Jerry Yellin will be doing a book signing on Saturday evening, November 5, from 7:30-8:30 at the Fairfield Library meeting room. Receipts from the sale of his four books will benefit Operation Warrior Wellness, a division of the David Lynch Foundation. Here is an article promoting this event written by Jerry’s son, Steven Yellin. Jerry’s books are listed at the end of this article.
A WWII P-51 Pilot Talks About Healing His Soul Through Meditation
On March 7, 1945, Jerry Yellin, a current resident of Fairfield, Iowa landed on a small strip of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. For the next six months he saw sights that would haunt him for the next 35 years.
The strip of land was Iwo Jima.
28,000 soldiers died on Iwo Jima. Had the American commanders known in advance how many casualties there were going to be in taking that island, they never would have invaded. Jerry was a P-51 fighter pilot who strafed the island for the Marines, and then flew 19 missions over Japan.
When Jerry returned to the States, he took those memories and images of what he saw on Iwo Jima with him. Everyday and many horror-filled dreaded nights, he relived the images of war. Time passed, the memories did not.
Though he didn’t die on Iwo, the memories of Iwo were slowly killing him. Then in 1975 Jerry learned the Transcendental Meditation program. Slowly, the memories of war started to fade from his mind. For the first time, he started to reconnect with himself on a deep level and experience the joys of life that were absent for so long. Though he had married a wonderful woman and had four great sons, he couldn’t really feel the flow of life until he learned to meditate. Years later, he said unequivocally that TM saved his life.
Last year, a friend of his called and said that her son was having a difficult time adjusting from the many military tours of duty he had done. Jerry met with him and as a former soldier that had seen combat, tried to console him. It didn’t work. Two weeks later that young man committed suicide. A little known fact is that more soldiers commit suicide each month than die in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jerry was devastated because he knew exactly what this young soldier experienced. He felt that something had to be done to prevent these kinds of suicides and the ruined lives of soldiers caused by Post-Traumatic Stress. So he contacted the David Lynch Foundation, a non-profit organization that has been teaching Transcendental Meditation to at-risk youth around the world since 2006. They immediately said they were interested and Operation Warrior Wellness was launched.
Since then Jerry has talked about OWW to military groups all over the country. The response has always been the same—this is an organization that needs to be successful because the problem is so acute. “We send our young men and woman to fight,” says Jerry, “and then, when they return, we can’t really help them integrate into society successfully, because what they saw and heard are so devastating to their souls.”
The four books Jerry Yellin will be signing are:
The Resilient Warrior, Healing the Hidden Wounds of War: stories of veterans of war who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress and how Transcendental Meditation helps cure them.
Of War and Weddings, A Legacy of Two Fathers: an autobiographical story of one American and one Japanese soldier who hated each other in their youth and came to be family by the marriage of their two youngest children in 1988.
The Blackened Canteen: a true story of 23 Americans who were killed on June 20, 1945, and the Japanese man who buried their remains in a common grave next to the 2000 Japanese citizens their bombs helped to kill.
The Letter: literary fiction about a powerful American Senator who goes through life hating people of different religions only to find out that his birth mother and father were everything he hated.
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The David Lynch Foundation teamed up with Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Foundation on June 7, 2011, to garner support for their shared goal: to help veterans who are suffering with Post-Traumatic Stress reclaim their lives. In this video, former WWII captain and fighter pilot Jerry Yellin speaks out about the horrors of returning to civilian life after experiencing the trauma of combat—and how he overcame the hidden wounds of war through the practice of Transcendental Meditation. More articles on Jerry Yellin are posted here on this blog.
Click here to download a beautifully-designed poster announcing the book-signing event.
Upcoming Event: David Lynch Foundation launches Veteran’s Day national meditation initiative
See Huffington Post: What Meditation Did for Me: A War Vet’s Story | Wall Street Journal: A Transcendental Cure for Post-Traumatic Stress by David Lynch and Norman E. Rosenthal | Medication or Meditation for Veterans with PTSD?
Tags: Americans, David Lynch Foundation, Iwo Jima, Japanese, Operation Warrior Wellness, Post-Traumatic Stress, TM, Transcendental Meditation, veterans, WWII
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