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‘Dear Prudence’ Bruns in Parade discusses world peace, the ’60s, and why kids love the Beatles

August 9, 2019

Parade’s senior features editor M.B. Roberts interviewed Prudence Bruns for this Aug 9, 2019 article: The Woman Who Inspired ‘Dear Prudence’ Opens Up About World Peace, the Influence of the ’60s and Why Kids Today Love the Beatles. Click the title to see original article with photos. Here is the text.

The Beatles’ muse still believes in world peace.

Prudence Bruns, 71, has several claims to fame. First, she’s the daughter of film director John Farrow and actress Maureen O’Sullivan, as well as the younger sister of actress Mia Farrow. Second, she’s a teacher and passionate advocate of Transcendental Meditation who studied with the TM guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, back in the late 1960s. It’s at Maharishi’s retreat in 1968 where Prudence’s fellow students included all four members of the Beatles. Third, her behavior during the retreat led John Lennon to write the song “Dear Prudence,” which appeared on the Beatles’ White Album. So, who is the flesh and blood woman behind the song that Rolling Stone named as No. 63 on its list of “100 Greatest Beatles Songs”? And what’s the story behind the famous song? Parade caught up with Bruns to find out.

You met the Beatles at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s retreat in Rishikesh, India, in 1968, where you’d traveled with your sister, Mia, to learn Transcendental Meditation. Were you starstruck?

No, I’d been around famous people before. It wasn’t a big deal to me but I liked them a lot, especially John and George. They came into my room one night to play a song and I could hear them outside on the patio at night playing. But really, I was so focused on getting the most out of my time there. It was my dream to go to India and study with a person who really knew about this meditation. I was pretty extreme.

That’s why John wrote the song, which starts out, “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play/Dear Prudence, greet the brand-new day.”

Right. People over the years would have these reasons why I was Dear Prudence that were completely off the wall and almost disturbing, like I was a heroin addict or I lost my mind or all these crazy reasons why John wrote the song. It bothered me in a sense but it seemed over my head, like what can I do about it. I’d tell people, well I had to stay in my room. Nobody believed that I didn’t have an affair with him. I couldn’t tell people. But it all came about because I stayed in my room by myself for five days straight. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom or slept. I didn’t eat. I was trying to see where [meditation] would take me.

And you’ve stayed with meditation all these years?

Yes, I’m back teaching now. At Sofitco Studios, a fitness studio in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.

What do you love so much about TM?

TM is a yogic meditation but what’s different about it is that it has been streamlined and simplified for those of us who are busy and can’t give our whole lifestyle over to changing how we are and what we’re doing. It makes it so that in just a short period of time you can go extremely deep inside and tap into a part of the mind that is foundational. It’s just silent. It’s like, the ocean has a surface and as you get deeper it becomes less active. And if you can get incredibly deep, it’s still. So the same with the mind. You can get to this part of the mind that is still, but it’s not inert. It’s actually very creative. And so, it’s wonderful. You can actually experience that. Anybody can.

Your memoir, Dear Prudence: The Story Behind the Song, came out in 2015. Why did you decide to write the book so many years (nearly 50!) after John Lennon wrote that song about you?

It was because of my grandson. We’d moved down to Florida and my daughter lived next door. At a certain point when my grandson was in high school, he came over and said, “OK, Grandma, you have to come to my school and speak to my friends.” It surprised me because at that point, I was getting used to accepting myself as being old and kind of irrelevant. I forgot I was Dear Prudence, because my older daughter and son—they were the generation after the Baby Boomers—and their interest in The Beatles was zip.

But there’s been a revived interest in the Beatles among kids and twentysomethings, don’t you think?

Yes, absolutely. Especially with [the game] Guitar Hero. Then you even have little kindergartners knowing all the Beatles songs. Anyway, being Dear Prudence really never mattered. Then when I went to my grandson’s school, it was like one of the Beatles came to see his friends. There were about 30 kids and they all came rushing up and gathered around me with all this respect. I was completely stunned.

Was it your link to the Beatles they were excited about?

