157: Claire Hoffman

 

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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

Homepage

Twitter

Facebook

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