Author’s Note
I have practised meditation regularly for more than eighteen years and eventually became a Certified Transcendental Meditation™ (TM) Teacher. During that time, meditation has become so thoroughly integrated into the rhythm of my life that I sometimes think less about the minutes spent meditating than about the many hours of activity that follow.
This essay grows from that experience, but also from my continuing interest as a researcher in what happens when consciousness, physiology, behaviour, and the demands of everyday life meet. Recent research concerning adverse experiences associated with some forms of meditation deserves serious consideration. Acknowledging such findings does not, in my view, diminish the considerable evidence for meditation’s benefits. Rather, it reminds us that meditation should be approached with the same intellectual honesty we should bring to anything capable of affecting human well-being.
Different practices, people, circumstances, and periods of life may produce different experiences. In the face of such realities, responsible advocacy requires neither insisting that meditation is right for everyone nor retreating from the evidence that it can be enormously valuable for many.
After eighteen years, I remain persuaded of its value in my own life. Perhaps the most meaningful evidence of that value appears not while my eyes are closed, but in the person who opens them again.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
When it comes to the realm of leadership and leaders, some decisions announce themselves as important. They arrive accompanied by meetings, spreadsheets, projections, advisers, and enough preparation to make everyone involved aware that what happens next matters. Then there are the decisions that do not.
Instead, they arrive in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. An employee walks into an office with a problem, an unexpected email appears, financial projections change, or someone says something during a meeting that demands an immediate response. In such instances, there is no opportunity to retreat for three days, examine every conceivable variable, and return once perfect clarity has been achieved. In that moment, a decision must be made and the decision must produce beneficial outcomes more than it does the opposite. This is the way of leadership
We tend to think about such moments primarily in terms of information. Did the leader have the right data, understand the problem, consult the appropriate people within their circle of influence, and were the risks adequately assessed?
Each element represents an important question, yes. But there is another question we ask far less frequently: What was the condition of the mind of the person making the decision?
A brilliant mind operating under sustained stress is not necessarily functioning with access to its full brilliance. A person carrying weeks of inadequate sleep into a consequential meeting does not leave that sleep deprivation outside the conference room. Nor does the nervous system cease participating simply because the matter before us is important. For good or bad, we bring the condition of ourselves and mind into the decisions we make.
As a result of my own work, I have become increasingly interested in this relationship between inner condition and outward action, not merely as a researcher but through experience. As some readers may know, I have meditated regularly for more than eighteen years. What began as a personal practice eventually became part of my professional life when I became a Certified Transcendental Meditation™ (TM) Teacher. Over the years, my wife and I have had the privilege of teaching more than two-thousand people to meditate and of watching what happens when a practice that occupies a relatively small portion of the day begins to influence how someone encounters the rest of it.
My own experience has been similarly cumulative.
Each of us has 1,440 minutes available within a twenty-four-hour day. Setting aside, in most cases, twenty minutes twice daily for meditation leaves another 1,400 minutes in which to live, work, interact, decide, create, solve problems, and respond to whatever life presents. Looked at from that perspective, forty minutes is a relatively small investment if what occurs during those forty minutes meaningfully influences the quality of the remaining 1,400. A little can go a remarkably long way. Here, I am reminded of something Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was wont to say: “Do less and accomplish more.”
As I have come to experience and understand that phrase, sitting to meditate allows my mind to settle and become clear enough that, when I return to activity, I am better able to make decisions and to respond to situations rather than merely react to them. The distinction is important. Reaction tends to collapse the distance between what happens and what we do next. Response allows some space to remain. And it is within that space that I have discovered something interesting.
The space created during meditation does not simply disappear when meditation ends. Increasingly, I find that I carry some measure of it back into activity. And within that space, possibilities seem more readily available. Rather than experiencing a situation as though there were only one obvious response—the immediate one—I can often perceive several possible responses, consider their likely consequences, select among them, and then act.
I have come to think of this as pause, select, and act.
The pause need not be particularly long. Sometimes it may occupy only a moment. What matters is that there is a moment: enough distance between stimulus and action for choice to enter. From the available possibilities, I can select the response that appears most appropriate and then act upon it. That does not guarantee that I will make the right decision. Clarity is not omniscience, and meditation does not confer immunity from error. But it can create conditions in which a considered response has a better opportunity to emerge than it might have had through immediate reaction.
