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May 7, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast
21:19
THE BEST OF: How to Conquer Anxiety With Meditation

Bob Roth is one of the most skilled and sought-after meditation leaders in the world. In this episode, Bob explains to everyone (even skeptics) the easiest way to start practicing TM and how finding strength in stillness will help combat stress. From finding your mantra to the best time of day to practice, it’s one of Bob’s most revealing interviews yet! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You're handsomely dressed.
You could easily be walking out of an investment bank office.
You could be in a legal firm.
You would never pick Bob Roth as a transcendental meditation leader.
So, I don't like to name drop, but I'm going to name drop.
I got a call from Tom Hanks to go over to his house.
He was interested in hearing about TM. I was in the neighborhood.
So I was dressed like this, and so rang the doorbell, and he opened the door, and he was visibly shocked.
Like, stunned.
And I said, what?
And he said, uh...
I thought you were going to be wearing yoga pants and have one of these man buns.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
One of my favorite people on the planet is joining us today on the podcast.
And he's hosted a bunch of stuff.
When you hear his voice, you'll probably recognize it.
But I wanted to have a mom because he taught me to do something that was transformative.
Taught Lisa, taught Daphne, taught Arabella.
She's been working her way through the family.
But he's taught a lot of people that you may know of, and a lot of people you don't know and won't know and don't need to know because he's so passionate about getting us to think differently about the power of meditation.
He's also successful without stress, directs the Center for Leadership Performance.
He's the CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, which addresses the epidemic of trauma and toxic stress among at-risk populations, especially children.
It's Bob Roth.
Really happy to be here with both of you.
Two of my faves.
I love you both very much.
We love you.
You didn't mention his new book.
Can't give it all away in the beginning.
Don't go away.
There's a surprise.
We're coming away to commercial right now.
It's a surprise.
A book by a guy you've never heard of.
No, it's a really transformative book.
It is.
It's called Strength in Stillness, the Power of Transcendental Meditation.
He's written before, but this is a beautiful book, Elegant, Simple, Straightforward, a New York Times bestseller.
I hosted Bob on my TV show and did very well for us, which always to me indicates, I mean, some people do well on the show because they're so charismatic, which you are too, but sometimes the topic It's just so compelling that people tune in to see it.
So I wanted to have you on the podcast because it's actually a wonderful medium to talk about meditation.
It's conducive to people taking a few seconds to step back and just look at what's out there and what the opportunities are.
So the phenomenon of transcendental meditation.
Let's just start with that.
And for the average person listening out there who doesn't know much about it, who thinks it's a religious cult or Hare Krishna, people are going to start chanting or they have to dress in saffron robes.
What is transcendental meditation?
You're both wearing saffron robes.
Yes.
Always.
Turn the incense up, please.
Light them on.
Transcendental, you can just say that it means deep.
So transcendental meditation, just deep meditation.
And when I talk about what meditation is, I like to use an analogy, which you've heard many times.
If you're on a little boat and you're in the middle of the ocean, and all of a sudden you get these 30-foot high waves, and you could think, oh my God, that's two, three stories high.
The whole ocean is in upheaval.
But if you could do a cross-section of the ocean out there, you'd realize you've got these little itty-bitty waves, and in reality the ocean is over a mile deep.
And while the surface may be turbulent, the depth of the ocean by its nature is silent.
So we use that as an analogy.
The surface of our mind is the monkey mind or the gada-gada-gada mind.
And we hypothesize.
No belief here.
We hypothesize that deep within every human being, all of you who are listening, Mehmet and Lisa, myself, everybody, there's a level of our mind right now that is already calm, settled, wide awake.
It's there.
We've lost access to it.
And transcendental meditation is a simple, effortless technique that requires no belief.
It just allows the active thinking mind to as if settle down or sink in and experience deeper, quieter levels of the mind towards what they call that source of thought.
That, if I may say, if we want to be a skeptic for a moment, whoa, that sounds nice, but it could be, you know, it sounds poetic, but says who?
Yeah.
Well, science.
It's interesting that you come at it from a science perspective.
For folks at home, he's wearing a beautifully pressed shirt with bespoke cufflinks.
What does bespoke mean?
It looks like someone curved them.
No, they're just beat up.
Well, forget to be spoke to that.
They're just cufflinks.
You know, a pinstripe suit.
I mean, you're handsomely dressed.
You could easily be walking out of an investment bank office.
You could be in a legal firm.
You could be doing estate planning.
You would never pick Bob Roth as a transcendental meditation leader.
And yet, that's what you really are for the nation.
And it's partly that surprising aspect of how you approach so many people that allows them to lower their defenses and start to listen to what you're saying.
So let's talk about the science.
First, I want to tell you a quick story.
Please.
So, I don't like to name drop, but I'm going to name drop.
