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

9. Just Business

just business ° 125 9 Just Business For Pamela K. Slowick, meditation is more than a pleasant daily pastime. She credits her livelihood to a recurring month-long vision she had while meditating in 1994. “Every single day, I closed my eyes and after thinking of the mantra a couple times, bingo, there was the store,” the effervescent Slowick recalls. Every day there was a new aspect—the flower essences for emotions, the homeopathic remedies to heal the body. I saw the different companies and the couch where we would have the mamas sit and research remedies. Every day, for twenty-eight days, this was happening. On the twenty-eighth day, I had a thought—talk about thick—“what if these thoughts are only happening in my head?” This was the first inkling I had that this might be my baby. The result: a year later, she opened Thymely Solutions, a shop that might seem more at home in San Francisco or in Harry Potter’s Hogsmeade than just off the main square in a southeastern Iowa farm town. Slowick and her half-dozen staffers offer bulk herbs, natural vitamins, supplements and tinctures , aromatherapy oils, and homeopathic remedies in the shop and online. They comb through the “bewildering array of natural products” available to stock some three thousand of what her website calls the “purest, organic, non-genetically engineered health products available.”1 126 ° chapter 9 Retail outlets such as Slowick’s are among the visible signs of the economic shot in the arm that adherents of the TM Movement have given Fairfield. Since the mid-1970s, the town has been a hotbed of entrepreneurialism as followers of the guru developed businesses that catered to one another and to markets well beyond Iowa. Restaurants now serve Indian and vegetarian food. Revelations, the used bookstore chock-full of spiritualdevelopment texts, doubles as a popular breakfast and lunch spot. Café Paradiso, a coffee shop, provides snacks and cutting-edge music. Outside downtown, Cambridge Investment Research, a fast-growing independent broker-dealer, employs hundreds who serve financial planners and their customers nationwide. Real estate developers in Fairfield have thrived by building homes that comply with the movement’s architectural principles. Several charming bed-and-breakfast inns welcome visitors from around the world, as does a luxury hotel-spa just outside town in Maharishi Vedic City. This commercial upsurge, which has remade parts of town, has been recognized by groups outside Fairfield. The National Center for Small Communities in 2003 gave the city a Grass Roots Entrepreneurship Award for cities with populations of less than ten thousand. A year later, the town was named the Most Entrepreneurial City in Iowa by the Iowa Community Vitality Center. The Fairfield Entrepreneurs Association claims that one-third of all venture capital raised in the state in the twenty years beginning in 1990 was invested in Fairfield-based companies. The area brags about being labeled “Silicorn Valley” because of a concentration of high-tech and Internet-based companies. Every bit as industrious as the Amana Colonies with their famed refrigerator enterprise or the Oneida Community’s cutlery operation, Fairfield ’s TM community entrepreneurs created hundreds of jobs for movement supporters and outsiders alike. But do the group’s teachings have anything to do with the commercial successes? Some TM backers insist that meditation is the secret weapon for successful businesspeople. It focuses their minds, clearing them of the clutter that most people struggle with and giving them the power—and inner calm—needed to make smart decisions, they contend. Others, including some who have broken with the group, scoff at this. Success in business would have come to these entrepreneurs anyway, they say. It’s all a matter of just business ° 127 personality, timing, and luck, and meditation is irrelevant. People on both sides of the argument admit that Fairfield’s entrepreneurs had no choice but to launch their ventures; much like the earlier Utopians, they moved into a place where there were too few jobs for all the people needing them. If they wanted to keep body and soul together, they had to create their own opportunities. Maharishi certainly had no trouble with the idea of his followers making money. While more of those who flocked to Fairfield were spiritually minded rather than business oriented, they did warm to the guru’s idea that life was a “200 percent” affair—with 100 percent focused on inner...