The Beatles and the Music that Brought Meditation West

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 ashram a 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…