I got a call from Tom Hanks to go over to his house.
He was interested in hearing about TM. I was in the neighborhood.
So, I was dressed like this.
And so, rang the doorbell, and he opened the door, and he was visibly shocked.
Like, stunned.
And I said, what?
And he said, I thought you were going to be wearing yoga pants and have one of these man buns.
Right.
And I said to him...
Was he disappointed?
No, just shocked.
Maybe.
And I said, if your cardiologist was coming over, you wouldn't think that.
So it's all branding.
And my whole thing is, meditation does not have to be strange.
It is a knowledge that's accessible for everybody.
So I just dress...
But it's the iron of your persona that makes you so intriguing to me, right?
I'm certain many others.
Why do you do this?
You're a highly intelligent, effective individual.
You could do a lot of things.
You could organize rock concerts.
You could go hang out at an ashram.
Why spend your life teaching TM? And yes, you teach TM to all the famous people, but you teach TM to school kids around the country in troubled neighborhoods.
You spend your life doing stuff that is God's work, but you don't call it that.
So, then I'll come back to the science.
The thing is, I grew up in a very, very, very political household where we talked politics all the time and you had to sort of be in the 50s and 60s in the Bay Area.
So it was stressful.
No, it was actually loving, but we were very concerned about politics and, you know, Kennedy and Nixon and Johnson and Goldwater.
That was like our religion almost.
almost.
And I worked for Senator Bobby Kennedy as a high school senior.
And I wasn't a Republican or a Democrat.
I just wanted to make a better world.
And I thought, oh, this is an activist guy.
I'm an activist.
And I saw him speak on June 1st, 1968.
Four days later, he was...
Oh, my goodness.
And for us, a 17-year-old kid, devastating.
So I went to college...
I went to university in October with the desire, the intention of becoming a lawyer, go to law school and be a U.S. senator like Bobby Kennedy to change the world.
So my trajectory was I wanted social transformation in a fair-minded, middle-of-the-road sort of thing.
And along the way, that fell aside because I didn't think you could heal the nation, soul of the nation through politics.
And my dad was a doctor, so I sort of felt like a healer.
Step, step, step.
I become...
I decided to become...
I learned to meditate.
And my first...
While I'm at college.
And my first experience after learning, after settling down, was not, after meditating the first time, oh...
I want to get enlightened.
It was, oh, I'd like to teach this to inner-city school kids.
And that was June 28, 1969. But why did you get exposed to meditation before LSD? I was never into that stuff.
I was not into drugs.
I was not into radical politics, radical religion.
I just was a kid, normal kid, who just loved sports, loved life, you know, just wanted to make a better world.
And I was going to school full-time, working full-time, and the summer, I mean, and 1968-69, they were like rioting in the streets over Vietnam.
So I was pretty stressed out.
Someone told me about meditation.
I said, not on your life.
I'm a skeptic.
I don't even know what it means.
But I trusted this guy.
He was down to earth.
He was normal.
And he said, try it.
If you don't like it, quit.
Right.
And I liked it.
All right, we're going to take a quick break.
When we come back, what Bob says to skeptics.
Probably like you.
The science of transdental meditation is what got me interested in it.
Because there has been, because it is a way of doing it that's pre-reproducible, there's been a fair amount of research on it.
And I'd love if you could walk us through, not in a rapid fire way, but really, you know, slow it down for us, we can all grasp it, how profoundly this importance is.
And if we had a drug that did this, it would be a blockbuster.
That's what Norman Rosenthal said.
Oh, he did?
Yeah, he said on the, Dr. Norman Rosenthal wrote the book, Transcendence.
He said, uh...
If TM were a pill, it would be a billion dollar, for just the effects it has on the cardiovascular system, it would be a billion dollar blockbuster.
So why is it?
Explain that.
Well, we know there's an, and you talk about, both of you talk about it all the time on your shows, we know there's an intimate connection between your mind and your body.
If you're anxious in your mind, your body is tense.
I'm just going to keep this very simple.
So during Transcendental Meditation on that cross-section analogy of the cross-section of the ocean, as your mind just settles down from a more heated, agitated level of the mind to a cooler, calmer level of the mind, as your mind settles down, your body gains a state of rest In many regards, actually deeper than sleep.
So you have a reduction in oxygen consumption.
You have a reduction in cortisol levels, which is a stress hormone, by 30%.
You have an increase in serotonin, which is the happiness neurotransmitter.
You have an increase in galvanic skin resistance, which shows that you're calmer.
A whole constellation of changes just because of the connection between your mind and your body.
It's not surprising whatsoever.
The amazing thing to me is what takes place in the brain.
There's a spreading of what they call alpha 1. Alpha 1 is 8 to 10 cycles per second in the brain, brainwave pattern, and it's a state of deep inner reflection and wakefulness.
