Mary-Ann Rich rises at precisely 4:45 every morning. After feeding her cat, she returns to bed and rests with her back against the headboard, her eyes closed. There she sits for 20 minutes, motionless, her mind drifting far from the images of burned and blown up bodies that have haunted her for a decade. “I would rather miss sleep than miss meditation,” the 63-year-old Rich tells me in her home in San Francisco. “I will be late for work rather than miss my meditation.”
For the past four years, Rich has repeated this daily ritual to help heal her emotional scars from the 18 months she spent as an Army nurse in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. After being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, she bounced from one treatment to another without much effect. Then she was introduced to Transcendental Meditation, or TM, the mantra-based meditation practice best known for its association with the Beatles and its controversial—some say cultish—guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
[For more of this story, written by Bryan Schatz, go to http://www.motherjones.com/pol...e-pentagons-support/]
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