I remember the day clearly, we were in the Dominican Republic on a holiday marking our 1st year wedding anniversary. I turned on the TV (probably the only time I did) to see it on the BBC news tick-a-tape completely out of the blue – “THE BEATLES GURU DIES”.

At the time we were living in the epicentre of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation (TM) moment in the US; Fairfield, Iowa, the place we had called home for the last 2 years, and would go on calling home for the next 7 almost 8 years. But TM was much more to me, it was something that shaped and formed my whole life, my formative years, something that I had inherited, 20 minutes twice a day, as natural to me as brushing my teeth, I never knew life without it.

I learnt TM when I was six years old, I had attended the Maharishi School in the UK, I had worked and lived in amongst TMers, both in the UK and the US for most of my life. My mother was a TM teacher from the 70s, almost all of my friends were TMers, I didn’t know anything BUT TM, the TM moment and that way of life.

It was a shock to see those words flashing up on the BBC, to feel so far away from it all, and yet be so connected with it somehow.

10 years on, so much has happened, so much has changed, and when I say so much, I mean it, both outwardly and inwardly, but it’s the inner change that has been the most profound.

I’ve gone from being a second generation TM movement kid, knowing nothing else, to transgressing this and embracing the world of Satsang and contemporary non-dual teachers, to finally opening my mind and heart to Grace in the form of a 15 minute Shaktipat Transmission, and in that instant having a life time of ’spirituality’ and spiritual practice melt into the experience of living life fully, beautifully, naturally, embodied, and abiding as the Self.

And in this I have had to learn how to live again.

I’ve lost myself so profoundly, and yet in that loss I’ve found my-Self again and again. Dying in each and every moment to a fresh, new, beautiful and raw moment, this moment. This experience, this knowingness, so simple and yet so profound has changed everything. Yet here I sit, chopping wood, carrying water, the same Imogen, the same body, totally and completely, divinely here, in the embrace of love.

Thank you Maharishi, for starting me on this journey to discover my very own Self, even if I didn’t ‘choose’ or even recognise that that was the path I was on all this time……

I bow at your feet.