Besides the kids noticing the Beatles and actually knowing every song they did and the words to every song, one of the kids asked a question that stood out. “Why did John and the Beatles think there could be such a thing as world peace?” I mean, they really believed there could not possibly be such a thing! This shocked me. It was sad, but it meant that they were actually listening to us. For us, we didn’t listen to anybody over 30! But grandparents? Forget about it. So that they were actually listening and hearing The Beatles and that message was a real wake-up call.

What was the message?

That there can be world peace. I told them, you’re wrong. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean we can’t achieve it. I explained to them that if enough of us live more consciously rather than every man for himself, really caring about our culture and our humanity then we can have peace. It was very powerful and that’s when I decided I had to tell my story. I’m Dear Prudence, one of the many that went through the ‘60s. We brought yoga in and the whole perspective of green and organic and all that came in to our culture.

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See this blog post with links to other interviews: Who was Dear Prudence the Beatles sang to in India? What happened to her? Here is her story.

See What Transcendental Meditation does for Ringo, published in Parade.

Feb 19, 2020: @ParadeMagazine asks @meditationbob what makes #TranscendentalMeditation so special.

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What Transcendental Meditation does for Ringo

July 10, 2019

Sunday, July 7, 2019 was Ringo Starr’s 79th birthday. He asks everyone wherever they are at noon that day to make the peace sign and say “Peace and Love,” what he wishes for the whole world. Here he is on the cover of Parade Magazine on his birthday. I highlighted some Q&As that caught my attention. See the whole article with photos and video.

Ringo talks peace & love, sobriety, turning 79, drumming in The Beatles, plus, what he really thought of Yoko Ono, in this week’s cover story.

After answering a question about why he always flashes the peace sign, Ringo gives a brilliant and succinct description of Transcendental Meditation, what it does for him, and why he starts his day with it! He clearly describes transcending, which allows his busy thinking mind to settle down and experience the unbounded state of just being.

Why has the message of peace and love become so important to you? You’re rarely photographed without flashing the peace sign.

I loved the mid-’60s, when all this peace and love started. [The Beatles] went right along with it. The press used to give me a hard time: “Oh, he’s doing that peace and love thing again.” But I’m only peace-and-loving. And they still like to sh-t on me! It’s connected to the Maharishi [the Indian spiritual leader the Beatles famously visited in 1968]. If you think to do good, then the planet will support you. It’s like a pebble in the ocean; it’s rippling out. And it will get to shore. But you can’t be impatient [laughs].

The mindfulness aspect of your peace-and-love message connects to meditation, which has become a major part of your life. What does it do for you?

It gives me a break from myself. Some days there’s absolute peacefulness and a feeling that I’ve been somewhere away, and I only know that because I come back. It’s very important for me to “not think.” I do enough thinking. You can just “be.” It’s a transcendent feeling. That’s why they call it Transcendental Meditation!

How do you stay in such great shape?

I get up in the morning and I meditate. I go to the gym and I have a trainer, and I work out myself too, when I’m on the road. I’m a vegetarian. When we’re on tour, to get out of the hotel, I usually go to the local organic shop just to see what they’ve got. But I’m only a vegetarian, not a vegan. I eat goat cheese. A vegan is very hard, and they eat a lot of sugar. I’m careful about sugar.

Ringo is a humble guy. I thought this last quote from 10 Inspiring Ringo Starr Quotes About Peace, Love and the Beatles was very enlightening!

10. “I’ve never really done anything to create what has happened. It creates itself. I’m here because it happened. But I didn’t do anything to make it happen apart from saying ‘Yes.’”

If you’re interested in learning more about TM, now is the time. See Transcendental Meditation Turns 60.

Enjoy this in-depth interview between Ringo and TM teacher and CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, Bob Roth. It was recorded a few years ago for Bob’s Sirius XM radio show “Success Without Stress.” The Foundation had honored Ringo with a Lifetime of Peace and Love Award.

