Building a Meditation Commune in Small-Town IowaWhy one rural town is full of Maharishi Vastu architecture

AARON SEWARD

Curbed

February 24, 2016

 

The Tower of Invincibility

On the last few miles of the drive to Fairfield, Iowa, a two-lane blacktop, which up to this point curves, climbs, and dips through hills and dales, straightens out on a high, flat plane. You feel much closer to the sky here. The regular features of the Midwest countryside—orderly corn and soybean fields; whitewashed farmhouses with their barns, silos, and other outbuildings; copses of trees poking out of ravines—take on an almost Platonic idealness. It’s the heartland as Edward Hopper would have painted it: stark and quiet with hard, white light. It is a fitting approach to the American center of the global Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, home of the Maharishi University of Management (MUM), the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment (MSAE), Vedic City, Utopia Park trailer park, and the largest collection of Maharishi Vastu architecture in this hemisphere.

The first Vastu building you encounter is well outside of town. Sitting far back on the west side of Highway 1, it is a large structure, almost classical in style and apparent symmetry. An east-facing, three-story central mass anchors the edifice. An orthogonal cupola tops the roof, with an exotic crown detail that resembles a miniature onion dome. From this stately center extend, north and south, two wings, punctuated by their own small cupolas and domes. A white picket fence surrounds the site.

It looks like a knock-off of a grand 19th-century hotel erected in India by the British Raj. But it’s not a hotel—it’s an office building. A sign by the highway lists the tenants: Lisco, a local internet service provider; Maharishi Ayurveda, which manufactures and sells Vedic health products; Cambridge Investment Research, a broker-dealer; two law offices; something called Prairie Hills Management; and Fortune Creating Buildings, the North American headquarters of Maharishi Vastu architecture.

 

Founded by the TM movement in 2001, Vedic City was the first newly incorporated town in Iowa in 60 years.

Maharishi Vastu, also called Maharishi Sthapatya Veda, is the architectural corollary of the practice of Transcendental Meditation. It evolved as part of the TM movement’s effort to extend its brand to cover all aspects of life. The movement and its followers have been designing and erecting Sthapatya Vedic buildings for the past 20 years, primarily in Fairfield and its environs, but also in communities throughout the world. My trip last autumn was, in part, to slake a professional curiosity—I’m an architectural journalist. My investigation also had a personal dimension. This was far from my first trip to Fairfield. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I went through one year of junior high and two years of high school at MSAE. My parents, practitioners of TM since the late 1960s, taught my brother and me to meditate when we were seven years old. We were one of many TM families who came from large cosmopolitan centers—Houston, Texas, in our case—to be part of this community of spiritual seekers located incongruously in the corn belt of Jefferson County, Iowa.

Taste of Utopia Street is the main drag of Utopia Park trailer park: affordable TM housing in the pre-Vastu era.Aaron Seward

Sthapatya Vedic architecture was only just becoming popular among TMers when I left Fairfield to go to college. Like many children of the movement, I spent the subsequent years questioning and discarding the philosophical propositions of TM, but I never completely turned my back on Fairfield. The town holds formative memories for me. It’s where I met many of my life-long friends. Some of them still live there, and it is they who have kept me informed, with a certain amount of dismay, of the rise of Vastu. Sthapatya Veda buildings looked cheap, they said. They were ugly, unsuited to the local landscape, and ignored common sense. Nonetheless, the true believers were selling their homes in town and doing whatever they could to build Vastu homes in new developments on the outskirts. The movement began to redevelop the campus of MUM to bring it in-line with Vedic principles, a process that included draining its beautiful pond and barricading the southern entrance. It also demolished several early-20th century masonry academic buildings, among them a handsome stone church, and replaced them with gold-painted timber frame structures built according to Sthapatya Vedic principles.

Architecture is a cultural phenomenon, and it reflects the consciousness of those who design and build it. The culture and consciousness of the TM movement evolved from a single source: its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died in 2008. Maharishi (which means "great seer") was an Indian spiritual leader who began teaching TM in the 1950s. As early as 1958, he visited the United States to promote his form of mantric meditation, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s that his teachings attracted a mass audience and became a full-blown movement. At that time, Maharishi gained a number of celebrity followers—including The Beatles—and soon an entire generation of young people, dissatisfied with the world their parents had laid, were tuning in to his philosophical teachings and meditating on his mantras. The TM movement had approximately 700,000 followers in 1977, more than a million by the 1980s, and as many as five million in recent years.

