during a good night’s sleep, these levels drop only 2%!

When our stress subsides, then the body and mind are able to settle down and the thoughts (our monkey mind) stop racing and in this deep state of rest our body can heal.

The coolest thing … the bang for the buck!

The practice is simple, easy to understand, requires you to be as comfortable as possible, and can be done anywhere, anytime. And its ability to clear my mind and reduce my stress level with so little effort is remarkable. It does require 20 minutes twice a day but these minutes are quickly becoming some of my favorite during the day.

As simple as it is, I will say that some of the insights I learned during the training completely flipped my ideas of a successful meditative practice upside down so I encourage you not to try to go it alone.

I am in. I am so very grateful for this practice for me, my family, and especially as we set off on a year that involves lots of adventures, I’m sure some new challenges and lots of travel. I’ve heard, if practiced during takeoff and landing, it is an unsurpassed cure for jet lag! I’ll let you know.