Download Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood AudioBook Free
On this engrossing, provocative, and personal memoir, a journalist reflects on her years as a child in the heartland, growing up within an increasingly isolated yoga community in the 1980s and '90s - a fascinating, disturbing look at a fringe culture and its true believers. When Claire Hoffman's alcoholic daddy abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, instructs five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old sibling, Stacey, they are going to heaven - Iowa - to live in Maharishi's national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire's mother, Transcendental Yoga - the Maharishi's method of yoga and his method of living the fullest possible life - was a salvo that guaranteed world serenity and enlightenment as their family fell apart. Initially this remote utopia offers heat and support and makes these outsiders feel quiet, secure, and connected to the earth. In the Maharishi Institution, Claire learns Maharishi's idea for living and meditates with her category. With the promise of serenity and enlightenment constantly coming, every day is infused with powerful and interpretation. But as Claire and Stacey mature, their adolescent skepticism kicks in, attracting them from the community and into delinquency and drugs. To save herself, Claire steps to California with her daddy and breaks from Maharishi completely. After a decade of employed in journalism and academia, the obstacles of adulthood propel her back again to Iowa, where she reexamines her religious upbringing and will try to reconnect with the magic of her years as a child. Greetings from Utopia Playground takes us deep into this organic, different world, illuminating its joys and conveniences and its troubling problems. While there is no utopia on the planet, Hoffman discloses, there are commendable goals worth trying for: believing in belief, interior peace, and a firm understanding that there's a larger cloth of the universe to which most of us belong.