Aside from the heavy tile roof and onion dome detail, this Vastu home would fit in easily among the Midwestern vernacular.Jon Lipman

While a large portion of Maharishi’s following is in India, his main focus was on expansion in the West, and his great success was in adapting Hindu spiritualism to Western sensibilities. (So dedicated to the West was he that he established his primary residence in Vlodrop, Holland, after a series of lawsuits curtailed his visits to the United States.) Western celebrities helped his cause, but his real genius was in tailoring the practice of TM to fit Western lifestyles. The elaborate mantras and invocations that make up Hindu religious practice were stripped down to a single-syllable sound—the mantra—repeated quietly to oneself for 20 minutes twice a day: once in the morning between waking and going to work or school, and once in the evening between returning from work or school and eating dinner. Far from prepping one for the loss of individuality, the practice of TM was said to help the practitioner rest, relieve stress, and achieve full potential spiritually and materially.

The men's Golden Dome, at the entrance of the MUM campus, erected in 1980, has since been renovated to bring it in-line with Vastu principles.Aaron Seward

During the practice of TM, the meditator—who "effortlessly" repeats the mantra in a sitting position with eyes closed—is said to transcend through levels of consciousness, shedding all thoughts, and all self-referential mental or physical activity, until reaching a state of "pure Being." "It is neither matter nor energy," wrote Maharishi in his 1963 book The Science of Being and Art of Living. "It is pure Being, the state of pure existence…Everything is the expression of this pure existence…which is the essential constituent of all relative life." TM only brings the practitioner into contact with pure Being for brief moments. The human mind, being a naturally restless and querulous entity, soon buoys one back up into the mess of one’s own inner life. But, through regular practice, one would be able to spend longer and longer periods of time in touch with pure Being. And eventually, after some period of time—perhaps a very long period spanning several lifetimes, depending on one’s karma—a TM practitioner might achieve cosmic consciousness, or God-consciousness: "Then is the selfishness of man the selfish end of God; the individual mind of man the cosmic mind of God; the individual breath of man the cosmic breath of God; the individual speech of man the expression of cosmic silence."

In promoting TM in that way, Maharishi bundled the seemingly opposite poles of spirituality and materialism. "…The use of his full potential would enable a man to think, speak and act in such a manner that every thought, word and action would not only accomplish the maximum in material life but would also become a means of his remaining in tune with almighty God," Maharishi wrote. It was the perfect blend to attract the generation that was then coming of age in the West.

Located on Highway 1 north of Fairfield, this grand structure looks like a knock-off of a 19th-century hotel in India, but it's a Vastu office building.Aaron Seward

As the movement grew—today, it is estimated to have a net worth of some $3.5 billion—Maharishi, the Steve Jobs of Indian gurus, released a series of branded products to satisfy all aspects of spiritual and corporeal life. He told his followers to limit themselves to only his products, which included the TM-Sidhi program, an expanded meditation practice that professes to enliven particular aspects of life and speed one’s journey to enlightenment; Maharishi Ayurveda, a system of alternative medicine that is practiced clinically and involves a line of dietary supplements; and Maharishi Gandharva Veda, music that is said to create balance in nature and peace in the world. And then there is the most visible product of all: Maharishi’s system of Vedic architecture, which, the guru promised, would "provide cosmic harmony and support to the individual for his peace, prosperity, and good health — daily life in accord with Natural Law, daily life in the evolutionary direction."

I met Jonathan Lipman, the chief architect of Maharishi Vastu, in the all-vegetarian cafeteria on the MUM campus. "Vastu, or Sthapatya Veda, is part of the Vedic literature," he explains. "It is the architecture aspect of Natural Law. ‘Sthapatya’ means to establish. One of the qualities of the structures of nature is that they are holistic and integrated into the web of nature. In the Sanskrit language, the word that means a structure should be balanced between the parts, and the whole, and the cosmos, that word is Vastu."

