What Is Transcendental Meditation? Exploring Its Vedic Roots and Benefits
Why This Style of Meditation Works So Well for an Anxious Mind
If you’ve spent any time trying to meditate, you may know the experience. You sit down, close your eyes and, within seconds, the mind gets busy.
The grocery list. The email you forgot to send. Something you said three days ago that you suddenly need to analyse from six different angles.
For someone already prone to anxiety or overthinking, meditation can sometimes feel like being given a front-row seat to the very thing you were hoping to quiet.
And so people often reach a fairly understandable conclusion: I’m just not good at meditation.
I’d like to offer another possibility.
You may simply not have found the right technique for your mind.
There are many forms of meditation, and they don’t all ask the same thing of us. Some involve sustained concentration. Others develop our capacity to observe thoughts, sensations and emotions without becoming caught up in them. These are valuable practices, and I use and teach several of them.
But there is another approach that I practice and teach, particularly for people with busy, anxious or highly active minds.
It is an internally repeated mantra practice with roots in the Vedic and yogic traditions of India. Rather than asking you to stop thinking or hold your attention rigidly in one place, it gives the mind something subtle to return to.
It builds a different relationship with the mind.
One of the things I’ve learned through twenty-five years of yoga and meditation practice, more than seven years of teaching them, and my work supporting so many people through change, is that wrestling the mind won’t make it quieter.
If I tell you not to think about something, you already know what happens.
An anxious mind is particularly good at monitoring itself. Am I doing this properly? Why am I still thinking? Was that five minutes or fifteen? Everyone else probably finds this easier.
Meditation can inadvertently become one more thing to perform well.
Mantra practice simply offers another way in
A mantra is introduced and repeated internally during the practice. The intention is not to use it to suppress thoughts or achieve some perfect state of mental silence. Thoughts will arise. Attention will wander. You may remember something you need to do later or find yourself halfway through an imaginary conversation.
None of this means the meditation has failed. When you notice that your attention has wandered, you return to the mantra. Then perhaps you wander again. And return again.
Over time, that movement becomes increasingly familiar.
You begin to discover that you can experience thoughts without needing to follow every one of them. The mind can be active without requiring your constant participation.
For an anxious or overthinking mind, that can be an important discovery.
Where this practice comes from
Like tributaries of a river, many contemporary meditation practices share ancient origins while taking different paths over time.
The practice I teach has its roots in the Vedic and yogic traditions of India, where mantra has been used as a contemplative practice for thousands of years. Japa, the repetition of mantra aloud, softly or internally, is one expression of this much older tradition.
My own training includes breath-focused mindfulness, Japa Yoga and advanced meditation instruction, with more than 500 hours of formal training alongside twenty-five years of personal practice. I have taught meditation and yoga for more than seven years.
While I was trained in and teach an internally repeated mantra practice informed by these traditions, it is not the branded Transcendental Meditation® and I am not affiliated with, or initiated by, the organisation or any other proprietary meditation system including the Vedic meditation certification offered by Thom Knoles.
For me, respecting the origins of these practices matters. Meditation has a long and rich history that precedes the modern organisations through which particular methods have become widely known in the West. We can make these practices accessible and relevant to contemporary life while still acknowledging the traditions from which they emerged.
Why mantra can be particularly helpful for an anxious mind
Meditation practices are sometimes grouped broadly into focused-attention practices, where attention is deliberately directed towards an object such as the breath, and open-monitoring practices, where we learn to notice thoughts, sensations and experiences as they arise.
Both can be enormously valuable. They can also feel surprisingly demanding when someone is highly activated, overwhelmed or caught in persistent rumination.
Mantra gives the mind a point of return. This is one reason I find it particularly useful for people who tell me, I can’t meditate because I can’t stop thinking.
You don’t need to stop thinking, you learn what to do when thinking happens.
Rather than treating every thought as an interruption, thoughts become part of the practice. You notice that attention has moved elsewhere and return to the mantra, without turning that wandering into evidence that you are doing something wrong.
There is also growing research interest in mantra-based meditation. A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (Álvarez-Pérez et al., 2022) found that mantra-based meditation was associated with reductions in anxiety, stress and some other measures of psychological distress.
Meditation is not a cure-all, but it offers a regular period in which you are no longer being asked to solve, anticipate, organise, react or perform. It helps your nervous system to heal from stress, and this has a profound impact on how you think, feel and relate to yourself and the world around you.
Consistency matters more than the perfect meditation
Regularity matters more than having a particularly impressive meditation.
Some sessions will feel deeply settled. Others will be full of thoughts. Some will feel spacious; occasionally you’ll spend much of the time wondering whether anything is happening at all.
The individual meditation is only part of the point. The practice is the point.
Over weeks and months, people often begin noticing the effects somewhere else entirely: in the extra space before they react, the ability to think more clearly when something goes wrong, the moment they recognise an old pattern before automatically following it, or the sense that their internal world is simply a little less crowded.
The aim isn’t to become very good at sitting quietly with your eyes closed. It is what becomes possible in the rest of your life because you do.
Why I teach this practice
I have been a student of meditation and yoga for twenty-five years and a teacher for more than seven. I hold advanced certification across a range of meditation and yoga practices, alongside dedicated study within the traditions from which much of this work emerged. But my relationship with meditation is not primarily academic or professional.
Meditation has been an important part of my own experience of navigating anxiety and panic, change, uncertainty, work, motherhood and the ordinary complexity of being human. It remains one of the foundational ways I care for my own mind and nervous system. It has truly been life-changing for me. And because of that, I want to share it.
When I teach meditation, I help students to integrate it on multiple levels so they understand the practice, establish it correctly, recognise what happens when the mind inevitably wanders, work through the questions that arise and, ultimately, become confident enough that the practice belongs to them.
I teach personalised meditation instruction across three one-hour online sessions, designed to help you learn the technique properly and establish a practice you can continue independently.
When you join me for longer-term support within a six-month partnership, where we meet fortnightly for dedicated and personalised resourcing as you move toward realising change in your life, I incorporate meditation instruction as a fundamental part of your journey.
If you’re curious about learning meditation for the first time, or would like support returning to a practice that has drifted, I’d love to support you. Please send me an email: jen@innervisioncounselling.com.au or book a time with me here.
Reference
Álvarez-Pérez, Y., Rivero-Santana, A., Perestelo-Pérez, L., Duarte-Díaz, A., Ramos-García, V., Toledo-Chávarri, A., Torres-Castaño, A., León-Salas, B., Infante-Ventura, D., González-Hernández, N., Rodríguez-Rodríguez, L., & Serrano-Aguilar, P. (2022). Effectiveness of mantra-based meditation on mental health: A systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(6), 3380. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19063380