Claire Hoffman - Fortunate Are We: Me, the Maharishi, and My Search for Beli

In the end, I went back to Iowa because I thought somehow the past held the answer to my future. I was at the age when fears were taking holdfear of becoming my mother, fear of not being as good as my mother, fear of becoming an adult and letting go of everything that had made my childhood vivid and hopeful, mystical and turmeric scented. In leaving behind a world where spending hours a day meditating was the norm, I had ended up with an adult life that felt empty of the quiet sacredness I had taken for granted as a kid. Around me, it felt like everyone was starting to meditate and practice yogathings that when I was growing up had marked me as an outsider in our divided Midwestern town.

That summer, I was thirty-four years old and a new mom and a new wife. I was a writer for Rolling Stone and had an assistant professor position at UC Riverside, just south of Los Angeles, where Id lived for six years. I had worked hard to get to where I was but everything Id strived for increasingly felt like a burden. I was perpetually exhausted and anxious and I couldnt shake a looming sense of dissatisfaction. I had a sense that Id let something precious slip through my fingers. Had I made a mistake? Somewhere along the line, in trying to be a normal person, had I let go of who I was?

This felt particularly troubling for me since Id grown up practicing Transcendental Meditation and had for a long time believed that I was immune to problems like stress and depression. Though I meditated sporadically, I figured a lifetime of practice would have created some sort of immunity. By my own very rough calculations, Id spent more than 2,200 hours of my life meditating.

It was around this time that something odd began to happen to me. Growing up, the people I knew who had sought out Transcendental Meditation had been former hippiesmy mom and her friends who were interested in consciousness and creating world peace. That impulse felt to me like something from another generationa faded Age of Aquarius dream. Id lived away from Iowa for seventeen years, and no one had asked me about learning to meditate. But now, people like Katy Perry and Russell Simmons and Rupert Murdoch were tweeting about how great TM was, how transformed their lives had become. And people kept asking me about it. Did I like it, did it work, where could they learn it, would it make them happier?

This confluence of eventsmy own malaise, my struggle with how to be an adult and a good parent, and the resurgence of TM in the zeitgeist put the idea in my head that I needed to go home. And I needed to learn how to fly.

Meditation has always been complicated for me. Transcendental Meditation was the cornerstone of our community, but the promise was that from there you would graduate into an entire world where everything had meaning and significance. Transcendental Meditation was a product sold by our guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, but he had ambitions to take people beyond the twenty minutes a day to another level of meditation, an extended practice that promised greater power and new levels of awareness and joy. By practicing his extended form of meditation, my community thought they were ushering in Heaven on Earth.

I am generally described as a down-to-earth and practical person, but what I decided to do that summer did not seem so logical. In order to reorient myself, I went home to the small rural Midwestern community Id grown up in and started lessons for the secretive meditation technique that promised the ability to levitateand create world peace.

And so it was that I found myself inside a dingy basement in my hometown of Fairfield, Iowa, hoping that I would somehow shed my heavily accrued cynicism and fly. Outside the small overhead windows, I could see the rain pouring down, the sky flashing with lightning. But in here, the air was dim, cool, and heavy with the scent of burning sandalwood. The entire room, from wall to wall, was covered in a carpet of thick foam. Each piece was wrapped in a saggy white cotton sheet. It felt like a giant adult jumpy house. Women of various ages, in various stages of repose, sat along the perimeter of the space, surrounded by a mishmash of pillows.

I bounce-walked my way across the room and took my seat among them, giving smiles to those who gave them to me. I turned my eyes to the woman in the corner who wore a brightly colored green sari.

All right, my little chickadees, she said in a voice that made me think of Glinda the Good Witch. Today we fly! On the wall above her was a large hand-painted banner that read Yogic Flying Competition, the letters majestic and golden.

She rang her bell and silence followed. We closed our eyes. I heard the rumble of thunder. There was a slumber-party sort of anything could happen breathlessness in the air. Anything could happen. And soon it did. Across the room, a girl began a low sort of ecstatic moaning. I opened one eye. Around me everyone was perfectly still, eyes shut, faces fixed in concentrated contemplation. Except for the woman moaning. Her body was starting to shudder and sway, almost convulsively.

This lady is totally faking it, I thought. But then her body began to rock up and down in the air. I shut my eyes. I didnt want to watch anymore. I didnt want to judge her. I could hear her butt smacking against the foam as she rocked up and down. I couldnt bear to watch. I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to fly.

Believe, I whispered in my head. You have to believe.