And the whole brain is sort of bathed with this spreading of Alpha 1. And that's, you have a unique state of restful alertness during TM that you don't find in sleep, you don't find in other mindfulness practices.
And that experience, Mehmet, is the basis of all the changes.
I mean, you talk about the benefits to heart health better than I do.
Let's get into this tiny bit.
So your brain exhibits waves that we believe are healing waves.
And we're not quite sure why it happens.
Yeah.
But the reason that I like it is because it changes my mindfulness for the rest of the day.
Right.
And I'm curious if some of the...
And that's neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity.
Yeah.
So your brain, like if you exercise, your biceps get nice and big and manly.
Your brain gets, you know...
A manly brain?
We don't want...
No one wants that.
No, no.
Testosterone poisoning.
I think what you have is when you're stressed, the prefrontal cortex or the frontal lobes, which is executive functioning, it's a...
I mean, the size of your fist behind your forehead.
When you're stressed, the prefrontal cortex goes offline.
And sort of what dominates, and you can add to this, is the amygdala, which is the reactivity center.
And so what happens when you settle down or transcend during Transcendental Meditation is you can actually see connections between the prefrontal cortex and the back of the brain Come back online, connections within the prefrontal cortex, calming of the amygdala.
There's even something, you know, the default mode network, which is also called the imagination network, that sort of creativity center of the brain.
That gets enlivened during TM. So there's a whole integrated brain reaction, completely different than napping, completely different than sleeping, completely different than hypnosis or anything else.
And through the word neuroplasticity, they say...
When the neurons fire together in meditation, they wire together out of meditation.
And that's what we see in schools.
So Strength and Stillness, your new book, gets into some of the details of how you make this practical.
Just to put some numbers on it, I know that there's data that shows that things as varied as psoriasis on your skin can be treated to blood pressures, numbers in hypertensive African Americans in the inner city.
So, I mean, how far apart can you get in conditions?
And you can probably list, please do a couple more areas where you're really confident the science has arrived.
Well, they've done studies in schools with graduation rates and PTSD with soldiers.
The Department of Defense provided...
Two and a half million dollars for a Phase II clinical trial with 200 post-9-11 veterans who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was a randomized controlled trial.
And it compared TM with just standard care and something called prolonged exposure, which is you show the veteran films of truck tanks being blown up, and that's supposed to numb them to their past trauma.
And the research from that RCT randomized control trial was that TM was as effective, not more effective, than...
Randomized and then prolonged exposure and far better than standard care.
And so now the VA is now offering TM for treatment of opioid addiction.
They're paying for that.
So there's that area.
There's areas in education where there's reduced suspensions and expulsions and improved graduation rates.
Lisa, how has TM affected you?
You mean dealing with the PTSD of having to live with you?
Yes.
Coping with me.
Let's talk about that first.
My recovery.
Remember, it says strength in stillness.
The still part's the operative part.
I have to just interrupt here because it was many years ago, and I have taught many people, but getting to teach...
But we were the most fun.
No.
Remember, we were sitting in a living room, and it was like, I have not forgotten that for an instant.
And then we all went out for Japanese dinner someplace.
We had the best time.
The best time.
No, you know, I loved learning TM. I have to admit, I am not a regular TM practitioner.
I do meditate, and I actually want you to talk a little bit about the different types of meditation, because this is, like, really bad for me to say.
I'm going to just say it on the air.
I'm going to tell you right now.
I didn't love my mantra.
Yeah, and that's not bad.
It's not bad.
No, it's nothing bad.
I felt really guilty because I just had this kind of like a negative response to my mantra.
So I'll meditate.
I'll do the meditation, but I won't always use the mantra you gave me.
And sometimes I'll be like 10 minutes into the mantra you gave me and I'm like, I don't like this one.
No, I'm glad you are.
Just be a different person.
Two things here.
It's a free world, so you get to do whatever you want.
How'd you pick my mantra?
And the second thing is, I would love to, and I've done this with Mehmet, and I'd love to get together with you for a half an hour sometime and just do a little refresher and see how you feel after that.
Because Transcendental Meditation is effortless, and if we make any effort or if there's a resentment or resistance...
Then it's not TM and it's a horrible experience.
It's that delicate.
Because the ability to transcend, transcend means to settle down or to go beyond the noise and the excitation and heat to that tender, tender, calm, peaceful level within.
And if there's any effort in doing that, then we can be very resentful of the mantra, any mantra, any sound.
So let's just, I think, I'm really glad you brought that up.
You can say anything you want.
But let's get to the mantra, because in strength and stillness, you point out the importance of it.
I happen to love my mantra.
I have the perfect mantra.
I can remember it.
It almost was designed for me, although I'm sure that there's millions of other people that more than that have that.
But why is the mantra so important?
