I’ve started to get the addiction that social workers have from helping others
— Photo from James Meade
James Meade, second from right, poses with students of transcendental meditation whom he taught at Wayne County’s jail in Pennsylvania. The man at left said he got through 45 days in solitary confinement by meditating every day in the hole. The man on the far right said of his TM experience, “I was just at absolute peace … I forgot I was incarcerated; it’s crazy.”
To the Editor:
My classmate, Don Asche, from Guilderland High School’s Class of 1962, has been gathering news from classmates, creating a tapestry in eternity. Here is my thread.
Mike Love of the Beach Boys is a buddy of mine. How did that even happen?
He explained the general change he went through, not just me: “I’m getting bugged driving up and down this same old strip. I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip.”
I was in the new place. I met him in a hotel in Mallorca in 1962. He wrote the preface for my book on anxiety, and he did a podcast with me.
My wife of 57 years, Nina, and I teach transcendental meditation all over the States and all over the world. We taught natives in Alaska and taught in Hawaii. We stir things up wherever we go, it seems.
In Tanzania nothing was happening, and a woman we taught has now trained thousands. In Hong Kong, we taught the American way not the Chinese way, and we increased instructions from 0-3 a month to 25-30. Nina keeps a blog.
It looks like we’re international tourists, but we’re not. We teach TM everywhere. We're working. In July, we're each getting an award for people who have taught TM to at least 1,000 people. Cool. Got an award in January as a plenary speaker at the 8th International Conference on Ayurveda. I spoke on ayurveda for dementia and a book I worked on with a Vedic Vaidya.
Not quite done. The David Lynch Foundation has made videos about our work. I won’t put the one about teaching Marines at Camp Pendleton (which was a testosterone rush) or the one about teaching at a school in Jamaica that was a bit of a fear rush.
Here’s one about what we’re doing now, teaching hundreds of health-care workers in a campaign to heal the healers. I’ve started to get the addiction that social workers have from helping others. Dopamine. The addiction hormone. Gotta be careful.
Which brings up prisons, where they made another video of us. Nina wrote in her blog how I taught a man at the county lock-up who described himself as an enforcer for the Hells Angels. He likes his TM.
He said, “I used to just go and mess someone up. Now I think about it before I do it.”
I’ll probably regret telling you all this. Why not just say, “I’m fine” and leave it at that? Yes, I’m fine. My knee hurts. Some aging thing. I think like I’m 14 but my body doesn’t agree.
James Meade, Ph.D.
Milanville, Pennsylvania