Over time, I have noticed another consequence. Repeated experience with this process builds confidence—not confidence that I will always know what to do, but confidence in my capacity to meet what arises, pause long enough to see more than one possibility, make the best decision available to me, and act. That distinction has had tremendous implications for the longer arc of my life and work. However, I would be reluctant to attribute every beneficial change in my life during the past eighteen years to meditation. Human beings are not controlled experiments. I have aged. I have married. Mina and I have raised children. I completed a doctorate. I have taught, researched, written, built organisations, experienced successes, encountered disappointments, and navigated periods of considerable uncertainty. Life itself changes us. Yet across those years there has been one remarkably consistent feature: twice each day, I stop.
That rhythm has become so thoroughly integrated into my life that I sometimes understand its value most clearly when contemplating the alternative. Meditation has not prevented difficult circumstances from arising, nor has it rendered me immune to stress. What it has provided is a regular opportunity for the accumulated momentum of activity to settle before I return to that activity again. And returning is the point.
I do not meditate primarily to become better at sitting with my eyes closed. I meditate because eventually I open my eyes and return to my wife and children, to teaching, to writing, to reading, to research, and to conversations and decisions and problems that still require solutions. And whatever value meditation possesses must ultimately reveal itself there—in the quality of consciousness we bring back into life. This is particularly relevant when we consider leadership.
Stress is not inherently an enemy. The human stress response is an extraordinary biological adaptation. When circumstances demand immediate action, the body mobilises accordingly. However, the problem arises when a system designed to respond to challenge rarely receives an opportunity to recover from it.
Under sustained stress, attention can narrow, memory and cognitive flexibility can be affected, emotional reactions may become more pronounced, and we can become increasingly inclined toward familiar responses at a time when circumstances require us to perceive something new. In such cases, what feels like decisiveness may sometimes be a stressed nervous system attempting to eliminate uncertainty as quickly as possible.
The consequences become especially significant for leaders because their internal states rarely remain entirely their own. A hurried remark can alter a relationship, reactive personnel decisions can affect an entire department, strategic choices made while exhausted can redirect years of organisational effort. Consider this: the greater one’s sphere of responsibility, the larger the potential radius of one’s internal condition.
This is one reason meditation has attracted considerable scientific attention. Research across several contemplative traditions has associated meditation with benefits ranging from reductions in anxiety and depression to changes in attention, emotional regulation, blood pressure, pain, and other measures of physical and psychological well-being. Even the recent Atlantic article, The Dark Side of Mindfulness, which focuses primarily on adverse experiences associated with meditation, acknowledges at considerable length that meditation’s popularity rests partly upon a substantial body of evidence suggesting real benefits. But the article also raises questions that those of us who teach meditation should not dismiss.
Willoughby Britton, a psychologist, researcher, and former meditation teacher, has spent years studying experiences in which meditation was associated not with greater well-being but with anxiety, insomnia, dissociation, depression and, in some cases, severe psychiatric disturbance. Some of the most troubling cases described in the article followed intensive retreats involving many hours of meditation over successive days, although adverse experiences have also been reported among people practising considerably less. In my opinion, that research deserves attention. Indeed, I will go so far as to suggest that acknowledging it is not an argument against meditation. It is, instead, an argument against treating meditation carelessly.
One difficulty in discussing this subject is that the word meditation can create the impression that we are talking about a single activity. We are not. There are, according to Fred Travis and Jonathan Shear, three broad categories of meditation—Focused Attention, Open Monitoring, and Automatic Self-Transcending. The practices falling within these three categories of meditation may involve sustained concentration, observation of thoughts, attention to breathing, body scans, contemplation, mantra, effortless transcending, and numerous other approaches emerging from very different traditions and operating according to different assumptions. Duration, intensity, setting, instruction, and the individual matters.
The Atlantic article itself illustrates this complexity. Britton’s research has found different adverse experiences associated with different meditation practices, while many of the most severe cases discussed in the article occurred in the context of intensive retreats. This distinction is familiar to me as a TM Teacher because we do not simply hand someone an audio recording and tell them to meditate.
