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Tens of thousands of newspaper articles associated with practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique have been published throughout the world. However, it was not until the 1970s, when the first credible published research on the topic of health and Transcendental Meditation appeared in print, that the popular news media focused greater attention on it. The purpose of the present meta-analysis was to investigate this phenomenon. From two archives of a total of over 64,000 newspaper articles, 294 were identified as pertaining to Transcendental Meditation, health and well-being. These articles, never before the subject of analysis, originated in 13 countries from 1959 to 2022 and contained 31 topics related to health and well-being. In seven conceptual categories of health, using quantitative and qualitative techniques this study presents detailed evidence of topics and categories from these newspaper articles, leading to the conclusion that Transcendental Meditation results in improved general health and well-being.
Keywords: Transcendental Meditation, health, well-being, psychology, physiology, behaviour, newspaper articles
The health benefits of meditation are well established and the subject has become a major focus of psychology and physiology. For example, Fish and Saul (2019) explored the relationship between depression in college students and mindfulness using a mobile phone app, Totzeck et al. (2020) examined the relationship between anxiety and loving-kindness meditation in university students, Venditti et al. (2020) explored the effects of meditation on gene expression and epigenetics, and Rose, Zell, and Strickhouser (2019) considered the impact of meditation, including focused attention and yoga, on a variety of mental and physical health outcomes.
According to the meta-analytic investigation of Sampaio, Lima, and Ladeia (2017), the first reliable empirical research on health and meditation was conducted by Wallace in 1970 at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Wallace's (1970) unprecedented work on respiratory rate and oxygen consumption, cardiac output, skin resistance, and brainwave activity during Transcendental Meditation, and its subsequent uptake in collaborative research at Harvard University Medical School and University of California at Irvine by others such as Herbert Benson and Archie Wilson (Wallace, Benson, & Wilson, 1971) and in research on electroencephalographic (EEG) changes at Massachusetts General Hospital by Jean-Paul Banquet (1972, 1973) set the standard for what followed in the field of health and meditation research.
Founded by Maharishi Mahesh...