This Vastu office building in Fairfield, with its vaguely classical pediment and columns, has a cupola that brings daylight to the center of the building, onion dome details, and PV arrays.Aaron Seward

All of Maharishi’s products are based in Vedic literature, ancient Hindu texts that were passed down orally by generations of priests before being written down. Unlike Ayurveda and Gandharva Veda, whose precepts are well described in the literature, the texts that describe Sthapatya Veda are arcane, difficult to understand, and thus open to wide interpretation. In India there are several lineages of Sthapatis—practitioners of Sthapatya Veda—who each have their own way of doing things. To develop his system of Vedic architecture, Maharishi went through a 15-year process of interpreting the Vedic texts in consultation with the most prestigious Sthapatis. Maharishi Vastu is the result of this effort, a complete practice of architecture with well-defined rules.

The Vedic texts, which were composed untold thousands of years ago, don’t have much to say about office buildings, or hospitals, or schools.

The first of these rules is that a building should face east. "The most powerful influence of natural law on the surface of the earth is the sun," says Lipman. "It rises in the east, sets in the west, and has different qualities of energy at different times of the day. The surface of the earth is moving, it’s rotating on its access to the east at this latitude about 700 miles per hour all the time, so the sun and everything outside of the earth come at us from the east because we’re rotating that way. When we’re facing that direction, our direction of travel, we’re kind of facing natural law, and we’re receiving it, we’re more in the flow of it."

The picket fence that surrounds Vastu buildings is another way of enforcing eastern orientation and extending the positive and protective influences of the architecture through the site. While eastern entrances are favored, northern entrances are acceptable. Southern and western entrances, however, are inauspicious and are avoided. In fact, many TM followers (called "roos," short for gurus, by the locals) who live in existing houses in Fairfield closed their homes’ south entrances and opened up new entrances on the east to bring them somewhat in line with Sthapatya Veda.

The white picket fences surrounding these Vastu office buildings enforce eastern orientation and extend the architecture's positive influence throughout the site.Aaron Seward

Whenever possible, Sthapatya Vedic buildings are designed to admit light to the center. In India this is often done via a courtyard. In Iowa, where the climate isn’t conducive to courtyards, it is done through skylights and raised cupolas with clerestory windows. Daylight infused all of the Vastu buildings that I visited during my trip to Fairfield—sometimes pleasantly so, and sometimes to the point of producing an uncomfortable amount of glare.

Unlike in much contemporary architecture, where solar orientation is calculated in order to optimize building performance, in Vastu the relationship of the structure to the sun is determined by the arcane prescriptions of the Vedic source texts. For example, according to Lipman, the Veda says that the sun has different qualities of energy at different times of the day. By locating specific residential functions in particular quadrants of a plan the Sthapatya Vedic architect is said to enliven certain qualities in the residents. "The dining room is where digestion is greatest, the living room is where conviviality is promoted, a study is where our mind is clear," says Lipman.

This Vastu office building in Fairfield shows some Eastern influence in its ziggurat-like column bays and prominently featured onion dome detail.Aaron Seward

This is less true with other building types. The Vedic texts, which were composed untold thousands of years ago, don’t have much to say about office buildings, or hospitals, or schools. As a result, Maharishi Vastu doesn’t dictate the placement of rooms in these facilities. But this hasn’t stopped the movement from building these sorts of structures according to its interpretation of the Veda. "In part what we are doing is identifying how we can apply these principles to the building types that exist today," says Lipman.

Besides the sun and its influences, Vastu incorporates a Vedic system of measurement and proportioning (the smallest unit, 1 nel, is equal to 11/64ths of an inch, and all ratios are determined by multiplying or equally dividing the chosen module); prescriptions for material choices (steel, for example, is not used, as it is considered inauspicious), and site planning guidelines. ("For instance, if there was a hill to the east of a building then clearly it would block the influence of the rising sun," says Lipman. "We wouldn’t build on such a site.")

While Vastu has many rules, it does not govern the style of a building. Just as Maharishi dressed Hindu spiritualism in Western garb to promote TM in Europe and America, his system of architecture is adaptable to the prevailing tastes of a region. Most of the Vastu houses I saw in Fairfield conformed to the local or other American vernacular styles. One was even designed to resemble a mountain lodge, complete with Douglas fir logs imported from the Pacific Northwest and an impressive stone fireplace. The Vastu buildings on the Maharishi University of Management campus, however, sought to embody what Lipman called a "Vedic style": a dull golden color with hipped roofs, white pilasters and trim, and wedding cake cupolas.

