CHAPTER 2 : SECTION 3

“How are your kids enjoying the Nature Explore Playground?” Tere asked.

“So far so good! My daughter is a really intense and solitary person and takes time to warm up to a new situation, but my son is the absolute opposite and will run and join any play group no matter how far it is from me and not even bat an eye. It’s so funny they are so different, but they can always make each other laugh.”

“Well, they are in good hands with Fatima and Pasha. And your mom is there, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

We had convened in Tere’s office and I had to ask the question that has been plaguing me since I began researching the school.

“So, I have to ask you about uniforms. When I first heard that you require uniforms I thought, ‘Oh, how can you take away a child’s expression of their self through their clothes’ but the more I thought about the fashion race, I wondered if maybe it really is a good idea. What is your reason for uniforms?”

“Ah, yes. Uniforms.” Tere stated with confidence. “There are two reasons that we do uniforms here. It is a quiet form of discipline. Even the staff is required to dress in such a manner in suits or dresses. We want to convey that what we are doing here is serious business. When they get home they can dress in whatever they chose, but here we want our children to know that play time is later. We are here to learn. Secondly, you are right, it takes away the fashion race and the stress that puts on the students. As a parent who had daughter here, it was always such an immense relief to not have to worry about what everyone else was wearing or spending the vast amounts of money on clothes to fit in. It reduces stress within an entire family.”

I had to admit, she was making a lot of sense. The uniforms didn’t seem all that difficult to wear. The younger girls wore yellow jumper dresses while the older girls wore skirts and a polo shirt. The young boys wore khaki pants and a polo shirt. The older boys wore khaki pants and a white shirt with a tie.

“My husband just started with a new company.” I began, “He has been compelled to wear a shirt and tie to work even though he doesn’t have to. It started with watching Mad Men and me saying that I’d like the “man in the suit” fashion to come back, and then he even admitted it gave him a different feel while he was working.”

“Yes, it does. That is the feeling we want the students to have here, a feeling of greater purpose. As for the reduction of stress that the uniform offers, the other thing we do here to reduce the stress among the students is separate by gender. This just creates harmony. You will see here at Maharishi that we do not have cliques based on what you wear, groups certain girls or boys fit in like some other schools. That stress is diminished here and creates zero competition in our classrooms. You’ve been in school, you’ve seen it, boys and girls being distracted trying to prove something to the opposite sex. Now, this year we have a few coed classes due to our high numbers of students.”

“Are you seeing if that is having any affect on the studies?”

“No, but that’s a good question. It is still too new to see what difference it makes.” Tere laughed. She too was light-hearted in her conversation. Clealy she was very together and good at her business, but she was very real in her explanations of the Maharishi School.

Tere continued, “Now we may be different in some aspects of our school, but we still are accredited with the state. Some private schools are not. We follow state requirements here. We are a college preparatory school. To be a college preparatory school 80% of your student body must be accepted to college. We here at Maharishi have a 100% acceptance rate.”

I’m pretty sure my jaw made a Tom and Jerry thud. The national average of high school students that go straight onto college is 33.28%! (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_001.asp) The crazy long answer to this question of how many students go to college can be found here: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_percentage_of_high_school_graduates_go_to_college_2008-2009.

Tere was clearly extremely proud of this fact, and she should be!

“Why do you think this is?!” I asked stunned. “Do you think this is because of the Transcendental Meditation.” I had done extensive reading on the brain research associated with meditation.

“Absolutely. I am sure it has everything to do with that. But I also think that it is the uniforms, I also think it is the single gender, I think all parts of Maharishi makes a whole.”

“So, is this why the state doesn’t care that you have meditation in your curriculum?”

“That’s right. We have proven ourselves, clearly, in the requirements of the state, so we are allowed some flexibility in our curriculum.”

