Lessons from 'Utopia Park'

Claire Hoffman was only three years old when her meditation teacher whispered her own personal secret mantra to her – the mantra she could use to meditate, which would lead to personal enlightenment and world peace. Hoffman grew up in Utopia Park, a trailer park on the campus of Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa. Her mother took Claire and her brother there so they could be immersed in the study of Transcendental Meditation. Hoffman’s childhood and her subsequent disillusionment with the movement and its founder, Maharishi, is the subject of her new book. It’s a memoir called Greetings From Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood.