By Claire Hoffman. On a summer morning in , I was very pregnant in the back seat of a limo with David Lynch , being chauffered along Mulholland Drive.
Lynch was 66 years old at the time. He was handsome and sharply dressed in his uniform: blazer, white shirt, American Spirits in his breast pocket, white hair, swooped in a faux-hawk. It was degrees outside, the radio murmured from the speakers, and the air conditioning was doing its best. Beyond the tinted windows, Los Angeles floated by β blue skies all around. I was interviewing Lynch for a piece in The New York Times Magazine about his recent emergence as an evangelist for the practice of Transcendental Meditation.
He was so solidly original and clear, with his crisp nasal twang, his sharp observations about the world. That day, he was a bit grumpy β he was on a cleanse, he explained, and his wife, Emily, was about to have a baby, too. But there was something about our conversation that felt high-stakes β almost life or death.
Facing each other as we made our way through Hollywood, we were talking about why he had taken this late-in-life turn, after decades as a beloved and critically acclaimed filmmaker, to such an intense focus on Transcendental Meditation. Lynch had learned T. Within I went. And boom. This is beyond the beyond. Lynch saw Transcendental Meditation as fundamental to his survival as an artist in Hollywood.
So I died the death twice. Meditation really saved me. If you have that happiness built up inside, you can withstand some heavy things. For decades, Lynch said, meditation was a private thing for him. If people asked him about it, he would share his experience and sometimes even pay for a friend to learn. But otherwise he forged his own path.
