Archive for the ‘David Lynch Foundation’ Category

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Watch David Lynch Foundation Press Conference and the Change Begins Within Benefit Celebration

December 14, 2010

Watch livestream rebroadcasts of two extraordinary events: the David Lynch Foundation Press Conference to launch Operation Warrior Wellness, from the Paley Center for Media, and the Change Begins Within Gala Event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Monday, December 13, 2010. See David Lynch Foundation’s Photos – Change Begins Within and Broadway World photo coverage of the 2nd Annual David Lynch Foundation’s Change Begins Within Benefit Celebration. Watch highlights of both events: the press conference and the second annual benefit gala.

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The Age: How Clint Eastwood keeps his cool

December 14, 2010

How Clint Eastwood keeps his cool

December 14, 2010

Cheap and effective–Clint Eastwood endorses transcendental meditation.

Hollywood A-listers including Clint Eastwood joined grizzled US military veterans on Monday to promote what they called the near-miraculous powers of meditation in overcoming war stress.

The event in New York drew an unlikely alliance ranging from fashion designer Donna Karan to traumatised veterans of World War II, Vietnam and Iraq.

Uniting them was a belief that transcendental meditation, dubbed TM for short, is the cheapest, most effective and medication-free way of healing people who have suffered severe stress in war and any other extreme experience.

“I’m a great supporter of transcendental meditation. I’ve been using it for almost 40 years now. I think it’s a great tool for anyone to have,” said Eastwood, best known for playing violent, hardened characters on screen.

The fund-raising event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was organised by experimental filmmaker David Lynch, whose Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace encourages meditation along the lines espoused by famed guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Lynch said his project, named “Operation Warrior Wellness”, aims to train 10,000 veterans in the art of finding inner peace.

Critics have cast doubt on the value of meditation for treating psychological disorders.

But Lynch said there are “a lot of misunderstandings about meditation”.

The director of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive said the technique could help everyone from disruptive school pupils to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

PTSD is an increasingly high-profile problem among servicemen returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, a large number of whom are believed to fear revealing their disorder to military health staff.

Vietnam vet Dan Burks gave a moving account of the mental scars he carried after a battle in which he says he killed Vietnamese soldiers and lost many of his own troops.

PTSD “is a wound”, he said.

“It takes your life away, just like losing a limb.

“But guess what? You can get rid of it,” he said, describing his life after discovery of transcendental meditation as “the difference between heaven and hell”.

Another veteran, World War II pilot Jerry Yellin told the fund-raiser that for three decades after the end of the war against Japan he “found no satisfaction in life in anything I did”.

At age 51, he took up TM and says he found peace.

“We have the ability to teach young people who are suffering tremendously … young people who are in a foreign land,” he said of today’s veterans.

One of those, a former infantry soldier in Iraq, said TM “cleared the skies and I could tell where I was going”.

“I felt this warm groovy feeling,” he said. “It just gets better and better.”

The star-studded event hosted by Lynch also saw testimonials from fashion designer Karan and British comedian Russell Brand.

Brand said he had suffered severe stress from his much-publicised sex-and-drugs addictions and had also found solace in TM.

“I felt love, sort of love for myself but also love for everyone else,” he said in a rambling speech delivered in his trademark hyper-energised style.

“I am a human being and it is applicable to all human beings. Someone, everyone can draw from it.”

Sceptics may question whether war veterans already unwilling to speak about their mental problems will embrace regular meditation. Lynch says they can.

“Clint Eastwood is about as macho as they get and he’s been meditating longer than I have,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

“We’re behind this technique and we think it can help veterans reclaim their lives and save themselves, their families and their friendships.”

AFP

Also see AFP: Meditation soothes war veterans | Eastwood and Lynch launch Operation Warrior Wellness to teach 10,000 veterans to meditate | Watch David Lynch Foundation Press Conference and the Change Begins Within Benefit Celebration | David Lynch Says TM Will Cure Soldiers of PTSD.

