The founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, with a net worth of about $17 billion, has practiced transcendental meditation (TM). Ray Dalio credited his financial success to a simple practice: a daily meditation.
After getting an MBA from Harvard, Dalio launched Bridgewater from his New York apartment. But seven years on, he lost almost everything after a bad investment. He borrowed some money from his father to tide over the phase and started meditation.
“I had learned transcendental meditation,” Dalio said in an interview. “I used it to reflect on mistakes and to clear my mind. When the pain passes, don’t just go forward, reflect, because that’s where your progress is.”
Dalio took up transcendental meditation after the Beatles discovered it in India in 1968. While breathing is a part of the technique, its bigger focus is on reaching a calm mental state, beyond thinking, by closing the eyes and repeating a mantra in silence.
Dalio says, is to find a quiet space. Then, sit comfortably, close your eyes and think of your mantra.
In transcendental meditation, you don’t share your mantra — it’s a proprietary practice where you learn your personal mantra during a four-day training course, which can cost you between $380 and $960. But a popular example, Dalio says, is the syllable: “om.”
Once you have your mantra, “you sit there in peace and you repeat that mantra over and over again,” he says. Eventually, the repetition supersedes the rest of your thoughts, sending you into a transcendent state.
“You’re peaceful. You’re quiet,” he says. “You’re not awake, but you’re not asleep.”
On a normal day, Dalio does one 20-minute session as soon as he wakes up in the morning and another one right before eating dinner. Each, he says, feels like a “20-minute vacation” that eases anxieties and puts him into a state of relaxation — enabling him to make better business decisions.
It’s more important to get two sessions in per day, he says, than trying to do them at the same time every day. If work commitments disrupt his normal routine, he’ll add a meditation elsewhere in his schedule to maintain his two-per-day cadence.
And the more you do it, he says, the more easily you’ll start to sense during the day when meditations might be necessary: “You can feel that little bit of anxiety, or whatever it is, and you say [to yourself], ‘Oh, I need to go meditate.’
Research from 2016 shows that practicing transcendental meditation can help alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression. For Dalio, there’s another bonus: “When you’re doing down into a meditation, these amazing ideas come to you.”
It’s both “terrific and frustrating,” he explains, since the point of the meditation is to put aside your ideas and focus on your mantra. “Sometimes I almost want to have a pencil and paper next to me,” he says. “I don’t want to lose the idea.”
Dalio’s theory: Great ideas hit you during meditations because you’re tapping into your subconscious, where your creativity tends to thrive. He compares it to the relaxation you experience while taking a hot shower and letting the creative ideas just come to you.
“When you want to be creative, you don’t say I’m going to go work hard and think about being creative,” he says.
Though Dalio resists the urge to write down his ideas during his meditation sessions, he says he emerges from them better equipped to make tough decisions.
“I’ll see things clearer,” he says.
