Huffington Magazine Issue 72 | Page 65

If there was a perfect year in which to discover transcendental meditation, it might just have been 1968. PREVIOUS PAGE AND THIS PAGE: DAVID LYNCH FOUNDATION That was the year that Bob Roth was a freshman at UC Berkeley — a campus considered Ground Zero for the anti-war movement and the cultural changes sweeping through the country at the time. He remembers living surrounded by helicopters spewing tear gas over student war protesters and Army tanks parked outside his front door. Demonstrations. Riots. Chaos. ¶ And against this backdrop, Roth did what many college students do: He took a part-time job. He sold scoops of ice cream at Swenson’s ice cream parlor, never expecting that amid the rush of pending social changes engulfing him, it would be at the ice cream shop where he would meet a guy who would ultimately alter the course of his life forever. Bob Roth speaks about the benefits of Transcendental Meditation (TM) at a health conference in Los Angeles in 2011.