Lawsuit alleges religious coercion through meditation in Chicago Public Schools

by | May 13, 2024 | Religion

(RNS) — Kaya Hudgins was a 16-year-old sophomore at a southwest-side Chicago public high school when her teachers announced a new mandatory program called “Quiet Time,” a twice-daily Transcendental Meditation practice designed to “decrease stress and the effects of trauma” for students living in high-crime neighborhoods. “I didn’t think much of it,” said Hudgins, now 21 and living in Texas. “I thought that, you know, it would just be basic meditation. I had no clue about what Hinduism was or what it was about.”
To be “initiated” into the Quiet Time practice, Hudgins recalls, she and her classmates were taken individually to a small room, told to place an offering of fruit at an altar with a man’s photograph and brass cups of camphor, incense and rice, and made to repeat the Sanskrit words a representative uttered. At the end, the representative whispered a unique, one-word mantra into her ear, according to Hudgins, and told her not to repeat it to anyone. The man in the photograph, she would later find out, was Brahmananda Saraswati, or Guru Dev: the master of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Hindu guru who started the global TM movement in 1955.
“It was unusual,” added Hudgins, who said she later researched her mantra on …

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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nn(RNS) — Kaya Hudgins was a 16-year-old sophomore at a southwest-side Chicago public high school when her teachers announced a new mandatory program called “Quiet Time,” a twice-daily Transcendental Meditation practice designed to “decrease stress and the effects of trauma” for students living in high-crime neighborhoods. “I didn’t think much of it,” said Hudgins, now 21 and living in Texas. “I thought that, you know, it would just be basic meditation. I had no clue about what Hinduism was or what it was about.”
To be “initiated” into the Quiet Time practice, Hudgins recalls, she and her classmates were taken individually to a small room, told to place an offering of fruit at an altar with a man’s photograph and brass cups of camphor, incense and rice, and made to repeat the Sanskrit words a representative uttered. At the end, the representative whispered a unique, one-word mantra into her ear, according to Hudgins, and told her not to repeat it to anyone. The man in the photograph, she would later find out, was Brahmananda Saraswati, or Guru Dev: the master of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Hindu guru who started the global TM movement in 1955.
“It was unusual,” added Hudgins, who said she later researched her mantra on …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
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