Yes, Dave Davies of NPR’s Fresh Air does a really capable job of leading her through the interview. I appreciate the way she quickly recaps the history of the ™ movement. That is important as I learned a number of years ago going to scholarly conferences finding that professor-types under the age of 40, gen-X and under, really had no reference for ™. ™ and Maharishi had withdrawn and skipped them. (1980’s, 1990’s ™ had withdrawn from teaching TM. ) Then also, for those over 40 it was distant only, “Oh, the Beatles?” At conferences it was evident that these people who teach the young at real Universities, they had never heard of TM let alone Fairfield, Iowa. The Fresh Air interview does a good job of overview, introduction and some of how it felt.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : I had missed this book interview a couple of years ago. emf NPR - Fresh Ari A Childhood Of Transcendental Meditation, Spent In The 'Shadow Of A Guru' Listen 31'09" https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2016/06/20160613_fa_01.mp3 https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2016/06/20160613_fa_01.mp3?orgId=427869011&topicId=1033&d=2232&p=13&story=481845003&siteplayer=true June 13, 2016 Author Claire Hoffman estimates that she's spent at least 2,200 hours of her life meditating — but not because she became a devotee of the practice as an adult. Her mother was a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Hoffman spent most of her childhood in a community in Fairfield, Iowa that was devoted to Transcendental Meditation. Hoffman, who writes about her unusual upbringing in the new memoir Greetings from Utopia Park, tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that moving to the utopian community from New York City when she was kindergarten-aged was idyllic — at least initially. "Those first few years, it was entirely magical," Hoffman says. "We believed that we were changing the world, and everybody was meditating. ... It was this sort of blissful experience." Maharishi, the Yogi whose teachings inspired her mother, specialized in "Yogic Flying," a practice that he claimed would infuse practitioners with the power to levitate. He charged Hoffman's mother and other devotees thousands of dollars to learn it. Because Yogic Flying was practiced in secret, Hoffman believed for years that her mother could, in fact, fly. Then, when she was 9 or 10, she attended a demonstration of the practice and was crushed. "It was this sort of funny frog hop that they were doing across the room," Hoffman says. "For me that moment of seeing this sort of awkward, ugly jumping, as opposed to this incredible levitation that I as a kid had imagined was a first moment, for me, of doubt."
