“I started meditation on July 1, 1973,” David Lynch recalled in 2016, “on a sunny Saturday morning at 11 o’ clock. I remember it as if it was yesterday. And it was so beautiful.”
Over the course of his life, Lynch told this story hundreds of times. In 1973, things were ostensibly going great for him; he was filming Eraserhead at the Doheny Mansion with a grant from the American Film Institute. But “he wasn't happy, and he didn't understand why,” recalls his friend Bob Roth, CEO of the David Lynch Foundation. Then, as Lynch recalled in a 2020 interview with GQ’s Chris Heath, a phrase came to him: “True happiness is not out there. True happiness lies within.” He shared all this at the time with his sister Martha, who recommended something called Transcendental Meditation. The conversation changed his life.
Though we will always remember Lynch as a filmmaker first, he may have left behind an even greater legacy in the movement to which he dedicated the last two decades of his life: Transcendental Meditation, or TM. Arguably no public figure did more for TM than Lynch, who was famously reticent when it came to talking about his films but downright voluble on the subject of his long-standing meditation practice: twice a day, every day. His Foundation has supported TM-related research, provided meditation programs for underserved and at-risk populations, and promoted public awareness of TM. In the twenty years since its founding, it has become one of the most important and influential institutions in the world of TM.
By promoting meditation as an accessible, evidence-based tool that could add value to your life, whether you’re a student, a firefighter, or a screenwriter, Lynch “brought it back down to earth,” Bob Roth says. The dynamic is roughly akin to Michael Pollan’s relationship to psychedelics—another case of an unexpected cross-disciplinary champion helping a subculture gain wider recognition and acceptance. But Lynch’s relationship with TM was also deeper, and a bit more mystical. At a memorial service last month, Dr. Tony Nader, international director of the TM organization, called him “a saint in our world.”
Lynch’s final “public” appearance wasn’t a screening or a film festival but a pre-recorded video for a DLF gala in September 2024. He was supporting Meditate America, a program designed to provide meditation education to frontline healthcare workers and first responders. In March, the DLF is launching its Meditate LA Program, designed to subsidize TM training for people affected by the wildfires through partnerships with hospitals, police departments, and fire departments. There’s a poetry in the initiative: Lynch was an essential Angeleno, and arguably a casualty of the wildfires. But now that he’s gone, who will speak for the program, or TM in general?
Transcendental Meditation has been called many things in the past 50 years: a new religion, a peace movement, even a cult. But for all its spiritual connotations, it’s essentially a wellness practice—a mental health technique to boost calm, clarity, and creativity. Roth notes that it was originally conceived as “a healthcare intervention—something that would be really good for people’s health.” TM even has its own Cleveland Clinic page, which describes it as a type of meditation where “your active mind settles inward until you transcend to a state of pure consciousness.”
At its most basic, though, TM is a silent, mantra-based meditation practice. Practitioners are given a mantra by a teacher, not to be shared with others, then meditate on that mantra for 20 minutes, twice a day. Derived from the Vedic tradition, the fundamentals of TM are thousands of years old, but the modern version that Lynch practiced and propagated dates to 1955, when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi began teaching the meditation style in India. What started as a technique evolved into a movement as the Maharishi toured the world and inspired a global following.
Part of that following was driven by celebrity. The most famous example is the Beatles, who first met the Maharishi at a conference in Wales in 1967 and subsequently promoted TM as a superior alternative to psychedelics. In 1968 they joined Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram in Rishikesh, along with Beach Boy Mike Love, which led to the Maharishi joining the Beach Boys on a US tour. Ever since, TM has had a steady stream of famous practitioners and advocates: Jerry Seinfeld, Howard Stern, Sky Ferreira, and Katy Perry, to name a few.
This hasn’t always served TM well. Whether your game is politics or enlightenment, celebrities can veer off message, bring their own baggage, grow disillusioned, or become embroiled in scandal. Mike Love, still a proud TM practitioner, has fully decamped to MAGA-land, while Russell Brand, another vocal supporter, has been embroiled in sexual assault allegations. While the Beatles have supported TM over the decades, John Lennon did write one of history’s first diss tracks, “Sexy Sadie,” about the Maharishi.
Lynch was a spokesperson of a different caliber: measured, consistent, unproblematic. It certainly helps that his work has a natural affinity with TM‘s general vibe: the dreamlike qualities of movies like Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive chime with TM‘s focus on transcendental consciousness. But he was also balanced in how he spoke about the practice, shouting out the practical benefits with a dash of the esoteric. He was adamant that TM is not a religion. “I’m an artist, I don’t want to belong to any kind of sect,” he said in one interview. “It’s not a sect, it’s a technique that fuels all fantastic things.”
Most importantly, though, Lynch was in it for the long haul, not the hype. Lynch started meditating in ‘73 but didn’t start his foundation until 2005. “He was a really reluctant advocate,” said Roth. “But he saw the response—people were really drawn to what he had to say.”
The DLF emerged from a chance encounter with Roth in Washington DC, where Roth was working on a TM study at American University for the effectiveness of TM on students with anxiety and depression and substance use disorder. Roth invited Lynch to speak to some students, and the event was such a hit that they decided to do similar events, giving talks from Brazil to Estonia about Lynch’s work and experience with meditation. Lynch and Roth decided to create a foundation to formally support the work, without much of a vision beyond spreading TM awareness.