At Maharishi the students in 7th-12th grades participate in 20 minutes of Transcendental Meditation before classes begin and then for 20 minutes at the end of their day. It is a requirement of the school, not an optional gathering. Ages 5-9 are not required to sit in this fashion with their eyes closed. The school believes children are not yet ready for that type of discipline being in such a physical place in their bodies. What 5-9 year olds do instead is what they call The Word Of Wisdom. The children are given a word, each child has a different word, and it is their word, it is not spoken aloud. At that point the children walk around, but in silence. This is getting the children ready for the learning of TM. It is never really spoken or dictated to the children as to what the kids do with their word, it is up to them. It is just a practice in discipline and a quieting.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is globally recognized as bringing Transcendental Meditation to the world fifty years ago. Meditation has become the keystone to the Maharishi School’s curriculum because of the scientifically proven success in stress reduction and improvement of brain functioning that is associated with Transcendental Meditation. The studies conducted on TM are so numerous I felt like I had just eaten some 1970’s mushrooms after scanning them all. Let me attempt the impossible task for putting 200-300 studies conducted into a nice Michael Bolton-esque, easy listening paragraph.

Groups of meditators were studied along side of a control group of non meditators and this is just some of what was found.

On the issue of the IQ of University Students the Mean IQ score of meditators was 121 over the non meditators at 116.

After 3 months of Transcendental Meditation, systolic, the top number, and diastolic, the bottom number, blood pressure was reduced significantly by 10mmHg.

High cholesterol also lessened significantly by 30 mg/100ml.

Meditators showed lessened hospital stays by, get this, almost 80% and less overall medical expenses by a reduction of 60% from norms. Meditators ages 40 and older also had an 80% reduction in outpatient visits.

Meditators smoked and drank alcohol less.

Transcendental Meditation reduced anxiety better than any other technique or psychotherapy.

After four months meditators had decreased insomnia.

Those suffering from post traumatic stress troubles showed very significant reductions in depression.

TM practictioners had increased job satisfaction, improved job performance, and younger biological age.

Now if that isn’t impressive enough, listen to what happens when a group of meditators get together:

When 7,000 experts (1% of the population) in meditation convened, a significant decrease in fatalities due to international terrorism occurred from what is normally measured.
When 1% of a cities population became instructed in Transcendental Meditation during the 1970’s the crime rate for the whole city went down.

Alright you say, but why, what is it about TM that can alter so much of the chemistry of a human body and even the chemistry of a town? So how possibly can meditating two times a day cause these students to excel so extravagantly above the national average? The answer I found is surprisingly simple: Transcendental Meditation opens the brain. Images taken of the brain during TM show blood flow widely distributed across the entire cortex! Why this is so cool is that our brains do not work like this very often. Different spots of our brain have been proven to fire when we are doing certain things, for example, talking. This will fire a different area of my brain than sitting and remembering something in my past, or perhaps telling someone a story. I will fire a different area of my brain when I’m artistic verses when I am making a list. But this integration of both halves of the cortex, where blood flows over an entire space is, well, very rare.

Quantum scientists have even studied Transcendental Meditation and have given it it’s own place on the totem of our consciousness. Science tells us we have seven known states of consciousness. In 1970, Dr. Robert Keith Wallace of Harvard was the first to publish his findings of TM as a 4th state of consciousness. The first stage, waking, the second stage, dreaming, and the third stage, sleep are all the common known states of consciousness. A fourth state of consciousness occurs during Transcendental Meditation. Dr. Wallace found that while in meditation there is an increase in what is called “medium-frequency alpha brain-wave activity,” which gives the meditator the same physiological benefits of deep rest. (Deans, Ashely, A Record of Excellence pg 34)

Ashley Deans, the previous director of the Maharishi School, explains that the deprivation of the fourth state of consciousness has been found to be just as detrimental on the brain as being deprived of our third state of consciousness, sleep, resulting in only partial brain development because of the constant stress of its absence. (pg 35) He goes on to say that students that routinely nurture this 4th state receive such a high level of brain functioning that they appear to far exceed from other students. (pg 39)