How To Do Transcendental Meditation (Learn TM For Free)

In this article, I'll share how you can teach yourself Transcendental Meditation for free.

TM is an easy, effortless meditation technique for anyone wanting to start implementing meditation into their daily routine. Transcendental meditation, or TM, can help you manage stress and anxiety and improve your overall health.

P.S. - If you want a complete guide on meditation (not just transcendental meditation), check out this guide I put together.

How to do Transcendental Meditation

As a society, we’ve come so far and achieved so much. We’re supposed to be living in the greatest time in human history. But whatever happened to happiness? We have so much pressure on us to work harder, buy more, and be more. And we’re constantly connected yet, somehow we’re lonelier than we’ve ever been.

Depression and anxiety are a global pandemic. In Australia alone suicide is a leading cause of death for people aged 15 – 44. According to the World Health Organization, over seven hundred and ninety thousand people die every year from suicide. That’s one person dying from suicide every 40 seconds. Most of those are men.

So obviously something that we’re doing isn’t right. But there is a way that we can all manage stress and anxiety naturally and to feel happier and calmer and more content in our lives. And we can do that through meditation.

What is meditation?

Meditation is amazing. It has the ability to physically rewire our brains chemistry and to take us out of reactionary fight-or-flight response and put us in a calmer more alert state. But most of us are so busy in our day-to-day lives that we never really experience this state.

The Buddhists call this pure consciousness and it’s something that we all have inside of us, but we rarely see it. So a good way to explain how meditation works is to think of the mind as an ocean.

Imagine you’re on a small boat in the middle of the ocean and a massive storm hits at that time. All you’re going to see around you of these tall massive waves. But if you were to do a bit of a cross-section on the ocean and to go beneath the surface you’d see that it’s calm and quiet. So that’s pretty much how our mind works as well.

And we get so caught up in our surface-level thoughts and emotions that we forget what it’s like to be able to go down to that calmer, stiller place beneath the surface. And the longer that you meditate or the more frequently that you meditate, the longer that feeling of calm will remain with you throughout the day.

So meditation carries over from your practice also to your day-to-day life as well.

Mindfulness vs. concentration meditation

There are lots of different types of meditation out there but the two main types are concentration meditation and mindfulness meditation.

So when it comes to concentration meditation we’re taking all of our awareness and focusing it on one single point and that could be the breath.

It could be a sound or a mantra, or it could even be staring at a candle flame. It doesn’t matter what the object is. And the point of concentration meditation is to give the mind something to focus on and allow the emotions that are arising slowly to start to fall away.

Mindfulness meditation is where there’s not really an object to concentrate on, but it’s more observing your bodily sensations and thoughts feelings and emotions as they arise.

Enter Transcendental Meditation

So a technique that I recommend to beginners and one that I’ve been practising for a few weeks is called Transcendental Meditation, or TM for short. Transcendental meditation is a really good form of meditation for anyone out there who thinks “my mind is too busy” or “I just can’t sit down and meditate”.

The cool thing about Transcendental Meditation is that there’s no effort required and you don’t have to push your thoughts away or anything like that. It’s an effortless type of meditation and in TM the object for the meditation is a mantra. And a mantra is just a word or a phrase that you repeat over and over silently in your mind and that mantra could be absolutely anything. And it’s probably best that the mantra that you use doesn’t have a meaning behind it because you don’t want to spend your meditation thinking about the meaning behind your mantra.

Most types of Meditation are a good way to reduce stress and anxiety and to feel happier and more content and calmer. But the cool thing about Transcendental Meditation is that there’s a lot of scientific research to back up those claims. In fact, there are about 380 peer-reviewed papers on the health effects of TM.

The benefits of Transcendental Meditation

So I’ll just read a couple of those to you now. So in a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, they found that TM meditation had a much bigger effect in reducing anxiety when compared to other interventions like mindfulness meditation and relaxation techniques.

Another study found that TM can also lower cortisol far more than any other relaxation techniques out there. And in this five-year randomized controlled study on patients with heart disease, they found that there was a 48 percent reduction in death from heart attacks and strokes in subjects that were practising Transcendental Meditation.