The women's Golden Dome, now dusty blue in color, was also built in 1980 and has since been renovated to Vastu standards.Aaron Seward

"The Vastu principles are not really style-giving," says Lipman. "The direction the building faces, the proportions, don’t contribute to style generally, so it is compatible with almost any different style." "Almost" is the operative word. Bilateral symmetry is a key aspect of Vedic architecture, and therefore, in Lipman's words, "Zaha Hadid would be very challenged to do a Vastu building and Frank Gehry might be too, because there are certain principles of a central main mass with additional masses, and completely fluid, non-hierarchical building style would be really challenging to overlay on a Vastu building."

Another defining feature of Vastu architecture is the Brahmasthan, the geometric center of the structure, which is marked on the floor in one way or another: a polished stone, a piece of demarcating furniture, a slab of glass etched with a Mandala. If the mystical underpinnings of Vastu were not clear before, here they become undeniably so. According to the Vedic view of cosmology, the universe arises from and collapses back to a single, "unmanifest" point in an unending cycle—much the way the Big Bang theory described nature until scientists discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, destined to stretch out and grow cold, probably never to contract again. In Vastu architecture, this point is acknowledged in order to bring the house and its inhabitants into harmony with the Vedic laws of nature. And the onion dome detail at the crown of the building serves as an intermediary, a junction point between the heavens and the environment below.

You can buy a t-shirt online that reads, "Fairfield, IA: 5.7 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality." It’s a play on what Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kanther once said about San Francisco, that it is 49 square miles surrounded by reality. The comparison is an apt one. Many people who moved to Fairfield for TM left the movement but stuck around to pursue other New Age spiritual practices. And many children of TM, who left for college or professional reasons, returned to raise families and start businesses.

This town of around 10,000 inhabitants smack in the middle of conservative "Silicorn Valley" has many of the markers of "up-and-coming" towns everywhere: an art gallery, an organic health food store, a performing arts and convention center, the best burger in Southeast Iowa, a cider works, a hip coffee shop, and a nightclub that books touring indie bands. The seat of Jefferson County, it is home to an impressive courthouse that is on the National Register of Historic Places. It has a town square complete with a gazebo at its center, ringed with brick buildings occupied by a variety of active storefronts housing everything from a cell phone store to something called the Divine Mother Church. There are a number of stately Victorian mansions along the main thoroughfares, and blocks and blocks of quiet, tree-lined residential streets. You can easily walk its entire length and breadth, and traffic is minimal.

This Vastu home near the MUM campus turns its back on Heavenly Lane, which is to the west of the site. The entrance is on the east side, a key precept of Vastu.Aaron Seward

Little Maharishi Vastu architecture exists in the center of Fairfield. A few commercial buildings make themselves known with eastern orientations and onion dome details. And then there is the campus of the Maharishi University of Management, with its new Vastu academic buildings, its drained pond, and the old Golden Domes, which were built in 1980 as group meditation halls, one for women, one for men. Today they are hemmed in by white picket fences, their entrances reoriented to face east, their tops crowned by onion dome details. The ground between them, as of 2007, is occupied by The Tower of Invincibility, a dull golden obelisk bearing inscriptions that glorify those who erected it and commemorate something called Invincibility Day, which is apparently helping to bring about world peace. The Tower of Invincibility has its own white picket fence to protect it from inauspicious influences.

A number of existing homes have been modified to bring them in line with Sthapatya Vedic principles, though Lipman says the movement no longer authorizes existing home retrofits. It is simply too difficult, he says, to meet the stringent requirements of Maharishi Vastu and obtain the full benefits of what the movement calls a Fortune Creating Home. So, to live in Vastu, you have to build from the ground up.

Most of the Vastu architecture being built in Fairfield today is rising in small subdivisions on the outskirts of town and in nearby Maharishi Vedic City, which was incorporated in 2001. Out there, on the tabula rasa of the Iowa cornfields, it is possible to see Vastu in unadulterated surrounds, as well as to catch a glimpse of Vedic town planning.

