The Fundy Film Society

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.