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The Huffington Post: Jeanne Ball: David Lynch Talks About the Benefits of Meditation

December 13, 2010
Writer for the David Lynch Foundation,
Meditation Teacher for 25 Years
Posted: December 13, 2010 05:49 PM

David Lynch Talks About the Benefits of Meditation

“Change Begins Within,” a benefit event featuring David Lynch, Clint Eastwood, Russell Brand, Katy Perry, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Candy Crowley, takes place tonight, Dec. 13 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You can watch it LIVE beginning at 9 p.m. EST.

We know David Lynch for his award-winning films — “Mulholland Drive” was recently voted movie of the decade by the LA Film Critics Association. Seems like every night there’s a “Twin Peaks” party going on somewhere. Lynch is also known as an artist, musician, philanthropist and proponent of meditation. He has been meditating twice a day for 37 years. His interests in meditation have led him to India and the Far East, as well as university EEG labs where brain researchers are exploring meditation’s effects on the brain.

I caught up with him amid his preparations for the David Lynch Foundation‘s upcoming benefit, happening tonight, to provide meditation training to 10,000 veterans with PTSD.

Click here to read the interview.

WATCH David Lynch speak about consciousness and creativity:

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Eastwood and Lynch launch Operation Warrior Wellness to teach 10,000 veterans to meditate

December 8, 2010

EurekAlert! Public Release: 8-12-2010: Clint Eastwood and David Lynch launch Operation Warrior Wellness to teach 10,000 veterans to meditate

Clint Eastwood and David Lynch, along with a panel of researchers, veterans and active duty soldiers will launch “Operation Warrior Wellness”—a national initiative to teach 10,000 veterans and their families a simple meditation practice for preventing and treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The live Webcast highlights a conference on the research and applications of Transcendental Meditation for PTSD at the Paley Center for Media in New York, Monday, December 13, at 11 am (ET). http://www.livestream.com/davidlynch.

The conference is being replayed at the same link. Also watch the live Change Begins Within Gala Event tonight from the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 9:00 pm ET.

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David Lynch Says TM Will Cure Soldiers of PTSD – Tonic: The Anti-Gossip

December 6, 2010

David Lynch Says Transcendental Meditation Will Cure Soldiers of Post-Traumatic Stress

By Jo Piazza | Monday, December 6, 2010 9:36 AM ET

We made a valiant effort to chat with David Lynch about the amazing work his foundation is doing to spread Transcendental Meditation. And we only asked him about ‘Twin Peaks’ twice. We’re still fuzzy on who killed Laura Palmer.

On December 13, Hollywood director David Lynch will be joined by Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Dr. Mehmet Oz to launch the David Lynch Foundation’s Operation Warrior Wellness, a national initiative to help 10,000 veterans overcome post-traumatic stress disorder through Transcendental Meditation.

Suicide, divorce, domestic violence, crime and substance abuse rates among veterans at home are skyrocketing. With the support of Dr. Oz and Eastwood — both avid meditators — along with veterans from World War II, the Vietnam war, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the aim of Operation Warrior Wellness is to help soldiers use Transcendental Meditation to cope with PTSD and other effects of combat.

The David Lynch Foundation has been providing scholarships since 2005 for over 150,000 inner-city students, veterans, homeless adults and children, American Indians, and inmates and guards in maximum-security penitentiaries to learn TM over the past five years. Lynch himself has been meditating for more than three decades. We took some time with him last week to chat about how TM has changed his life and how he really, really, really believes it can change everybody else’s.

Tonic: What exactly will Transcendental Meditation do for returning vets suffering from PTSD?

David Lynch: From what I have heard, the veterans with PTSD are suffering big time. I have learned that 18 veterans commit suicide every day. One of the treatments is to show veterans programs of violence until they finally get numb to them. This to me is inhumane. You give them Transcendental Meditation and it is like giving them the key to the treasury within every human being. They sit comfortably. They chant their mantra and they dive within. With each meditation they get more of this consciousness and more peace. This is modern science’s unified field. It is a field so beautiful and positive that when you experience it in meditation you grow in all positive qualities. Tension, anxiety, sorrow, hate and anger all start to go away.

Tonic: How did you first get into Transcendental Meditation?

Lynch: I heard a phrase: true happiness is not out there; true happiness lies within. I felt a truth to that but the phrase doesn’t tell you where the within is.