At first glance, there is little that distinguishes these Vastu homes from any other American contemporary residence built on a similar budget. They are almost entirely symmetrical; the same could be said for many developer tract homes throughout the country. They are composed of walls set on foundations and topped by roofs, with windows for daylight and views and doors through which to enter and leave. The materials are also, if not always standard, certainly not unique to Vastu. Most of the homes I saw were wood-framed and sided with asphalt shingle roofs and vinyl windows, though Lipman also showed me a more modern house he had designed with concrete panel cladding. He also took me to a subdivision called Abundance EcoVillage, which exists completely off the grid, where many of the homes are made with straw-bale construction. Maharishi, he pointed out, was an early proponent of solar energy, and indeed photovoltaic arrays, in addition to wind turbines, are to be seen throughout Fairfield in general.

Abundance EcoVillage, built in the middle of the cornfields, exists completely off the grid, drawing all of its power from a wind turbine and PV arrays.Jon Lipman

There is something eerie about a close collection of buildings all facing the same direction — east, in this case. The setup also creates very real urban planning impracticalities, which Lipman grappled with when the movement was laying out Vedic City. "We are engaged in a kind of experiment in introducing these principles into this culture," he says. "We are figuring some of those things out as we go along. For example, on the face of it, it would sound like you cannot lay out the blocks that compose a city if all the houses face north or east. How can you lay out a grid of blocks with houses on both sides of the streets? Several of us have really tried to figure out what the solutions are, because to say that you’re going to single-load every street means that infrastructure costs are going to be vastly higher."

Whether planners and architects are Vedic Sthapatis or Mies van der Rohe, it is the residents who ultimately decide how buildings and cities will be put to use. In laying out Vedic city, Lipman and his team did indeed create single-loaded blocks, with houses facing the backsides of the next row of houses. These single-loaded grids were placed within rings, expressed in landscaping and walkways, with several such rings surrounding a central ring. "When I moved in there, what I discovered is that once or even twice a day somebody, or a couple, will step out of their house and they’ll go for a walk around the loop. And as they walk other families will see them and they will hop out of their house and they’ll join them. They’re all just chatting and stuff, but it looks like a parade….I had no clue. I’m just following these ancient patterns. And so it’s very interesting to watch what’s actually happening."

For those of us outside of the Movement, it can be easy to scoff at attempts to force an ancient and mystical system of architecture into modern life. On the other hand, it’s hard not to be charmed by that same fact, especially when you compare it to the seemingly mercenary motivations of many housing builders in the United States, whose developments are devoid of both architecture and substance. With Maharishi Vastu there is at least the striving for something beyond the profit margin (though there is that as well). Its aim is spiritual and utopian, values that modern architecture once tried to promote before becoming simply a style.

Editor: Sara Polsky

http://www.curbed.com/2016/2/24/11100572/commune-architecture-iowa

Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood

Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood
By Claire Hoffman

In this engrossing, provocative, and intimate memoir, a young journalist reflects on her childhood in the heartland, growing up in an increasingly isolated meditation community in the 1980s and ’90s—a fascinating, disturbing look at a fringe culture and its true believers.

When Claire Hoffman’s alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven—Iowa—to live in Maharishi’s national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire’s mother, Transcendental Meditation—the Maharishi’s method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life—was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart.

At first this secluded utopia offers warmth and support, and makes these outsiders feel calm, secure, and connected to the world. At the Maharishi School, Claire learns Maharishi’s philosophy for living and meditates with her class. With the promise of peace and enlightenment constantly on the horizon, every day is infused with magic and meaning. But as Claire and Stacey mature, their adolescent skepticism kicks in, drawing them away from the community and into delinquency and drugs. To save herself, Claire moves to California with her father and breaks from Maharishi completely. After a decade of working in journalism and academia, the challenges of adulthood propel her back to Iowa, where she reexamines her spiritual upbringing and tries to reconnect with the magic of her childhood.

Greetings from Utopia Park takes us deep into this complex, unusual world, illuminating its joys and comforts, and its disturbing problems. While there is no utopia on earth, Hoffman reveals, there are noble goals worth striving for: believing in belief, inner peace, and a firm understanding that there is a larger fabric of the universe to which we all belong.

PURCHASE NOW!

The transcendental meditationists who turned an Iowa farm town into a Bernie base

Ben Terris 
Washington Post
January 29, 2016

FAIRFIELD, Iowa — Every morning and every evening, and sometimes in between, this rural community appears to undergo a massive outbreak of narcolepsy. Gathering in giant domes, or sitting in the privacy of their own homes, hundreds of men and women will take the time to close their eyes, bow their heads and sit motionless for 20 minutes.

With the caucuses just days away, this unlikely mecca for practitioners of Transcendental Meditation is getting a jolt of activity. There have been visits from Hillary Clinton, as well as HUD Secretary Julian Castro, her who-knows-maybe potential running mate. Ted Cruz drew a big crowd to the small convention center here on a Tuesday night.

But it was Bernie Sanders whose visit Thursday got the most buzz about town — and it’s he who might benefit most from the Maharishi effect.

“He represents a higher level of cognitive development,” said Sam Farling, a volunteer organizer here for Sanders. “Hillary Clinton may have the almost militaristic level of organizing — but we have the passion.”

Farling, a Vietnam veteran originally from Ohio, migrated here decades ago for the same reason as many Fairfield residents: the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

The gloriously bearded guru, who died in 2008 at age 90, launched the Beatles and Mia Farrow on spiritual quests and made the ancient Indian tradition of meditation hip. He also helped transform a sleepy farm town into the enlightenment capital of southeastern Iowa: When a group of his acolytes outgrew their digs in California in the early 1970s, they came here, snapping up a newly defunct liberal arts college at a bargain price.

Now the Maharishi University of Management dominates the town with its 1,000 students, two 25,000-square foot meditation domes (“over one million hours of transcending has occurred here”) — and a bountiful crop of Bernie 2016 stickers in the parking lot.

“I think in general it’s a weird school so people here tend to be more open-minded to new and different things,” said student Kennidy Stood. “Bernie represents a certain ideal, and people aren’t as afraid here to go for that.”

As a “consciousness-based learning” institution, Maharishi requires students to practice TM; they are encouraged to get brain scans as they start at the university and right before they leave, to see how meditation has affected them. While many other spiritual fads of the ’70s have petered out, or been deemed too cultish, TM has held steady, even gaining in popularity as the ancient art of yoga has also entered the mainstream.

“It’s unlikely the Army and National Institute of Health would fund a cult,” said Maharishi’s executive vice president, Craig Pearson, noting various grants the school has received.

The school’s sensibilities have taken hold in Fairfield, as a number of TM practitioners (who call each other “Ru,” short for “guru”) have put down roots. Even the mayor, Ed Malloy (“I’m caucusing for Hillary, and my wife is caucusing for Bernie”), is a Long Island transplant who came here for the meditation.

Many homes face east, their roofs topped with golden Hershey’s Kiss-shaped ornaments; the town boasts a hip coffee shop, an upcycled goods center, vegetarian joints and six Indian restaurants.

But still, this is small-town Iowa, home to farmers and foundry workers and the Iowa Cattle Association’s best burger of 2015. And for all his old-hippie credentials, not everyone here is in the tank for Sanders.

“A lot of our community is really hardwired to look at the most idealistic version of everything,” said Holly Moore, a 1979 Maharishi graduate who is volunteering for Clinton. “But I’m so pragmatic. I don’t think life is all about sitting somewhere with my eyes closed, and not all about a level of activity. It’s a combination of the two.”

There are even TMers who vote Republican.

“It’s really about being against the establishment,” said Doug Stewart, a Cruz supporter. It’s more typical for a GOP TMer to lean libertarian, though. This is, after all, the only county in Iowa that Ron Paul won in 2008.

“If I don’t vote for Rand Paul, I might vote for Bernie,” said David Ballou, who is helping run one of the caucus locations in town.

Jeff Shipley, the 27-year-old chairman of the county GOP, says he’s not your typical Republican — he’s as keen on legalization and the anti-war movement as he is fiscal conservatism — and even he can almost feel the Bern.

“The point of the meditation is to create world peace,” said Shipley, who is himself not a meditator. “You had thousands of people come here with the idea of creating a better world, and they like Bernie for that. If I was a Democrat I’d support him without a doubt.”