So there’s a tonne of research on the benefits of TM, but I highly recommend checking it out for yourself and I’ll leave a link below to some of those research papers.

Typically, Transcendental Meditation is taught by a certified teacher and it costs around a thousand dollars to learn the technique. But in my opinion, meditation should be free and the techniques fairly easy to actually do. So I want to teach you how to do it.

Learn TM for free: step-by-step instructions

So the first thing that you want to do is find a spot that you can sit down for five or ten minutes in your house and somewhere that you know you won’t be distracted.

1. You can sit cross-legged on the floor, you can sit on a chair you can sit on the couch, whatever is comfortable for you. It doesn’t really matter.

2. Next, sit comfortably and then close your eyes. The first thing that you want to do is just take a couple of deep breaths just to calm the mind and to centre yourself. So for me, I normally take three deep breaths, inhaling as deep as I can and holding for a second and then exhaling.

3. And then once you’ve done that you want to perform a mindful body scan. A and a body scan is just taking a mental note of how your body’s feeling. So scanning from head to toe seeing if there are any aches or pains or even if there’s any feelings or emotions that are coming up. And the important thing is that we’re just kind of taking note of how we’re feeling. We’re not judging in it anyway and we’re just seeing how we feel at this stage. So if you have identified any painful emotions or physical sensations in the body, now’s the time to take a couple of minutes just to focus on those sensations. Don’t judge them. Just sit with them for a couple of minutes.

4. And then after this stage, it’s time to introduce the mantra into the practice. So the mantra that I was taught is super simple, and it’s just “ahum”. And what we want to do is repeat that mantra gently and silently in our minds and you almost want to have it pulsating on its own.

   So you’re not controlling it. You’re not focusing all your attention on it. it’s just they’re running in the background and what you’ll find is that after a minute or so your mind might start to wander from that mantra and that’s perfectly okay. In fact, a big part of TM is noticing when your mind has actually left the mantra and is trapped in thoughts and then gently bringing the mind back to the mantra. And through a meditation session, you might do that five, 10, 15 times and that’s totally normal.

   The goal is not to stop thoughts but just to observe when you’re lost in thoughts and then to come back to the mantra.

5. In the last couple of minutes of the meditation, you want to let go of the mantra and just sit in silence. And hopefully, if you’ve done this technique correctly you’ll actually feel a lot calmer. Your mind will feel still and you should have fewer thoughts. And it’s a really, really awesome feeling.

6. And then once you’ve done that then you can just bring your attention to the body, feeling those bodily sensations. Wriggle your fingers and then slowly open your eyes and re-introduce yourself back into the world.

Free Transcendental Meditation app

Transcendental Meditation is a super simple technique that anyone can do. And in my opinion, it’s really effective for beginners because it’s such an easy way to bring you to a place of stillness as opposed to say breath counting meditation, which is something I have practiced for many years.

If you want to learn TM in a more structured way I definitely recommend checking out the app, One Giant Mind. So this is personally how I learned Transcendental Meditation. And I came across that on a Reddit post where someone had actually suggested using this app to learn the technique because I didn’t want to pay a thousand bucks to learn how to meditate.

The app is really good because it gives you a 12-step structured program on how to learn the technique and then there’s a 30-day challenge that you can do which is a really good way to build meditation into your daily routine as a habit.

Helpful Transcendental Meditation resources

• Transcendental meditation research studies

• 1 Giant Mind App

Final thoughts

Meditation doesn’t have to be complicated and you definitely don’t have to pay for it. Using a technique like TM for just five or ten minutes every day can make a huge impact on how you feel. It can help you reduce stress and anxiety it can make you feel happier and calmer.

It can also improve your health by reducing blood pressure, by reducing the chances of heart attack, it’s incredible. And there’s so much research out there that’s backing all of these things that ancient Yogis and Buddhists have known for so many thousands of years.

So let me know how you go with meditating in the comments below and I hope you found this article useful.

Until next time!

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