Word: chinmoy
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...continuous wall of dull brick that makes up Beacon Hill's Charles Street. Behind the counter, Marion Lennihan, dressed in a flowing yellow sarong, finishes cutting up enough tofu and egg salad sandwiches for the expected lunchtime rush from nearby Mass General Hospital. Lennihan is a disciple of Sri Chinmoy, an Indian teacher who arrived in the U.S. in 1964 and began attracting followers soon after. Several pictures of the guru hang on the wall, showing Chinmoy playing tennis, jogging, and sitting on a ledge smiling out at the world with a beatific...
...Chinmoy "comes out of the Hindu tradition, but he isn't very Hindu now, he's more universal, very Western," Lennihan explains. Chinmoy teaches "heart-centered" meditation, an "easy, natural form," she continues. "Mind is fearful, it panics if you get too 'cosmic,' but heart is peace, love, trusting. The soul is throughout the body but hangs out more, so to speak, at the heart...
There are 30 Chinmoy followers in the Boston area, including five or six Harvard-Radcliffe students, but hundreds more are exposed to him through free meditation classes, concerts and art exhibits. Chinmoy himself is based in New York, where he leads meditations for diplomats and clerks at the United Nations. There are nearly 20 Chinmoy centers in the U.S. and 40 others in nations such as Germany, Japan, Canada, Iceland and Australia...
...last two years, Chinmoy has taken up running as an active meditative discipline well adapted to an outer-directed West. In March 1979 he ran his first marathon in San Francisco (a leisurely 4:31) and now encourages all disciple to run at least two miles a day. Chinmoy himself, according to Lennihan, "is in a state of constant meditation," and doesn't have to meditate formally, "like any illuminated master...
Lennihan was a Radcliffe senior when she took her first meditation class with the Chinmoy group six years ago. Earlier the turmoil of the widening war in Indochina and the student strikes led her to take a year off to explore different forms of yoga and meditation. "I was into radical politics, women's liberation. It was a time of great searching, and I was looking to help make the world better," she says. "For each person looking, there's one kind of answer and for me this was it, I just knew it." She continued to live and work...