Did he study Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi?
JB: He didn’t actually study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, but was studying Transcendental Meditation (TM). This was in the 1960s and early 1970s when the Maharishi’s work was very popular. There were people on all the college campuses using TM, and some students at Harvard came to him and said, “We know your interest is in blood pressure, and we’ve noticed that people who have meditated for several months, who previously had high blood pressure, have lowered it through the meditation practice. Maybe you want to study it.” That’s how he got into it. The first thing Dr. Benson studied was TM, with a physiologist, Keith Wallace; together they coined a term “the relaxation response,” the opposite of the body’s flight-or-fight response. In 1975, he went on to write the book The Relaxation Response, and looked at how a variety of different cultures, from secular to religious, had ways in which they could turn off the inner dialogue and become present, thus eliciting this relaxation response.
JB: He didn’t actually study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, but was studying Transcendental Meditation (TM). This was in the 1960s and early 1970s when the Maharishi’s work was very popular. There were people on all the college campuses using TM, and some students at Harvard came to him and said, “We know your interest is in blood pressure, and we’ve noticed that people who have meditated for several months, who previously had high blood pressure, have lowered it through the meditation practice. Maybe you want to study it.” That’s how he got into it. The first thing Dr. Benson studied was TM, with a physiologist, Keith Wallace; together they coined a term “the relaxation response,” the opposite of the body’s flight-or-fight response. In 1975, he went on to write the book The Relaxation Response, and looked at how a variety of different cultures, from secular to religious, had ways in which they could turn off the inner dialogue and become present, thus eliciting this relaxation response.
