An invitation to join your neighbors in taking a collective deep breath in trying out meditation.

Sara Rubin here, first with an admission: I don’t meditate, and I think I’m not cut out for it. The simple idea of sitting still, of quieting both my mind and my body, actually unsettles me. (I get the irony—that probably means I’d benefit a lot from meditation.)

According to tons of research, and yes, there is tons of it, I’m missing out. Meditation is a technique recommended by physicians to reduce high blood pressure. And going back at least as far as 1976, researchers found evidence of community-scale metrics improving too—Monterey was part of a study revealing that if at least 0.97 percent of a city’s population practices meditation, the crime rate decreases. (At the end of 1962, 0.55 percent of Monterey residents meditated regularly.) 

“People meditate for their own personal benefit, but as a side benefit, you’re actually helping the community,” says Jo Ann Gesner, who has been teaching transcendental meditation (or TM) for 48 years and practicing for 54. “I would love hundreds of people to start.”

To that end, Gesner and the rest of the team at the Monterey TM Center are launching an initiative called Meditate Monterey County tomorrow, Sept. 19. The effort comes on the heels of Meditate America, which launched last week and included U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy accepting an award as “Enlightened Doctor of the Year.”

“The power of meditation to reduce stress and improve health could not be more important at a time when there is so much mental health strain in the world,” he said. Murthy added that his first meditation teacher was his mother, who helped him develop a practice as young as middle school: “That practice became a lifeline for me later on.”

Locally, the TM Center is expanding its offerings of free informational sessions and reducing the price of four-day introductory classes by up to 50 percent, to $480 (or $280 for students). The idea is that after a four-day class, students are self-sufficient practitioners of meditation. 

“My goal is to make it available to everyone,” Gesner says. She’s hoping the nonprofit can raise $25,000 to support this effort, and then to step it up by offering free or reduced training to groups of first responders who work in medicine and public safety. (Anyone can donate to that effort.) 

The initiative coincides with election season, meant to address “election stress syndrome,” and lasts until Nov. 12. Gesner has lived the power of meditation when it comes to grounding during crisis mode. She was a journalist in Iowa when the attacks of Sept. 11 shook the world. She and her editor, while talking on the phone with each other about the day’s news, watched on television as a plane hit the second tower at the World Trade Center. It became a day of chaos for the team, but Gesner relied on what she knew would work: meditation.

“I set up command central, but this wave of calm came over me,” she says. The TM community came together to find a way through: “We ended up doing lots of meditation, to calm the whole situation down.”

When I reached Gesner a few days ago to talk about Meditate Monterey County, she had just finished meditating. “I feel calm, I feel happy, I feel clear,” she told me. Sounds like something worth trying, if only I can slow down to try it.