I got interested in meditation because I thought that was a way of going in. Maharishi Mahesh has said most of the forms of meditation out there don’t deserve the name meditation. The Transcendental experience is one that utilizes the full brain. I looked into all kinds of meditation and one day my sister called and said she started Transcendental Meditation and I heard a change in her voice. I heard more happiness and I heard more self-assuredness and I said this is what I want. And I went out and got it. You’re an expert from your first meditation. My first meditation was so beautiful I have been doing it twice a day for 36 years.

Tonic: So can anyone learn it?

Lynch: If you’re human you can learn it. You need a legitimate teacher. But it is easy and effortless. It takes about four days to learn and then you have this technique. But if you are meditating correctly it will work.

Tonic: What is the cost for the average person to learn?

Lynch: Right now the cost is $1,500 but if it’s a hardship, because now we have the financial downturn, you can get it for $750. If you write to the Foundation chances are you can get it for $375.

Tonic: Has it helped your creative process?

Lynch: The field within the unified field is the ocean of pure consciousness. It is a field of infinite creativity. When you experience it you will grow in creativity. Life gets better. You get more creative and your IQ goes up. It’s a technique that opens the door to the deepest level within which is all positive.

Tonic: What are you working on besides your work with the Foundation?

Lynch: A bunch of music and paintings and trying to catch the next idea for a film and working on a documentary of Maharishi.

Tonic: Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese and George Lucas are all joining you in Operation Warrior Wellness. Do they meditate too?

Lynch: Clint and Martin do. I’m not sure if George does. Clint is really behind helping the veterans.

Tonic: Do you ever get sick of everyone asking you questions about Twin Peaks?

Lynch: [Laughs] Not at all. I love that people still love that world. I love that world too.

Photo courtesy of the David Lynch Foundation.

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Veterans Today: Filmmaker David Lynch Introduces Veterans to Meditation

November 26, 2010

Filmmaker David Lynch Introduces Veterans to Meditation

November 26, 2010 posted by Chaplain Kathie

When you tell a Marine they need to do yoga or meditate, they think you’re the one with the problem. Yet when they understand they had to train their mind and body to respond to combat situations, they must now train their mind and body to relax again, they get it. Stress and anxiety is a big part of PTSD. Learning how to relax plays a big role in healing. They need to take care of their minds, bodies and spirit. Each one connected to the other just as each part of them was exposed to the traumas of combat, all of the person needs to be taken care of.


Filmmaker David Lynch Introduces Veterans to Meditation
David Lynch is looking to make the world a little quieter.

The filmmaker behind the movies “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” is giving $100,000 to launch Operations Warrior Wellness, an initiative to help 10,000 veterans overcome Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other war-related illnesses through transcendental meditation, which he says creates “professional peacemakers.”

Backed by the likes of actors Clint Eastwood, directors George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, Mr. Lynch will announce the new program next month at a gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 2005, Mr. Lynch started the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace and since then has donated half a million dollars to help finance scholarships for 150,000 students who are interested in learning transcendental meditation. The foundation has also funded research at institutions such as the University of Connecticut and the University of Michigan on the health benefits of the meditation technique.
read more here Filmmaker Introduces Veterans to Meditation

The human body is born with the ability to respond to the world they live in. The warrior has been taught since the beginning of time to push on past fear, climate conditions, hunger, thirst and lack of rest. They must then train their body to be able to relax just as they must work to recover the human beneath the warrior.

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Filmmaker David Lynch Introduces Veterans to Meditation

November 26, 2010

The Wall Street Journal Greater New York
Filmmaker Introduces Veterans to Meditation

David Lynch is looking to make the world a little quieter.

The filmmaker behind the movies “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” is giving $100,000 to launch Operations Warrior Wellness, an initiative to help 10,000 veterans overcome Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other war-related illnesses through transcendental meditation, which he says creates “professional peacemakers.”

DONOR

Backed by the likes of actors Clint Eastwood, directors George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, Mr. Lynch will announce the new program next month at a gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 2005, Mr. Lynch started the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace and since then has donated half a million dollars to help finance scholarships for 150,000 students who are interested in learning transcendental meditation. The foundation has also funded research at institutions such as the University of Connecticut and the University of Michigan on the health benefits of the meditation technique.