Ringo Starr discussed meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, how he came to write the Beatles popular Octupus’s Garden song (years later made into a colorful children’s book), inspiring others to meditate, and bringing Transcendental Meditation into schools.

Of David Lynch and the global efforts of his Foundation, Ringo said, “My sense of David and his work is brilliant. The big one for me, of course, is bringing meditation to schools and how they know from the research that the violence goes down. How far-out is that? And the Foundation goes into tough schools. That is incredible. You have to support David for that.”

A month later: ‘Dear Prudence’ Bruns in Parade discusses world peace, the ’60s, and why kids love the Beatles. Feb 19, 2020: @ParadeMagazine asks @meditationbob what makes #TranscendentalMeditation so special.

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Howard Stern interviews Donovan about his hits and time with The Beatles and Maharishi in India

February 11, 2014

Howard Stern Show – Donovan Interview 02/05/14

2-5-14-donovan-on-air-3.vault

Howard tells Donovan that he’s going to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame before he even knew, and today it’s news: Donovan, Kinks’ Ray Davies lead Songwriters Hall inductees. Check this description of the interview on the Howard Stern Show – SONG BY SONG WITH DONOVAN. Around 40 minutes into the interview Donovan talks about how they got into meditation. Some fascinating stories!

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Posted in Audios, Music, Peace | 1 Comment »

Style.com: David Lynch and Italo Zucchelli on their creativity and Transcendental Meditation

December 25, 2013

Style.com: The Transcendentalists: David Lynch and Calvin Klein Collection’s Italo Zucchelli on their shared passions: creativity and Transcendental Meditation

By Matthew Schneier. Photographs by Olivia Malone
Published December 24, 2013

On a winding road high in the Hollywood Hills, not far from Mulholland Drive, is a Brutalist-looking concrete structure that’s equal parts manse and bunker. It’s the studio of David Lynch, and appropriately for his many pursuits—he is an auteur across media, from film and television to painting, music, self-help books, and coffee roasting—it has a variety of different spaces: a screening room, a recording studio, storage for his photographs and artwork, a kitchen with an industrial-grade espresso machine. (Lynch die-hards may recognize it as the house from Lost Highway.)

I’ve come here from New York, along with fashion designer Italo Zucchelli, to discuss one of Lynch’s abiding passions, Transcendental Meditation. The director established his own nonprofit, the David Lynch Center for Transcendental Meditation and World Peace, in 2005. He credits the practice with much of his success, and he’s devoted as much time to raising awareness of it as he has to virtually any of his other endeavors. His 2006 book, Catching the Big Fish, is dedicated to the subject.

Transcendental Meditation is an ancient practice, but its profile was raised in our era when the Beatles took it up in 1968, under the guidance of its twentieth-century guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It comes with, and rules out, no religion, faith, or creed, but because of its new-wave aura, it has largely bubbled away at the fringes of culture. Lately, however, it is experiencing a new boom. “In the last year, something tipped,” says Bob Roth, the affable executive director of The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. “If one [particular] thing happened, I haven’t seen it—and I’ve been on the front lines. But something happened, [because] I don’t have enough teachers to teach all the people in New York City who want to learn.”

TM has a very healthy celebrity fan base, which no doubt helps its public profile, and the foundation, which exists to provide scholarships to at-risk populations so they can learn the practice, including schoolchildren, survivors of domestic abuse, and military personnel, has taken advantage of that fact. Paul McCartney, a practitioner, performed at the foundation’s first benefit concert. Hugh Jackman and Jerry Seinfeld, Transcendental Meditators both, were honored at its most recent benefit gala, in December. Mario Batali and Martin Scorsese will both speak at its upcoming conference in February. The list of adherents is even longer. Ellen DeGeneres does it. Oprah does it. Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, does it. And in the realm of fashion, so does Zucchelli, who is celebrating his tenth year as creative director of menswear for Calvin Klein Collection.