And just to get this issue, because Lisa brought up of the emotional response, meditation is not about getting rid of the emotions.
No.
And you talk about it in the book, so please walk us through that.
Well, again, let's use that analogy of the ocean.
You know how you say, oh, that little kid is a hothead and he's boiling over with rage and the poor little kid's body is tense?
And then we say, oh, that little kid is cool, calm, and collected.
We say, cooler minds will prevail.
And the bodies are fluid.
So we know the mind is a system that can be heated and can be calm.
And the purpose of a mantra, a sound, in TM, it's a word or a sound that has no meaning associated with it.
It doesn't mean anything.
And you're taught how to use it effortlessly, and it serves as a vehicle for the mind to just dip in.
Now, if you're repeating it too clearly, you'll hate it.
If you're using it with any force, you'll hate it.
And it's not the mantra's fault, it's my fault, because I didn't teach you well enough.
So that's why I want to do a refresher.
Not true.
No, I want to do a refresher with that.
No, it's my fault.
It's entirely my fault.
It's no fault.
We're kidding, we're kidding, we're kidding.
I learned just fine.
I think it's his fault.
None that does it perfectly.
But would you do, could we do that?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
When we come back, more questions with Bob, one of the most skilled and sought-after meditation leaders in the world.
He has answers.
So there are other ways of meditating.
People will do the same, I don't know, like with a mandala, is it the same type of...
So, what you have is, there's this idea of transcendence, which is, if you look up the word transcendence, it means to go beyond ordinary human limitations.
And some people look for transcendence to go beyond, oh, I want to jump higher, I want to ride a motorcycle faster, I want to change my...
But those are just different things.
Then the extraordinary becomes ordinary because there's surface.
Real transcendence is accessing that timelessness that you feel within.
And you can have that with your partner at some moments.
You know, just time slips away when you hold a baby in your arms.
Newborn baby, time slips away.
Sometimes in sports or music or listening to music is that inner calm.
And so the purpose of all these different approaches are to access that inner calm.
And that's why I said it's not one or the other.
It's yes and.
Because you can approach it from different directions.
So, for listeners who don't have access to you or your course, who may be in a remote area, is there something they can do as a bridge until they can get to a TM course?
Something that could dip into meditations, like a TM light that would help them?
I personally think there are many meditations that actually cause people more frustration because they're told, don't think thoughts, clear your mind of thoughts, or imagine something.
And those things can be actually more stressful.
I just tell people, listen to some beautiful music.
Go for a walk.
Be kind to yourself for 20 minutes.
Don't judge yourself.
Oh, I'm no good at this and pressure.
Just take time out.
And then go online, TM.org.
It's a non-profit organization.
And see if there's not a teacher in your area or a teacher coming to your area.
But investigate it.
And strength and stillness.
That was a really good question.
I gave it to her.
All the good ideas come from you.
We should auction off getting to do this show with these two.
This is like a blissful experience.
We're in the Catskills this weekend.
Try the corned beef.
We'll be here all weekend.
Strength and stillness has a quote in it that is profoundly important.
I'm just going to read it to you and get your response.
It's a vehicle to lead the mind to the source of the thought.
And you've explained it elegantly and almost purposely made it pedestrian, but there's an incredible depth to what it feels like to do TM. And I'd love if you could explain what the source of the thought is and how it gets us there.
And in that, I'm going to challenge you because you were a skeptic initially.
And I want to understand how you got past that to appreciate this.
I can't pass it from direct experience.
I like that I could be skeptical.
I like that I could be 100% skeptical and I could learn the meditation.
I like that.
And as I said before, I thought I'd try it.
If I didn't like it, I'd stop.
And I trusted my friend who was doing it.
He seemed like a normal person.
I didn't want to get into anything weird.
And so I got over it from experience.
I'm still a very skeptical person.
I'm not into new age.
I'm not into woo.
I'm my father's...
My father's son used to tell me to be a little lighten up.
He was a real skeptic.
From Detroit, a radiologist and a physicist.
And the idea of a source of thought, the beautiful thing is, you read literature, and there's these beautiful, whether it's the kingdom of heaven is within you, or be still and know that I am God, or...
Lao Tzu, the great Chinese philosopher, said the universe surrenders to the quiet mind.
So it's just throughout the literature that there's levels within everyone that you can access.
I was never into philosophizing about it.
I wanted to let me experience it.
If I experience it, then I got it.
And it's not that I believe in it.
It's my experience.
So, that's got me there.
You just heard from one of the most skilled and sought-after meditation leaders in the world, Bob Roth.
He happens to be a very good friend as well.
I'm just a mensch.
You can hear lots more of what he has to say in a beautifully crafted book, Strength and Stillness, New York Times bestseller, for good reason, The Power of TM, Translational Meditation.
God bless you.
God bless you both, and I really love you both.
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