Howard Stern: “Meditation is just like brushing your teeth!”

Howard Stern, the famous radio DJ and talk-show host, sat down recently with the comedian Jerry Seinfeld to discuss the Transcendental Meditation technique.

Their talk was recorded for Jerry’s show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee:

Howard Stern: “I started meditating at 18 years old…

My mother brought me to a Transcendental Meditation center. She was very depressed, because her sister had died.

I only tell you this because how profoundly depressed that she was, this is what I’m trying to tell ya, it was that bad. She tried psychiatrists, she didn’t like that idea, very closed off to it. Nothing worked.

Then I go off to to college and I get a call in my freshman year from a woman who sounded completely different! ‘I can’t tell you what’s happened in my life, I feel unbelievable’ — I could sense that my Mum was profoundly different!

Organically happy, not a contrived happiness, so I started meditating.”

Howard Stern: “I got to interview the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi twice in my life and I brought my mother with me and she was in tears, she owes her Life to him and people shouldn’t think that its a religion or anything like that.

It’s just like brushing your teeth, it’s a technique and yet this technique changed her, from the inside out. She is a completely different human being, like reincarnated.”

Jerry Seinfeld: “I just started because I wanted Jess to do it, she learned it and I was talking to the guy (TM teacher) and he said, ‘How many times a day have you been meditating?’

‘Oh, I only do once.’ He says, ‘You should try the mornings!’ I started this in January.”

Howard Stern: “What do you mean? But you had learned a long time ago how to meditate!”

Jerry Seinfeld: “I started the same time you did.”

Howard Stern: “But you didn’t realize the importance of doing it twice a day?”

Jerry Seinfeld: “I didn’t. And all these years of doing the show [“Seinfeld”] would have been so different. If I’d had that relief back then… well, I’d still be doing the show, you know!”