“It” is a relatively simple practice. It consists of devoting twenty minutes twice a day to meditating, which in the Transcendental iteration means silently chanting a Sanskrit mantra. (The mantra must be given by a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, as part of an instruction that can cost upwards of $1,000.) Devotees say that it combats stress, improves mood, and staves off illness and disease. Remarkably, science confirms much of this. The American Heart Association found in a study that Transcendental Meditation, alone among meditation practices it tested, reduces high blood pressure; other studies indicate it can improve functional capacity in patients with congestive heart failure. Over the past forty years, more than 300 studies have been published about the effects of the practice in peer-reviewed medical journals, and the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense have both given millions for further testing. While a quick Google search does turn up skeptics and critics—more of charlatan practitioners than of the practice itself—the tide seems to be now firmly in TM’s favor.

“In 1968, meditation was a fad,” says Roth. “In 2013, because of the research, Transcendental Meditation is being incorporated into the actual fabric of our culture.”

There’s something undeniably intriguing about the beatific bliss that Lynch and Zucchelli radiate—in the filmmaker’s case, in stark contrast to his dark, often violent work. I wanted to find out more about the connection they both draw between the practice and their creative lives. Below, condensed and edited, is a transcript of that free-flowing discussion.

Visit Style.com to read this intriguing interview and see the photos.

See David Lynch on Esquire Network, How I Rock It, talking about Transcendental Meditation.

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Celebrating Paul Horn and his Contribution to Jazz, World Music, Meditation and Spirituality

March 20, 2013

Paul Horn, Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and David Lynch attend the press conference for the David Lynch Foundation “Change Begins Within” Benefit Concert at Radio City Music Hall on April 3, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

It was St. Patrick’s Day on Sunday, March 17, 2013. It was also Paul Horn’s 83rd birthday, and I had sent around an email about it with links to Paul’s participation (:55–1:22) in the Change Begins Within Press Conference Highlights from Radio City Music Hall in NYC, April 3, 2009, and the concert the following night. Here’s an overview of the Change Begins Within Press Conference and musical Paul McCartney & Ringo Starr Concert Highlights. This is a great collection of concert clips and interviews, and DLF school clips: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr Collaborate for Meditation in Schools. PBS later aired an edited version.

A Symphony of SilenceI also read an interview with Paul Horn in the first chapter of A Symphony of Silence: An Enlightened Vision by George A. Ellis. Paul spoke about his philosophy of music and improvisation, how he communicated musically with a killer whale at an aquarium in Victoria, BC, and in Hawaii. He also spoke about his own spiritual quest, how he started Transcendental Meditation and met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He discussed how he was invited to join a course in India with Maharishi and his experiences there. George Ellis also asked Paul questions about his becoming a TM teacher in those early days, and also playing his flute in the Taj Mahal. It’s a great interview, and a wonderful way to start the book! It got me hooked.

Rolf Erickson, editor-in-chief of Enlightenment, The Transcendental Meditation Magazine, emailed to say there’s an excerpt of the interview with Paul Horn in the latest issue, number 11, called The Music of Meditation. In it, George cites a beautiful quote from Paul’s own book, Inside Paul Horn: The Spiritual Odyssey of a Universal Traveler, highlighted at the top of the article: “We are traveling in historical time, from the present to the distant past. We are traveling inwardly as well, through the music of meditation.” Rolf also contributed an article about George Ellis, Sharing the Symphony of Silence, describing what he had accomplished as a TM teacher and entrepreneur, and his heartfelt tribute to Maharishi with this book. Visit http://asymphonyofsilence.com.

Here is an excerpt from the book A Symphony of Silence by George Ellis on Paul Horn and the Music of Meditation published in Enjoy TM News.

Here’s an earlier post from a few years ago: Iconic Jazz Musician Paul Horn Performs Inside MUM’s Golden Dome in Historic Concert May 15. The concert was in the context of a Symposium on Music and Consciousness during which Paul Horn was honored for his lifelong contribution to music, as a jazz musician and Father of New Age Music; and consciousness, as a longtime teacher of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique. Paul taught thousands of people to meditate in the 70’s. Here is Paul’s great talk at that Symposium: Improvisation: The Ultimate Art of Self-Expression — Paul Horn at MUM. Click here to see all of the Lecture and Performance Videos including Q & A.

