Bob Roth is on a mission. Ray Rogers speaks to the globe-trotting enigmatic CEO of the David Lynch Foundation about schooling the world in Transcendental Meditation and its myriad benefits.
Bob Roth, the guru behind Transcendental Meditation
Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry, Jerry Seinfeld—the list of celebrities Bob Roth has taught Transcendental Meditation to goes on and on. As CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, Roth has also guided titans of business (like Bridgewater Associates founder, Ray Dalio) and thousands of civilians, many of whom credit him and the method he teaches with changing the course of their lives. But if he’s anyone’s “guru,” it’s more in the traditional sense of the word.
“‘Guru’ just means teacher, a genuine, authentic teacher,” says Roth, 73, in his unerringly kind, plainspoken way. “Look at what teachers do—I still remember my teacher in second grade, Mrs. DeVilbis—they are the people who guide us on an authentic path. You wouldn’t call your professor at NYU medical school your guru. But that professor at NYU medical school? That’s a real guru. Or a mentor at a business, or a grandparent who offers wise advice, that’s what I think a true guru is. But the pop or trendy understanding of ‘guru’ is often not anchored in reality.”
As an 18-year-old college freshman searching for some sense of peace in the midst of the chaos and turmoil of the late ’60s, what initially drew Roth to Transcendental Meditation (TM) was the fact that it is backed by science. A career teaching meditation wasn’t on his agenda when he enrolled in Berkeley in 1968. “I wanted to go to law school to become a U.S. senator like [Robert F. Kennedy], I went there with a mission to make a better world,” he recalls. A skeptic by nature (“I like new ideas, but I don’t like New Agey, untested things”), Roth was introduced to TM by a trusted friend, and its science-backed evidence and relative ease appealed to him.
In TM, participants meet with a teacher and are given their own sound mantra, which they silently repeat while seated for 20 minutes in the morning and again in the evening. Roth took to it instantly. Of that fateful first stab at it, he says: “It was so physiologically relaxing, deeper than anything I’d ever experienced.”
“There’s so much research on Transcendental Meditation that shows it’s actually more effective than many medications that I think society is going to change, and people are going to have to incorporate a few minutes twice a day for deep meditation into their impossibly busy schedules. Otherwise, we’re on a downward spiral of stress, trauma, sickness, violence. It’s not a promising vision of the future.”
Bob Roth
Roth’s upbringing instilled in him a desire to help others and with TM, he had found his calling. His father was a WWII veteran who was on the front lines as a medical doctor in Europe before working at a veteran’s administration hospital in San Francisco. “As a kid, when I would go to work with my dad, I saw all of these WWII and Korean War veterans… I mean it was such a sad, sad situation, so much suffering,” he remembers. His mother’s career as a schoolteacher also had a profound effect on him. “I saw firsthand the difficulties that kids going to what they call under-resourced schools experienced. So, when I learned to meditate and when I became a teacher, one of my first desires was to bring it to veterans and kids. I saw the suffering of people and I saw that this meditation could help people really in need—as well as everybody else.”
Like in the late ’60s, the world is currently in pervasive crisis mode once again. As Roth sees it, the need for meditation now cannot be underestimated. “Twenty years ago, people could’ve thought something like meditation or TM was a luxury, for people on the Upper East Side in New York or something like that. But now, I call it a pandemic of stress and trauma. There’s so much research on Transcendental Meditation that shows it’s actually more effective than many medications that I think society is going to change, and people are going to have to incorporate a few minutes twice a day for deep meditation into their impossibly busy schedules. Otherwise, we’re on a downward spiral of stress, trauma, sickness, violence. It’s not a promising vision of the future.”
It’s certainly not some New Age dream. The first research on TM was conducted by Dr. John Allison, a London GP, back in 1969, followed by studies at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s, published in the two most prestigious journals, Science and Scientific American, in 1970 and 1972, respectively. “It showed that during TM your body gains a state of rest in many regards deeper than the deepest part of deep sleep,” Roth explains. “Yet, brainwave research showed that when the meditator was in a state of deep inner peace and wakefulness, it was not sleep, it was not hypnosis, it was not an altered state; it was just a unique state of restful alertness.”
Since then, there’s been roughly 400 studies published in top medical and scientific journals in the U.S. and all over the world, including $30 million in grants from the National Institute of Health and the Department of Defense. The findings, says Roth, “show that Transcendental Meditation is incredibly effective for reducing stress and stress-related disorders like anxiety, depression, burnout, for improving focus, concentration, problem-solving ability, and increasing happiness and sense of well-being.”
A sure sign meditation has entered the mainstream? The David Lynch Foundation is currently in discussions with a number of insurance companies that are looking to include TM in their reimbursable packages. In New York City, the FDNY and NYPD have a foundation which is paying for firefighters and police officers to learn TM, and the David Lynch Foundation has taught meditation to some 500 assistant district attorneys, as well as to women who are survivors of domestic violence, through family justice centers that are paid for by the DA’s office. “And we’re now offering TM in 42 hospitals in New York City to doctors and nurses on the front lines,” says Roth proudly. “So, right now New York City’s at the forefront in the world of the David Lynch Foundation and TM.”
New York City is also at the center of Roth’s world. Born in Washington, DC, and raised in the Bay area, Roth travels the country and the globe—the David Lynch Foundation is in 35 countries—but his home base is happily here in Manhattan, where he lives on 33rd Street and Madison Avenue. “I love, love, love New York!” raves Roth. “I’ll be in another city, anywhere in the world, thinking, ‘Oh, this is so beautiful, it’s so calm, it’s so peaceful,’ and as soon as the plane is coming down into JFK or LaGuardia, I just go, ‘Ahhh! Home.’”
A regular at MOMA, and an enthusiastic restaurant diner—Asian and Italian are his favorites—you might run into him on a Circle Line, cruising around the Statue of Liberty, just for the joy of being out on the water in NYC. “I love the creativity, I love the intensity, I love the anything-is-possible,” he says about Manhattan. “I mean, the city has huge problems we have to attend to, and we are working with governments and hospitals, and we’ve actually launched something called Meditate New York. There’s an openness to meditation in New York City—a serious openness—that I don’t find any other place in the world.”
