Facing The Music

Remembering the revolutionary sound that helped bring meditation to the West.

- By Jennifer Davis-Flynn

In October 1966, 18-year-old Prudence Farrow Bruns was kneeling at the foot of the Apparition Grotto in Lourdes, France, praying for a miracle. She desperately wanted to study Transcendental Meditation (TM) with her guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, but students at his TM teacher training were required to be at least 24 years old. When her older sister, actress Mia Farrow, was invited to the Maharishi’s ashrama year later, the younger Farrow was desperate to join her. “It was my dream!” she recalls.

As fate would have it, Prudence got her miracle, and in January 1968, she traveled with her sister Mia to the small Himalayan town where her guru made camp when he was not traveling around the United States and Europe lecturing about elevated consciousness and the joys of inner happiness. There were more than 60 people staying at his ashram at the time, including the Beatles, Scottish pop star Donovan, and the Beach Boys’ Mike Love—all seeking enlightenment from a shaggy-haired pacifist whose battle cry was that with just 20 minutes of TM a day, practitioners could achieve “pure bliss consciousness” and live from a place of love rather than in the prison of their minds.

But it wasn’t all peace and love at the compound. The Beatles famously left after two months amid rumors of sexual misconduct by the Maharishi (no suits were ever filed and some of the attendees later denied that anything inappropriate had taken place) but not before they penned 48 songs, including the White Album’s “Dear Prudence,” a nod to the young Farrow’s reclusive dedication to her meditation practice while at the ashram.