During his visit to MUM and Fairfield, Jo Ann Gesner interviewed Paul for an article, Paul Horn: Improvisation from the Inside Out, published in Enlightenment Magazine’s 6th issue as Inside with Musician Paul Horn, with a beautiful photo that Jo Ann took of Paul and his wife, Ann Mortifee, in front of the mural painted by Lynne Teeple in Café Paradiso.

This video, Inside Paul Horn, is an overview of Paul Horn’s career. Originally titled, Inside Paul Horn Special Edition, it includes clips from Story of a Jazz Musician – David Wolper Presents, and was uploaded on Jan 14, 2011 by annmortifee. It seems to have been taken down now but you can see the full 3-part film here.

For more on the music of Paul Horn and Ann Mortifee, visit http://paulhornmusic.com and http://annmortifee.com.

Listen to Monica Hadley interview George A. Ellis on KRUU’s Writer’s Voices – 20130712 and how his book Symphony of Silence came about. Also posted on Writer’s Voices website.

See my Haiku With My Muse, Sali, inspired by Paul Horn.

See Snapshots: Paul Horn in Conversation: History & Influences.

Paul Horn died June 29, 2014. There were many memorial articles about the jazz flutist, composer and creator of new age music who also became a teacher of  Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation at his ashram in Rishikesh, India. He taught thousands to meditate in the United States and returned to make a film about Maharishi when the Beatles happened to be there to learn more about TM at his ashram. The Guardian announced his passing: Paul Horn, father of new age music, dies aged 84, then published a more detailed obituary.

Update July 4, 2020: A Symphony of Silence: An Enlightened Vision: 3rd Edition Abridged Paperback – June 28, 2020 and Kindle Edition. Also available in Spanish as Sinfonia del Silencio.

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Study suggests meditation may help prevent PTSD—Boston Globe article by Bryan Bender

December 3, 2012

Study suggests meditation may help prevent PTSD

By Bryan Bender | Globe Staff | December 02, 2012

Norwich Rooks Meditate after classes

Lance Ostby, Rob Wetmore, Matt Miller, Aaron McDuffie, and Jeremy Ward practiced meditation following afternoon classes. Kayana Szymczak for the Boston Globe

NORTHFIELD, Vt. — It is part of a highly regimented daily routine at Norwich University, the nation’s oldest private military academy and a cultivator of battlefield leaders for nearly two centuries.

Dressed in combat fatigues and boots, a platoon of first-year cadets — “Rooks” — are up early in their barracks. On the orders of their instructor, the young men and women take their places. At 0800 sharp, they sit on wooden chairs in a circle and begin — to meditate.

The first-of-its-kind training is part of a long-term study to determine whether regular brief periods of silent, peaceful consciousness can improve troops’ performance. Ultimately, researchers hope the transcendental meditation training might be made available across all branches of the military to help inoculate troops against acute post-traumatic stress disorder, which has reached epidemic proportions and is blamed for a record number of suicides in the ranks.

For an institution that demands that incoming cadets exhibit physical and mental toughness, meditation training is a radical approach. The broader military culture had long associated meditation with a leftist, antiwar philosophy. Known by its shorthand, TM was widely introduced to the West by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Hindu leader who once served as the spiritual guru to the Beatles.

“I was very skeptical at first,” said Norwich president Richard W. Schneider, a retired Coast Guard admiral who is among several university officials who have also been trained in the technique. “I’m not a touchy-feely guy.”

But the preliminary results of the study, now in its second year, surprised even its lead researchers. They have been methodically tracking the dozens of participants and several control groups of non-meditating cadets through detailed questionnaires as well as brain wave and eye scans to measure levels of stress, anxiety, and depression.

“All those things decreased significantly,” said Dr. Carole Bandy, a Norwich psychology professor overseeing the project. “In fact, they decreased very significantly.”

Positive traits such as critical thinking and mental resilience improved, according to preliminary findings shared with the Globe that Bandy and her team plan to publish next year.

