I've been interested in Trancendental Meditation off and on for years. It seems interesting, but nobody will say exactly how to do it. That is, not unless you pay around a thousand dollars to have an official Transcendental Meditation instructor teach you.

There have often been lower cost alternatives to things. There is VHS vs Beta, Windows vs Linux...

In reading about Trancendental Meditation in contemplation of making the leap to sign up for some training, I've come across a newer and less known brand of meditation called NSR which is described as being pretty much like Trancendental Meditation.

NSR stands for Natural Stress Relief, and it's a type of meditation that is mantra based, kind of like Transcendental Meditation. Judging from what the NSR web site says, and from what a lot of others say, NSR is for the most part the same or very similar to Transcendental Meditation, but without the high price tag.

The NSR course is $47 for a book and audio CD, or $25 for a PDF version of the book and MP3 files of the audio.

I'm thinking about taking the leap. I've heard such great things about TM but I don't know if I want to drop a grand to learn a meditation technique. I read the the people behind NSR are actually Transcendental Meditation coaches or practitioners. 

http://www.natural-stress-relief.com/ The original NSR site and where you can get the downloadable version.

http://www.nsrusa.org/ The American NSR site. I think that only the printed version is available from here.

Edit: I ended up purchasing a digital copy of the NSR program from here http://www.natural-stress-relief.com/stress/pdf.htm#pay. I haven't received it yet apparently because they don't have an automated download system implemented. So I guess I'll need to wait for the product to be delivered manually. I'm sure I'll have something to say about it once I read over it.