Beditations - Meditations for Better Sleep

In a city where money is a mantra, a surprising new trend is keeping Wall Street titans grounded, even as markets fluctuate.

Some of New York’s most successful finance and business leaders—including billionaire hedge funder Dan Loeb and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio—have adopted the daily practice of transcendental meditation.

Transcendental meditation (known as TM) entered Western pop culture via the Beatles, in their porn-stache and Nehru jacket phase. Their guru was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a controversial Indian teacher who was accused of  peddling TM to get rich. Others ridiculed TM’s eyebrow-raising claims of being able to bring about world peace, or that its practitioners could literally fly.

In the 1980s, a spate of lawsuits filed by former adherents against Maharishi and his organization made claims ranging from fraud to manipulation and emotional distress. Damaged by negative publicity and dismissed by the mainstream as a hippie affectation, TM’s moment seemed to be over.

But with a resurgence of interest from Hollywood to Wall Street, the movement has enjoyed a comeback in the years since Maharishi died in 2008.

“He didn’t seek the Beatles out, they came to him,” says Bob Roth, a TM educator of 42 years who worked closely with Maharishi. “He said, ‘I love those boys, but they set my work back 30 years.’ That’s because it became a fad, rather than being seen as a medical process that has profound health benefits.”

Mr. Roth is executive director of the David Lynch Foundation, a non-profit founded by the Hollywood filmmaker to fund TM education. Much of the movement’s recent success can be credited to his skill at navigating the salons of the super-rich and famous, many of whom he teaches personally.

Silvered, well-spoken and handsome, with a nice selection of trim suits, he is the opposite of a robe-wearing swami. Mr. Roth’s large office is decorated sparsely but tastefully, the décor suggesting a Park Avenue divorce attorney who has a sideline in interior design. The man knows his scatter cushions.

“I never want to teach anyone who doesn’t want to learn,” Mr. Roth insists. “If it interests you, fine. If it doesn’t interest you, fine.”

Yet he smoothly suggests how easy it is to start meditating: “almost as simple as taking a nap or walking.”

A session does not require assuming the lotus position or adopting any other ephemera. One merely sits quietly for 20 minutes, twice a day. Practitioners meditate silently, with their eyes closed. They can be in groups or alone, sitting anywhere from at their desk to on a bus.

Mr. Roth, who became involved in the practice in 1969 when he was a student at UC Berkeley, describes himself as a skeptic. He has a winning way of referring to New Age-y cities like Berkeley and Los Angeles as “woo-woo-ville.” He stresses that TM doesn’t come with any associated belief system or ongoing financial obligation.

“The misunderstandings of meditation are that it’s a philosophy, it’s a religion, it’s a lifestyle, you have to eat tofu, sit in a strange position and clear your thoughts,” he says. “None of that is true.”

Adherents focus silently on a sound, or “mantra,” provided to them by their teacher. The goal is to transcend conscious thought and experience what Mr. Roth describes as “an unbounded level of the mind that is the source of creativity and energy and intelligence  within.”

Testimonials from health professionals ranging from NYU School of Medicine neurologist Gary Kaplan, M.D., to the television personality, Dr. Mehmet Oz, attest to TM benefits including reduced blood pressure and stress hormones, as well as improved cognitive focus and creativity.

To learn TM, those who can afford it are charged $960 for a four-day, eight-hour course. Some of it goes to free programs to bring TM to military veterans with PTSD, prison inmates, and at-risk high school students.

“Our work with veterans caught the attention of business leaders,” Mr. Roth explained one recent Saturday morning at the foundation’s east Midtown headquarters. The only other person on the floor at that hour seemed to be Robin Roberts, the ABC news anchor, sitting quietly by herself in the waiting area.

“Some business people were meditating and they came to our fundraising galas,” says Mr. Roth. “It spread by word-of-mouth. What interested them was three things: handling stress, the idea of more focus and creativity, but also work-life balance. When they’re home with their kids, they want to be home with their kids. And they appreciate that they sleep better at night.”

One prominent evangelist has been Mr. Dalio. With an estimated net worth of $15.2 billion, Forbes lists him as the 30th-richest person in America. A meditator for 42 years—he heard about TM during the Beatles phase—he offers to pay half the course fee for everyone in his firm.

“I feel a lot less anxiety since I’ve ben meditating. I feel like a ninja in a fight,” Mr. Dalio said in February, on a panel devoted to extoling the virtues of TM to business leaders. “Now, when something comes at me, it seems like it comes in slow-motion.”

Mr. Dalio has introduced several associates to the practice, including leading philanthropist and wealth manager, Mark Axelowitz.

“It’s some time I enjoy doing every day, it’s like two 20-minute vacations,” Mr. Axelowitz wrote to the Observer in an email.