Two hours before the Vermont senator showed up, the line to the convention center had begun to snake through town. “It’s like Hillary 2.0,” said a local photographer shooting the scene.

“I had to move a dentist appointment up to early this afternoon to make this,” said David Goodman, a transcendental meditationist. “The Novocaine is just wearing off.”

The actress Gaby Hoffmann (“Transparent”) stood in the back wearing a shirt with a stenciled rendering of Sanders’s face, having come to Iowa for 24 hours to support a candidate she has never met. (“But he shops at the same health foods store as my best friend’s mom.”) Susan Sarandon opened the show for him.

“I came from New York,” the Oscar winner said to knowing applause. “For me, the one thing that is important is consistency and moral courage.”

When Sanders took the stage, his voice hoarse from repeating his mantra about income inequality at stops across the state, the crowd broke their reverie and screamed approval for their honorary Ru.

There’s an open question about whether Sanders is going to be able to turn this enthusiasm into actual caucus-goers. It’s Clinton who has a downtown phone-bank operation here and a field organizer as well as a klatch of volunteers.

But Fairfield residents are highly trained at keeping cool. If the candidate they adore can’t pull it off, they’ll find peace somehow.

“People who meditate get in the harmony with the deepest flow of life,” Farling said, “and we already know that overall everything is going to turn out wonderful.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-transcendental-meditationists-who-turned-an-iowa-farm-town-into-a-bernie-base/2016/01/29/b4de383c-c5e1-11e5-8965-0607e0e265ce_story.html

Men’s dome gets new roof

NICOLE HESTER-WILLIAMS
Fairfield Ledger
September 25, 2015

The men’s meditation dome at Maharishi University of Management recently got a new roof after it started leaking near the building’s skylight.

MUM’s chief administrative officer David Todt said university administration felt it was time for a new ...
http://fairfield-ia.villagesoup.com/p/men-s-dome-gets-new-roof/1417866

A few schools have large pools of unvaccinated kids

The Des Moines Register
Tony Leys
March 1, 2015

Although the vast majority of Iowa children are fully vaccinated, a few schools stand out for their relatively large pools of students who haven't received their shots.

Public health experts worry those schools could provide a toehold to highly contagious diseases, such as measles, which could be spread to others in the community.

The Iowa Department of Public Health recently released 2013-14 immunization data for every school with more than 100 students. The Des Moines Register created a searchable database so parents can see how their children's schools scored in the first-time report.

Out of the more than 1,300 schools, records showed just 17 with fewer than 80 percent of their students who were fully vaccinated.

One — the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment — has by far the lowest vaccination rate. Just 47 percent of 178 students at the private Fairfield school had records showing they received all required shots last school year.

The school draws most of its students from those who practice Transcendental Meditation, as taught by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Movement members say it is not a religion, but stresses "natural" methods of staying well. Followers are urged to eat nutritious foods, exercise regularly, meditate and take other steps to maintain their health.

Richard Beall, who is head of the school, said he plans to hold a parent meeting soon to discuss vaccinations. He said the school takes no official stance on the subject, but it wants parents to make informed choices.

Beall said many of his school's students obtained religious exemptions from vaccinations. When asked why, given proponents' contention that Transcendental Meditation is not a religion, Beall said the state gives parents the option of citing their private religious beliefs.

"We don't have authority or reason to probe behind it," he said.

Beall said the parent meeting will include discussion of what to do if a disease such as measles crops up among the students. As it happens, Fairfield was the site of the last Iowa measles outbreak, which happened in 2004 when an unvaccinated teenager brought the virus back from India and infected two other people. Public health authorities blunted the outbreak with an extensive and expensive quarantine and vaccination campaign.

LOW RATE FRUSTRATES FAIRFIELD PHYSICIAN

The presence of the Maharishi school is a major reason that Jefferson County has the second-highest level of vaccination exemptions in Iowa. State records show that 9 percent of all school-age children in the county had exemptions last school year. Of those, 169 cited religious reasons and four cited medical reasons.



The situation frustrates Fairfield pediatrician Jay Heitsman. Like most mainstream physicians, Heitsman is a firm believer in the value of vaccinations.