The project has garnered high-level attention from the Army.

“Becoming more psychologically fit is just like becoming physically fit. It is better to do it before you are injured,” said retired Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum, a surgeon who until recently ran the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program and visited Norwich three times to be briefed on the work. “There seems to be no question that meditation is, frankly, good for you. I am very encouraged by the Norwich University study.”

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Mike Love of the Beach Boys on Stories of Success

May 31, 2012

Here’s a good Interview With Mike Love of the Beach Boys posted May 29, 2012 on Stories of Success. He discusses how the band was formed, his creative output as a singer/songwriter, their stages of success, the impact of drugs and alcohol on their lives and careers, and more.

At about the 9:55 mark, Mike is asked the question of what kept him from getting caught up in drugs and alcohol, and the responsibility he had of acting as a role model. He answers by talking about his TM practice, how he was personally instructed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and later invited to join The Beatles and Donovan in Rishikesh. He continued with a discussion on karma and the results of our actions, why people choose to abuse drink and drugs and how different people react, finding one’s dharma or what you’re meant to do and enjoy doing the most, and persevering to fulfill your chosen career path. The video is posted on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/43009744.

See this great article, Mike Love, Not War, written by Virginia McEvilley for the Iowa Source when The Beach Boys came to Fairfield, Iowa for an outdoor Labor Day concert, sponsored by the David Lynch Foundation, on Monday, September 7, 2009.

Related stories: Beach Boys’ Mike Love recharges at The Raj, Beach Boy found life saving cure in Fairfield, Beach Boys concert ‘fun, fun, fun’ for all, Q & A with Mike Love, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on History International Channel (November 2007).

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George Harrison: The not-so-quiet Beatle, article by Philip Goldberg in LA YOGA Magazine

December 14, 2011

George Harrison: The not-so-quiet Beatle,

by Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda,

published in LA YOGA Magazine.

Download a PDF of this article

found on pages 28+29 of the LAYOGA

December/January 2012 issue.

Listen to this Oct 12, 2012 KRUU FM interview with Philip Goldberg and Cheryl Fusco Johnson on Writers’ Voices http://www.kruufm.com/node/14325/node/14325.

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Posted in Articles, Music, Peace | 3 Comments »

The Independent: Transcendental Meditation: Were the hippies right all along?

July 10, 2011


Transcendental Meditation: Were the hippies right all along?

For years, it has been ridiculed as a 1960s embarrassment. Now Transcendental Meditation is back in a big way. So were those hippies on to something all along?

By Laura Tennant
Sunday, 10 July 2011

Remember M-People’s 1995 Top 10 hit instructing you to “search for the hero inside yourself”? A decade-and-a-half on, it seems that things have changed – these days, it’s not so much a hero as a guru that many of us are hoping to internalise. For strange as it may sound, among those of us who seek to surf the zeitgeist, the most fashionable thinker of 2011 may turn out to be Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement – and the fact that he passed to a better place in 2008 doesn’t appear to have discouraged us one bit.

TM, as its followers call it, is rapidly moving from kooky margin to respectable mainstream thanks largely to a burgeoning body of scientific research which indicates that regular meditators can expect to enjoy striking reductions in heart attack, stroke and early mortality (as much as 47 per cent, according to one study). And the apparent benefits don’t stop there: according k to a pilot study just published in the US journal Military Medicine, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars showed a 50 per cent reduction in their symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after eight weeks of TM.

Meanwhile, educational establishments which introduce a “quiet time programme” – as did Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco – report drops in fights and suspensions, increased attendance and improvements in exam results. In this country, the Maharishi School in Ormskirk, Lancashire, gets glowing reports from Ofsted and achieves exceptional academic results.

An estimated four million people now practise TM globally – 20 minutes twice daily, as per the Maharishi’s prescription – many of them over the course of many decades, and there are some famous, and rather surprising, names on the list. Clint Eastwood, for example, has been doing it for 40 years, a fact he vouchsafed via video link at a fund-raising dinner for the David Lynch Foundation, an organisation set up by the film-maker to teach TM to school children, soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress, the homeless and convicted prisoners. Other celebrity adherents include Paul McCartney, Russell Brand, Martin Scorsese, Ringo Starr, Mary Tyler Moore, Laura Dern and Moby.