Instruction occurs within a teaching structure. Follow-up is part of that structure. And some teachers, present company included, receive additional training for working with populations whose nervous systems may have been subjected to extraordinary levels of stress, including military veterans and first responders. The underlying principle is important regardless of technique: the person sitting before us matters more than our desire to prove that a practice works. And that principle also changes how we should respond when someone tells us that meditation is not helping.
Admittedly, one of the more troubling themes in Khazan’s article concerns people who reported distress to meditation teachers only to have their experiences reframed as evidence of spiritual progress, resistance, or incorrect practice. In some instances, they were simply encouraged to meditate more. I believe we should be capable of a more humane response.
Sometimes a person may need different guidance. In some instances, another form of meditation may be more appropriate or additional professional support may be warranted. And at other times, the appropriate response may simply be to stop. And, for me, there should be no shame in that.
Nor must deciding that meditation is not appropriate now become a declaration that meditation will never be appropriate. Human beings, circumstances, and nervous systems change. The practice that someone finds uncomfortable or unhelpful at twenty-five may be experienced quite differently at thirty or forty-five. Someone navigating acute trauma, grief, illness, or extraordinary stress may encounter a practice differently after circumstances have stabilised.
In my experience, the door can, and perhaps should, remain open without anyone being pushed through it. This, to me, is what responsible advocacy for the benefits of meditation looks like.
After eighteen years of regular practice of meditation, I remain unequivocally persuaded of its value. My experience as a practitioner gives me reason for that confidence. My years as a teacher have added to it. And a substantial and growing body of scientific literature gives us reason to continue investigating meditation seriously. But confidence need not require absolutism.
Indeed, one of the researchers quoted in The Atlantic, Richard Davidson, expresses something close to the position I have arrived at: for most people, he believes the potential costs of not meditating are greater than those associated with meditation, while simultaneously arguing that people with serious psychiatric disorders require considerably greater care and professional guidance. For me, those ideas can and should peacefully coexist.
A practice can be beneficial for many people without being beneficial for every person under every circumstance. A medication, as research has shown, can save lives while possessing contraindications. Similarly, exercise can improve health while being inappropriate in particular forms for particular bodies at particular times. And as we learn within Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, sleep is essential, yet even sleep can become disordered. Maturity allows us to resist the temptation to turn useful things into universal ones. For leaders, this returns us to where we began.
Meditation is not the only means of caring for the mind that makes the decision. Adequate sleep, exercise, meaningful relationships, beneficial nutrition, time away from work, meaning, belonging, purpose, and the varied structures within which people work matter enormously. No meditation technique should become an excuse for maintaining an unhealthy organisation while teaching employees to tolerate its dysfunction more peacefully. Meditation can instead become one element within a larger ecology of intelligent self-maintenance.
The leader who meditates is not withdrawing from responsibility. Ideally, the practice allows for a more complete return to it. The objective is not perpetual calm, nor the elimination of every difficult emotion. Because, leadership sometimes requires urgency, discomfort, confrontation, grief, uncertainty, and the willingness to make decisions for which no perfect answer exists. As a result, the question becomes whether we can meet those moments without allowing the accumulated stress of all the moments preceding them to make the decision for us.
Perhaps this is why, after eighteen years, I continue to close my eyes twice each day. Not because meditation has removed difficulty from my life. Trust me, it has not. I continue because eventually I open my eyes again. And when I do, there is a world waiting—a family, a community, work worth doing, decisions to be made, and consequences that will extend beyond me.
The quality of what happens next depends, at least in part, upon the condition of the person who has returned to meet it. And for me, that person is far better than he would otherwise be without meditation. So, give meditation a shot. The same may be so for you.
Suggested Practice
Sometime today, notice what happens immediately before you respond to something unexpected.
It need not be a major decision. Perhaps an email irritates you, someone interrupts you, a plan suddenly changes, or a problem appears that requires your attention. Rather than responding immediately, experiment with creating a small amount of space.
Pause. Select. Act.
Pause long enough to recognise that an event has occurred without assuming your first reaction must become your response. Select from among the possibilities available to you, considering not merely what you can do but what outcome you hope your action will produce. Then act.
Afterward, reflect upon the experience. Did the pause reveal an option you might otherwise have missed? Did it change the quality of your response? Did it alter what happened next?
Meditation can help cultivate this space over time. But today, simply begin by noticing that the space exists.
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About the Author
Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.
He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.
Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.
His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.
He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.
To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.