Claire Hoffman - Levitation, Meditation, and a Childhood in a Transcendental Meditation Trailer Park

Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation

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True Crime, Talk Radio, Comedy, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Part 1 of our interview with journalist Claire Hoffman, Claire shares what it was like growing up in an Iowa trailer park community built around the Transcendental Meditation (or TM) movement and its charismatic leader, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi–whose followers included The Beatles. Claire shares what the daily routine was like in the TM community, how it felt believing every adult she knew could levitate, and the powerful mystique of Maharishi.
Plus, she tells how the fall of the Berlin Wall and her subscription to Cosmopolitan magazine helped lead to her eventual awakening about the guru being a mere mortal, and the book she wrote about that experience, Greetings From Utopia Park.

SOURCES:
Greetings From Utopia Park

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is exactly right.
0:07.4	Trust me. Do you trust me? Would I ever lead you astray?
0:12.1	Trust me. This is the truth. The only truth. If anybody ever tells you to just trust them,
0:18.0	don't! Welcome to Trust Me, the podcast about cult's extreme belief and
0:23.8	manipulation from two levitators who've actually experienced it. Not the levitation, though. I'm
0:29.0	Lola Blanc. And I'm Megan Elizabeth. Today is part one of our interview with Claire Hoffman,
0:35.5	former member of a transcendcendental Meditation Community,
0:38.2	an author of two different books we're going to talk about. But for today, we're going to discuss
0:42.3	her book, Greetings from Utopia Park, surviving a transcendent childhood, which is about her childhood
0:48.5	growing up on a commune-like trailer park organized around transcendental meditation. In part one today,
0:54.1	she's going to tell us why
0:55.0	her mother started practicing TM, what it felt like arriving at Maharishi school at age six and
1:00.2	growing up in the meditation focused community, what levitation actually was and why life there was
1:06.4	actually kind of magical and gave her a sense of purpose when she was young. She'll talk about how
1:10.8	she began to question the group and the unhealthy worship of the leader on the kind of magical and gave her a sense of purpose when she was young. She'll talk about how she
1:11.0	began to question the group and the unhealthy worship of the leader, almost like he was a god,
1:16.5	how Cosmo Magazine factored in, and how doing research for her book and learning about how much
1:22.2	he was really just a human man shaped her perspective on idol worship and helped inform her next book.
1:29.0	Real quick, some context for folks. So Transcendental Meditation is a meditation practice
1:33.7	initially popularized by a man named, I think I'm pronouncing it correctly, Mahesh Yogi,
1:39.8	who was the guru to the Beatles and lots of very, very famous people in the 1970s.
1:44.3	And most people use it relatively harmlessly, since it's just one of many meditation techniques
	...

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