“To be a foundation, you have to be a 501c3. And one day he called me up and said, “What’s a 501c3?” And I had to tell him, I don’t know!,” Roth said. “I say that because of the innocence at the beginning. There was no grand plan, and he never thought, ‘This is going to grow big.’”
But it did grow, and fast. Starting in 2005, Lynch threw himself into DLF work, giving lectures around the world and hosting meditations at his home in Los Angeles (Michael Cera scored his Twin Peaks: The Return cameo after attending a course at Lynch’s house). The lecture series spawned a documentary, Meditation, Creativity, Peace and his book (dedicated to the Maharishi) Catching the Big Fish, which has become a cult classic guide to creativity. In 2016 he created a dual-degree program in screenwriting and meditation at Maharishi International University, TM‘s educational institution.
Roth cites 2009 as the DLF’s breakout moment. “He invited Paul [McCartney] and Ringo [Starr] to do a benefit for us at Radio City Music Hall. That was the coming out for the David Lynch Foundation. The goal was to teach a million kids to meditate.” The “Change Begins Within” benefit concert was the first time the two had performed together in 18 years, and it propelled the DLF from Lynch-level awareness to Beatles-level fame.
But Lynch and his partners also created a network and infrastructure that made the DLF more than a PR machine. The foundation has worked with pop stars and presidents, but the heart of their work is research and training. Their Heal the Healers Now (HTHN) program provides TM training to healthcare professionals; it’s been implemented in more than 100 hospitals and medical centers across 17 states, with participation by over 2,500 physicians, nurses and other healthcare workers. Their Resilient Warrior program offers TM training to active-duty military personnel and veterans with a specific focus on addressing PTSD. They’ve sponsored clinical research and phase three trials at Duke, Cambridge and Harvard. So far, over 1 million people have participated in David Lynch Foundation-supported TM initiatives.
Lynch was most active in the DLF during its first ten years. “He was like the rocket booster,” says Roth, getting the organization into a self-sustaining orbit. This timeline roughly tracks with his filmography: he would have stepped back to focus on Twin Peaks: The Return. But even as he scaled back his commitments (and battled emphysema), he still made time to record videos and make appearances in service of DLF work. Programs like Meditate LA and Heal the Healers show that the grassroots work can and will continue without him, but it’s hard to imagine the David Lynch Foundation without David Lynch. Who’s going to be the new face of the operation?
TM still has a deep bench of celebrity practitioners to pull from. Hugh Jackman hosted the David Lynch’s Meditate America gala last year. Katy Perry has spoken about TM with Bob Roth at the Vatican. Still, Wolverine is an unlikely guru, and Perry seems more focused on the cosmos than cosmic consciousness at the moment. Teenage Dream is a very different sort of dream than Lost Highway. Perhaps the best thing that the TM organization or the DLF could do next is catch a big fish. Maybe Timothee Chalamet will realize now that happiness comes from within.
Even after his death, though, Lynch may remain the best gateway to TM—not because of his foundation or advocacy, but simply because of who he was. Consider Andrés Canales-Johnson, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University’s Consciousness and Cognition Lab. His work, which is supported by the DLF, is at the forefront of TM research.
Canales-Johnson got into TM during the pandemic, and quickly realized that the practice was uniquely suitable for clinical research. “[TM] is very easy to study scientifically, because you learn TM in exactly the same way, even learning Cambridge, or if I'm learning in Japan, because the teacher has a standardized way of teaching it,” he explained. In other words, it’s easy to study consistently against control groups.
His research confirms that TM does something to our brains. Long-term practitioners consistently produce synchronized brainwaves at 10 Hz (think about that reintegration scene in Severance—those waves). Different forms of meditation produce different frequencies. But Canales-Johnson studies what’s known as neural noise: what happens between the waves. The neural noise is where consciousness coalesces. “Noise has to do with putting things together, and the waves have to do with maintaining information,” said Canales-Johnson. And it turns out that noise is an even better indicator of whether or not someone practices TM. Their brains aren’t necessarily “noisier,” but they are, to extend the metaphor, making a unique sound in the part of the brain where consciousness happens.
What does that mean? That’s what Canales-Johnson is trying to figure out, with help from the DLF. But his connection to Lynch is older and deeper than TM. Before he even knew what TM was, Lynch inspired him to become a neuroscientist. When he was 13 years old in Chile, a friend introduced him to Lost Highway. “It was a crucial moment,” he recalled.
“I have a very vivid memory of having nightmares for a few weeks after watching a scene in Lost Highway where the main character is at a party,” he said. “It completely freaked me out, but in a nice way, because I asked myself how is it possible that a piece of meat inside your skull can generate something that is not there? How is it possible that a brain can generate an entire reality that is not happening for real?”
Lynch’s work set Canales-Johnson on the path to big questions about meditation and our brains. It may have taken a decade for him to get there, but that road eventually led him to TM. That may be Lynch’s most lasting legacy within the movement. His films invited you to explore the depths of your consciousness—and if you’re curious about going even deeper, he extended an open invitation to transcend.