Heitsman said he often speaks to parents who think vaccines can be dangerous and are unnecessary. He tells them he strongly disagrees, based on the conclusions of overwhelming research. He knows some physicians refuse to treat families who won't vaccinate children, out of fear they'll bring diseases into clinics.

Heitsman hasn't taken that step. "I choose instead that every time I see them, I give them heck," he said.

He said a few parents who previously refused to obtain vaccinations have recently brought their kids in for shots because of news about the national measles outbreak. He hopes that's a sign of progress.

Dr. Nancy Lonsdorf, a Fairfield physician who practices Transcendental Meditation, said she doesn't generally discuss vaccination with her patients. "I think they've made up their minds by the time they come to me," she said. "I don't tell them one way or the other."

Lonsdorf, who went to medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, moved to Fairfield because of its concentration of people interested in using other health practices alongside Western medicine.

Lonsdorf said that if she had children, she probably would vaccinate them. But she said it's not surprising some others want to rely on natural methods, such as diet and exercise, to maintain wellness.

"Because of that, there's probably a lot of concern about injecting substances into their bodies, especially at a young age," she said.

She recommends patients take vaccines in certain circumstances. For example, she said, people with chronic health conditions that weaken their immune systems should consider getting annual flu vaccinations. But she said her patients tend to take good care of themselves, and she doesn't believe they need tighter government requirements to force them to take precautions.

"Government can't solve bad habits — our eating junk food, trashing our immune systems, not getting enough sleep, abusing alcohol," she said.

'SCIENCE IS NOT MY GOD,' PARENT SAYS

Leila Montgomery is one of the Maharishi school parents who obtained a religious exemption to avoid vaccinations. Montgomery's 9-year-old son, Dil, is a third-grader at the school, and her 18-month-old daughter, Lyra, will soon start preschool there.

Montgomery said her application for the exemption wasn't based on an organized religion's teachings, but it was sincere. She defines her religious belief as "my ability to listen to my inner intuition." She added: "I believe science is not my God."

Montgomery said her children never get sick, and she credits good nutrition, exercise and other healthy habits. She doubts vaccines are as effective as promoters claim. She said she's not overly worried about her kids contracting diseases such as measles.

"I don't live my life in fear," she said.

Officials of several other Iowa schools that scored low in the new report said the data are skewed. For example, Elaine Collins, office manager at All Saints School in Cedar Rapids, said a significant number of students did not have up-to-date vaccination records on file when the school was audited last year.

The statewide data show 25 percent of the school's students were unvaccinated for the 2013-14 year. In fact, Collins said, only two out of more than 200 are now not vaccinated. Those two have exemptions, she said, "and everybody else is up to date."

Jaclyn Greiner, the nurse at Washington Township Elementary near Kalona, said nearly three-quarters of the 375 students listed as attending there are actually home-schooled children who rarely mingle with the in-school students.

Many home-schooled students have religious exemptions to vaccinations, she said. Overall, the state report shows 65 percent of the school's students were fully vaccinated last year, but Greiner said 87 percent of students who attend the school full-time are fully vaccinated.

Officials of several schools also said other reasons, including tardy paperwork, help explain relatively low scores in the new state report.

Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, medical director for the Iowa Department of Public Health, agreed the report might not reflect current vaccination status at every school. For one thing, the statistics are based on audits done last school year. Some schools have probably taken steps to improve their rates or their record-keeping since then, she said.

Also, the numbers don't specify how many students at a given school had medical exemptions, which nearly everyone agrees are legitimate reasons not to be vaccinated. The health department didn't break down how many medical and religious exemptions were granted at each school, because it feared doing so could breach confidentiality by letting people deduce which kids probably had such exemptions.

Quinlisk said many children who have medical exemptions avoid only one or two shots to which they have allergies. But many children with religious exemptions skip all vaccinations, she said.

Quinlisk suggested that parents at schools attended by large numbers of students who are not vaccinated ask school leaders what's behind those numbers.

If the school still has many unvaccinated children, she said, parents could consider working with administrators or the PTA to try to increase educational efforts about the benefits of vaccine.



http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2015/02/28/maharishi-school-fairfield-vaccinations/24193179/