• The Empowerment Plan

    “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ― Rumi, The Essential Rumi If there is one thing that I am a stickler on, it is class attendance. A few years ago, a former student, signed up to take a second class with me. When she missed the first two weeks, I was surprised. A good student, Veronika, knew about my “skipping class” pet peeve. Toward the end of the second week of the semester, I received a rather breathless apology email from a very obviously busy young woman. Veronika, it seems, had been otherwise occupied. She had been invited to speak at the UN regarding her burgeoning non-profit “The Empowerment Plan”. The Empowerment Plan is a Detroit based organization dedicated to serving…

  • Cultural Rehab

    A healthy man needs to see a doctor after spending time around a group of contagious sick people because he too becomes infected. A clean individual who spends time around a dirty drug scene will eventually start participating and use the drug. If that behavior continues and as a result their quality of life goes down, the best thing they could do is seek help. Individuals in this situation need to learn how to be alright without the addicting drug. There is a type of institution for that. Its called rehab. The purpose of rehab is to remind you of who you were before you started using. Sometimes I wonder if it is difficult for people to admit addiction because they started down the path so innocently. Initially, they may…

  • Tetris Game Hijack

    I came into the “Consciousness, Creativity and Bliss” class after a long and stressful previous semester. The promise of meditation lured me in as the stacks of boxes full of responsibilities kept getting higher and higher in my mind. Now don’t get me wrong, the boxes don’t just disappear when I meditate. Going to school and working is necessary, at least until I graduate. The problem arises when these boxes aren’t neatly stacked one on top of the other but rather dropped at random like a really cruel game of Tetris. Things inadvertently become misaligned. Every one of my classes has a box of its own. Every family member, with their unique and crazy respective problems, has a box just for themselves. Every hour I log at work is another, much…

  • Recycling Classic Style

    I am currently a sophomore in college majoring in Media and Communications and minoring in Business. I go to a unique school in Fairfield, Iowa focusing on integrating the practice of Transcendental Meditation into our daily routine. For the past few years I have lived here, I have modeled for a friend who owned an eBay vintage clothing store. A few months after I started my freshman year of college, she announced she was selling the business and would teach the ropes to whoever bought it. My friend Chamolie and I were immediately inspired by the potential of this project and ended up buying the company in October of 2010. Owning a start up business in college is a thrilling yet ambitious project to take on. Chamolie and I go…

  • It’s All Around Us

    My name is Kevin Kline. I am a May 2011 graduate from the College For Creative Studies (CCS). I, like most of you, began my college career straight out of high school and I simply had no idea what I was getting myself into. Having grown up in the motor city around a very automotive-driven group of people and being very creatively engaged in my upbringing, it seemed like the natural progression for me to go to CCS for automotive design. Upon arrival to the school, I quickly realized just how serious my program was. I had no concept of what I was about to go through in the next four years. It didn’t take me long to get knee deep in trouble.  During my freshman year, I became very…

  • A Course for Inspiration

    Consciousness, Creativity and Bliss is an inspirational course at the College for Creative Studies that has opened my perspective to new discoveries and explorations to endless creative potential. This course has motivated me to be open to change and step out of my comfort zone with experimenting with different mediums for my projects. Transcendental Meditation has made an impact on my life. It is a stress relief that is the best natural medicine to help me think clearer in my creative process. Transcendental Meditation has helped me understand who I am as an individual. Rather than contemplating decisions in my head of judgments, Transcendental Meditation has helped me see clearly and make decisions with my intuition and feeling.

  • How I Got Here

    College Essay by Cami Beauregard 3:42 A.M. Shaking, on the floor. Is that normal? What even is that? I was diagnosed with Epilepsy when I was nine years old. To me that meant I was special; God blessed me with something that no other kid had. But to the outside world, I was weird. My childhood revolved around my brain and how it refused to function the right way. I woke up several nights a week swallowing my tongue and collapsing on my knees to the ground. My mind was so occupied by the nighttime, by its seizures, that during the daytime I could not focus.  My world was a world of earthquakes.

  • Believing is Seeing

    “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” – Franz Kafka A few weeks ago, my boyfriend, Myles- who also practices TM- and I got into a heated debate about…afterlife. I would like to say that we discussed such a topic while sipping wine and listening to Mozart. Instead, I will admit that this conversation took place over plastic plates of mac n cheese at the kitchen counter of my apartment. Nevertheless, we both became completely engulfed in the age-old question of whether seeing is believing or believing is seeing. He leans heavily towards the former. I relate more closely to the latter. Chaos ensued. Well, not chaos, exactly, unless one can argue that chaos can be…

  • Ideababies

    I’ve found that the best way to be happily creative is to live in the flow of things. New ideas are wonderful; they inspire us, they get our butts in gear, and they put our hands to work. Without them, nothing new would ever happen! We’d be frozen in time, generation after generation… we’d still be monkeys.

  • An Invitation

    I learned TM because my mother made me do it. There are far more romantic and enlightened reasons for learning TM but that is my truth. She organized the class, paid the fee and took care of my two babies while I went off to find some peace. Frankly, I thought my mom was kinda pushy on the subject. And while I was admittedly curious, I probably never would have made it happen on my own. It just didn’t resonate at the time. Over the years, meditating became something I did cause my mama told me to. I innocently plodded along – awake, asleep, mediate, talk, walk, eat, awake. Sometimes it all felt the same — part of the routine of being alive.