Image via Wikipedia of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

A couple of years ago I saw an episode of Oprah on which she interviewed women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who were still youthful for their age.

One woman religiously jumped off the roof of her house everyday and swan dived into the pool below, which she swore was the secret to her youthfulness.  Another women said that hers could be attributed to her sexual prowess.  Another had some magic cream that she swore was the secret to her velvety smooth skin.

The woman who stole the show though was tall and elegant, and she had a “lightness” to her that made her almost radiant.  She was practically beaming.  “When I was in my twenties,” she said to Oprah, “I started doing Transcendental Meditation, and it changed my life!”  It showed.  I wanted it.  And from that day on, I became interested in TM.

An online search quickly revealed an interesting fact: David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and many more), a person I greatly admire for his artistic integrity, vision and insight, has been doing Transcendental Meditation (as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) for over thirty years.  He’s so inspired by the benefits of it that he’s started a school called the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace in New York City.  He often speaks about how deeply it has affected his life and perceptions.  In fact, he says he owes his creativity to it completely.

Three or four years later I still haven’t gotten round to taking a proper Transcendental Meditation course, and I’m not happy about it.  (My friend Sonia Esgueira went off and learned to do it in Johannesburg and has been singing the praises of it ever since, which has re-awakened my interest in it.)

What I really like about (what I’ve read about)  TM, is that it sounds totally do-able.  You meditate for twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes in the evening, which to me sounds just about right.

For months I’ve been considering attending the local Vipassana Centre to do a free ten-day course there, but quite frankly, the idea of sitting and meditating for more than eight hours a day for ten days and (as I understand) concentrating only on the tip of my nose for the first three, sounds painful.

So finally I’ve started looking into doing the course quite seriously, and it turns out that there’s one in Cape Town starting on the 1st of October, which I will do my best to attend.

Here is a couple of my favorite videos of David Lynch, talking about the benefits of TM.