Called “Quiet Time in Schools,” students and teachers meditate for 10 minutes at the beginning and end of each day. The funds pay to train educators and parents on how to administer and teach the method.

“Soon grades and attendance go up 20% to 30% and suspensions and expulsions go down,” Mr. Lynch says. “Instead of giving the kids drugs like Ritalin that just numb them, we give them a technique to reduce stress and focus better.”

Mr. Lynch, who is 64 years old, began meditating about 40 years ago using this method, which was introduced to the West nearly half a century ago by Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The technique is typically practiced twice a day for 20 minutes and used to eliminate stress, promote good health and gain deep relaxation.

Adapting the technique for college campuses, elementary schools, after-school clubs and hospital-wellness programs, Mr. Lynch says he has been able to improve academic performance and creativity in students. It has also been taught to men and women in homeless shelters and in prisons.

Now, Mr. Lynch wants to bring this approach to help the thousands of war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“These men and women have a lot of honor for what they have been through and don’t want to appear weak or admit suffering,” he says, pointing to high suicide rates and incidence of PTSD among veterans.

To that end, he says he wants to work through veteran associations and support groups to bring them this meditation technique.

“Clint Eastwood is about as macho as they get and he’s been meditating longer than I have,” he says. “We’re behind this technique and we think it can help veterans reclaim their lives and save themselves, their families and their friendships.”

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Jerry Yellin: Healing the Hidden Wounds of War

October 27, 2010

On Patrol | Until every one comes home | The Magazine of the US

October 27, 2010

Healing the Hidden Wounds of War

by

I was one of the 16 million people who served our country in World War II.

Just 18 when I enlisted, I was 19 when I graduated from flight school at Luke Field in Phoenix, Arizona, and three weeks into my 21st year when I landed on Iwo Jima. I quickly became familiar with death.

On March 7, 1945, our squadron landed on a dirt runway at the foot of Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi. I looked out at the landscape as I taxied my P-51 Mustang to our parking area and saw huge piles of dead Japanese soldiers being pushed into mass graves, the sight and smell indelibly imprinted on my mind. It was a shocking sight for such a young man to see.

Our squadron area was next to a Marine mortuary where hundreds of dead Marines were being readied for burial.

The fighting was fierce on the eight-square-mile island situated 650 miles off Japan’s southern coast. Nearly 7,000 Marines and 21,000 Japanese soldiers lost their lives there.

I flew 19 long-range missions over Japan from Iwo Jima with 11 young pilots; all of them friends, who did not return home. Over the course of the war, I flew with 16 pilots who did not come back.

On one mission, Al Sherren, my classmate from flying school called in, “I’m hit and can’t see,” and he was gone. Robert “Pudgy” Carr also disappeared that day. He was my tent-mate.

Three of those killed were my wingmen. Danny Mathis was lost in a mid-air collision along with 26 other fighters the day my wisdom teeth were pulled and I was grounded. Dick Schroeppel died following me on a strafing run over Chichi Jima, and Phil Schlamberg disappeared from my wing in the clouds on August 14, 1945 – the day the war ended.

All of us knew who we were fighting and why.

Then it was over. One day a fighter pilot, the next a civilian.

No buddies, no airplane, nothing to hold on to, and no one to talk to. Life, as it was for me from 1945 to 1975 was empty.

The highs I had experienced in combat became the lows of daily living. I had absolutely no connection to my parents, my sister, my relatives, or my friends. I listened to some of the guys I knew talk about their experiences in combat and I knew they had never been in a battle let alone a war zone. No one that I knew who had seen their friends die could talk about it. The Army Air Corps had trained me and prepared me to fly combat missions, but there was no training on how to fit into society when the war was over and I stopped flying.

I was not able to find any contentment, any reason to succeed, any connection to anyone that had meaning or value. I was depressed, unhappy, and lonely even though I was surrounded by a loving wife and four sons. That feeling of disconnect, lack of emotions, restlessness, empty feeling of hopelessness lasted until 1975.

In 1975, I learned a technique called Transcendental Meditation (TM). In just a few months life became meaningful to me and now, at 86 years of living, I can say that this meditation has brought me peace and contentment.

