Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa

5. Power of the Ballot

60 ° chapter 5 Connie Boyer should have been a shoo-in when she ran for an Iowa state house seat. A Republican, she brought an impressive résumé to the 2002 race. She was a sixth-generation resident of Jefferson County in southeast Iowa, had been active in the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, the Fairfield Strategic Planning Commission, and numerous arts and civic groups. Telegenic and folksy, she also co-hosted a local public cable TV show, helped run a bed and breakfast with her husband, and managed to work full time as chief financial officer at a local bank holding company. But for some voters, Boyer had a fatal flaw. She was a meditator in a place where praising the Lord—loudly and often or, more conventionally, with the help of old English hymns—is the way some people strive for higher realms. Even though she was homegrown, unlike the out-of-state interlopers who flocked into Fairfield at the urging of their late guru, Boyer carried baggage. At one political meeting, she was challenged about efforts to bring TM into public schools. “One of the questions was, ‘we think that because you meditate that you are going to try to force meditation into the schools,’” she recalls, as we chat in her quaint bed and breakfast, the Seven Roses Inn. Boyer said she had no intention to do that, had never been asked by anyone in the movement to do that, and had no plans to press for bills that would do that. The David Lynch Foundation was offering programs to inner-city schools around the country, but Boyer said the effort was simply not on her to-do list. Meditators have run for all sorts of offices around the country, indeed around the world, over the past few decades. Sometimes they have seemed 5 Power of the Ballot power of the ballot ° 61 to be pushing a TM agenda, tilting at windmills in elections they can’t win— such as the U.S. presidency—as they try to garner headlines for the practice. On a local level in Fairfield, some may have wanted to make sure that the interests of MUM were considered when such issues as road improvements came up. But several officeholders and would-be elected officials who meditate seem more motivated by the same mix of ego, sense of civic duty, and stances on issues that drive politicians of all stripes. Still, meditation—like race or religion—can play a big role when voters consider the candidates. Boyer lost her state race by a heartbreaking half a percentage point, with her fifty-two hundred votes falling just fifty-five shy of the tally for her non-meditator opponent. “It was an issue when I ran,” she says. Her take on the question she faced: “My guess—it would have been fear, I suppose, of religion. The people that asked me I would consider pretty conservative and traditionally religious.” Yearslater,however,theironiesinherdefeatremainrich.Boyer,aLutheran who in her late teens and early twenties threw in for a time with a group of born-again Christians, is not a mover and shaker in TM. Rather, she got involved with meditation casually at the time her first marriage was ending, around 1990. That was a time, she recalls, when she was “wanting something deeper” in her life, something she “felt to be more real.” She had to overlook a “goofy” TM enthusiast who, she says, smiled too often while introducing the practice to prospective meditators. Eventually, a friend taught her. Like several thousand other Fairfield residents, Boyer had been surroundedbyTMwhileshewasgrowingup .Backwhenshewasinninthgrade, she recalls, her class debated whether the movement should be allowed into town. Later, when her brother took up meditation for a while, “we teased him about taking his fruit and flowers,” she says. (Fruit and flowers play a role in initiation ceremonies into TM.) Still later, Boyer worked as a sales clerk at a local sheepskin clothing shop that was run by a meditator, and she got acquainted with customers who were part of the movement. Some time afterward, she struck up a friendship with a meditator who performed with her as a dancer in a local production of The Music Man and who taught her the TM practice. When she did take up meditation, as a thirty-year-old, Boyer found it felt 62 ° chapter 5 familiar. The feeling, she says, was much...