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This week we talk to Claire Hoffman
Claire Hoffman works as a magazine writer living in Los Angeles, writing for national magazines, covering culture, religion, celebrity, business and whatever else seems interesting. She was formerly a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a freelance reporter for the New York Times.
She has a masters degree in religion from the University of Chicago, and a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University. She serves on the board of her family foundation, the Goldhirsh Foundation, as well as the Columbia Journalism School. Claire is a native Iowan and has been meditating since she was three years old.
Her new book is called: Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood.
In This Interview, Claire Hoffman and I Discuss…
- The One You Feed parable
- Her new book: Greeting from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood.
- Growing up in a transcendental meditation community
- How that community changed over time
- The meditation only trailer park
- Rationality versus belief
- How things can be so much more beautiful and strange than logic allows
- Moving away from the meditation community in her late teens
- Being tired of the negative cynical voice in her head
- Revisiting the meditation community many years later
- Can meditation cause people to levitate?
- Quieting the cynical doubting mind
- Is evolution antithetical to happiness?
- Yogic flying: what it is and what it looks like
- How she felt about seeing her mom attempt to fly
- The desire to escape being human, to be divine
- That part if being who she is is feeling uncomfortable
- Accepting what it’s like to be a person
- Her evolution as a meditator
- That she doesn’t aspire to being enlightened
Claire Hoffman Links
A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other.
One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear.
The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”
The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feedThe Tale of Two Wolves is often attributed to the Cherokee indians but there seems to be no real proof of this. It has also been attributed to evangelical preacher Billy Graham and Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw. It appears no one knows for sure but this does not diminish the power of the parable.
This parable goes by many names including:
The Tale of Two Wolves
The Parable of the Two Wolves
Two Wolves
Which Wolf Do You Feed
Which Wolf are You Feeding
Which Wolf Will You Feed
It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.
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