War is always difficult for those on the front lines, but today’s wars are being fought in the countries of our enemies, on their territory, their homeland, and their cities, with no distinguishing uniform. There are no established front lines or objectives to capture. Every citizen can be looked at as “the enemy,” every road dangerous to travel and every pile of garbage might explode from a hidden IED.

As I write this today, in October 2010, there have been 5,745 of our servicemen and women killed and 86,175 evacuated because of wounds or illness. That’s 21.7 percent of the approximately two million who have seen combat duty.

It has been estimated by some private organizations that up to 25% of those who have served since 2001 may seek treatment for post traumatic stress.

I am a recovered PTSD veteran. Meditation made a difference in my life. Maybe it can work for others as well.

To learn more about Operation Warrior Wellness, please visit www.davidlynchfoundation.org.

This is an excerpt from Jerry Yellin’s book The Resilient Warrior.

Army Air Corps Captain Jerry Yellin (Ret.) flew P-51 Mustangs during World War II. He currently co-chairs Operation Warrior Wellness and is the award-winning author of four books, including Of War and Weddings.

Copyright ©2010 USO. All Rights Reserved

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David Lynch receives Cologne Film Award

October 3, 2010

COLOGNE, Germany — David Lynch hasn’t turned his back on Hollywood entirely, but the four-time Oscar nominee is focusing more on the art of painting and photography than film as his non-cinematic work begins to receive worldwide attention.

“I’m trying to catch ideas for a film but I don’t have the ideas yet,” the director of “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Dr.” told an audience in Cologne Friday, where he received the city’s Film Prize for his life’s work.

The award ceremony was the climax of the 20th media festival and confab the Cologne Conference.

While the idiosyncratic director has been linked to a CGI project called “Snootworld,” Lynch said the only film he is working on at the moment is his documentary on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation. Lynch has been a practitioner and proselytizer of TM for decades. The director was recently in India shooting interviews for the project.

“I’m not a documentary film maker, but I’ll give it a try,” Lynch said.

Lynch’s last feature, “Inland Empire” (2006) received mixed reviews and grossed just $4 million worldwide.

But his painting, photography and sculpture, work he has continued to produce between film projects, is reaching an ever-larger audience. Since a major exhibit of his paintings and photography in Paris three years ago, Lynch has held exhibitions around the world. He recently held a joint exhibit together with shock-rocker Marilyn Manson at the Vienna Kunsthalle this summer. A new exhibit of his work opens this month in Osaka, Japan.

On October 9, Lynch will receive the Goslar Kaiserring, one of Germany’s highest artistic honors. Previous winners include painter Willem de Kooning, “wrap artist” Christo and sculptor and art film director Matthew Barney.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

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New film by Richard Beymer on David Lynch Following His Master’s Footsteps Throughout India

October 1, 2010

You are Invited to a Sneak Preview

Richard Beymer’s Stunning New Film from India
“David Lynch Follows His Master’s Footsteps”

Saturday, October 9 • 7:30 pm
Dalby Hall, Argiro Center • Maharishi University of Management

$10 General Admission • $5 Students

Tickets can be purchased at MUM Bookstore & Flying Leap Art Space

All proceeds go to the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment

Be in your seat promptly at 7:30 p.m!
There will be no seating once the film begins!

In December 2009, David Lynch retraced Maharishi’s travels across India in the years before Maharishi inaugurated his Spiritual Regeneration Movement in 1957. Richard Beymer’s stunning new documentary follows David up into the Himalayas, to Jyotir Math, where Maharishi spent much of 13 years with his teacher, Guru Dev; and to Uttar Kashi, where Maharishi spent two years in silence following the passing of Guru Dev in 1953. We go with David to Jabalpur, near the birthplace of Maharishi; and to Ramashram, Kanyakumari, and Trivendrum–all rare and special sites integral to the founding of Maharishi’s movement. Richard’s filmmaking is artful, magnificent, and captures the behind-the-scenes look and feel as David and his traveling buddy, Bob Roth, make their way with awe, humor, and dogged persistence to each new destination. See David Lynch at his best: wise, funny, insightful, and inspired.

Source: PEACETOWN, USA

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