TM reaches far into the rational and sceptical world, too; the American philosopher Daniel Dennett does it, as does Dr Jonathan Rowson, head of the Social Brain project at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and a chess grandmaster (more from them later). Now a psychiatrist with 30 years’ clinical experience, Dr Norman Rosenthal has written a book, Transcendence: Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation, which gathers all the available evidence for TM and urges healthcare professionals to offer it to patients suffering from mental illnesses ranging from mild depression to bipolar disorder.

While the research on the health benefits of TM is fascinating, there’s another, more compelling, reason why meditation is in the air just now. Done consistently, it seems to offer some sort of corrective to modernity, a respite from anxiety and the ability to really, truly relax, without chemical assistance; a break from our constant, restless and often doomed aspirations to be thinner, richer and more popular on Facebook; the welcome discovery that happiness is to be found not in retail therapy, but within.

Those spiritual cravings explain why Rosenthal’s book is now riding high at number 14 on America’s Publishers Weekly non-fiction list. And according to TM UK’s official representative, David Hughes, there’s a similar surge of interest on this side of the Atlantic; figures are vague, but he reports that “there’s definitely an ongoing increase month by month” to the estimated 200,000 people who have learnt TM in the UK since 1960.

I first began to ponder the notion of meditation while writing a piece on solitude. While aloneness might not be a state that comes naturally to most humans, without it, mental-health experts believe, it is impossible to be creative or even really to know oneself. It was the sheerest coincidence that on the day I contacted TM’s UK website they were preparing for Dr Rosenthal’s press conference.

Click on this link to read the rest of the article: http://t.co/795LCEz.

According to David Hughes, TM is a not-for-profit, charitable and educational foundation which, once it has paid its teachers and covered its costs, ploughs its revenue back into outreach programmes in the developing world. It is certainly not shy about proselytising; but if its impact on public health is as great as Dr Rosenthal believes, one could argue it has a moral responsibility to spread its message. As for me, I’m seriously considering introducing my children to a stress- and anxiety-busting daily ritual that seems to do no harm and may well do a great deal of good.

For more information on the movement, visit t-m.org.uk

©independent.co.uk

A nicely edited version of this article was posted Tues Jul 12, 2011 in the Times of Oman: In search of a quiet time.

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Scattered Skies and Seas: New Paintings and Collages by Benjie Cabangis

November 8, 2009
MANILA BULLETIN
Benjie Cabangis: Allusions to Hot-tempered Nature
By PAM BROOKE A. CASIN
November 8, 2009, 1:38pm

It was the Beatles that did it. The impact of the quartet’s avant-garde music at that time was too palpable for anyone not to notice; the world has never seen anything like it. Theirs was cult-like. In England and elsewhere, the most famous musical men on the planet were always met with frenzied screams and sighs of admiration. In the Philippines, artists started following their footsteps and took impetus from the rich and powerful imagery of their songs. The young Benjie Cabangis was one of them.

The abstract artist says that the band’s White Album influenced him a lot. Released in 1968, the album cover was unlike any other. It was white and minimalist and had been stripped off of adornments and color that their previous albums boasted. Songs from the record were mostly inspired by the group’s sojourn in India to study meditation under the celebrated Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Naturally, the songs were moving and possess simple guitar riffs and lilting melodies that captivated the hearts of many.

Cabangis’s oeuvre follows suit. (He also meditates first before proceeding to paint and practices transcendental meditation which Yogi founded. The artist attests that meditation helps him to clear his mind and focus on a painting). His current abstractions, collectively known as ‘Scattered Skies and Seas,’ may be a bit unobtrusive aesthetic-wise but the artist’s statement about it is no less than a powerful and ominous reminder to us all of nature’s wrath and provoking complexities.

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