Get mellow!
Psychedelic 60s folk legend Donovan bids to bring meditation to Scots classrooms
IN the heyday of the psychedelic 60s he headed to India to study the mysteries of eastern spirituality.
Now legendary singer Donovan is hoping to bring some of his guru’s wisdom to his native Scotland.
For the musician – famous for songs such as Mellow Yellow and Catch The Wind – aims to persuade schools across the country to introduce transcendental meditation.
Fifty years on from flower power, he believes pupils should be taught the techniques of yogic relaxation.
The 73-year-old Scot told The Scottish Mail on Sunday that young people are obsessed with smartphones and the internet – and it is leaving them ‘stressed to the max’.
He has already worked with a charity in the US to bring transcendental meditation into schools.
There, he said, two 20-minute periods of quiet time a day had helped reduce anxiety and improved students’ grades.
The singer said: ‘It’s not a lesson, it’s a practice where you turn off your mind. The kids do nothing but sit there and are led into the meditation. They can’t wait to do it because they know it’s good. It’s turning down the stress of the modern world.
‘Everybody understands kids are stressed to the max the more they dive into this individual obsession with the wee screen and internet.
‘They have also got to dive inside themselves to realise that there is a way that they can find out where the future lies, because intuition has to be reintroduced.
‘The mind used to be the servant of humanity. Now the mind has actually become a chain because it’s all thinking, thinking.
‘When you turn off thinking, with meditation reducing the amount of thoughts pouring into your mind, something happens deep within each individual and you will find within yourself solutions.’
Donovan, born in Maryhill, Glasgow, burst onto the folk scene in 1965 with hits Catch The Wind, Colours and Universal Soldier.
He learned about transcendental meditation during a high-profile visit to India in 1968 along with The Beatles. They studied at an ashram in Rishikesh with the Maharishi
‘Kids are stressed out to the max’
Mahesh Yogi, who taught them transcendental meditation.
It is described as an effortless technique that does not involve contemplation or concentration but instead the repetition of chants, or mantras, to settle the mind and transcend thought.
It is practised for 20 minutes twice a day to achieve a sense of peace and calm.
During the trip to India, Donovan wrote his hit Hurdy Gurdy Man, while The Beatles composed many of the tracks on The White Album.
Last year Donovan, who now lives in America with his wife Linda, returned to India to make a film about what he had learned 50 years earlier. The documentary, Donovan and The Beatles in India, was screened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last month.
He said: ‘It would be my pleasure to move things forward in the years I have left in this life to try to introduce transcendental meditation to Scotland – it could be the pioneer for the new form of education which is stress-free.
‘That’s what I see going forward, that’s why I am here.’
He added: ‘I’m from Scotland. My father gave me the poetry and social consciousness, my mother and her sisters gave me Scottish and Irish songs. But what I learned was Scotland, more than any other country, could pioneer this form of consciousness-based education.
‘My father explained to me about John Knox in the 16th Century introducing a school in every village. It’s been known for 250 years Scotland is the most highly educated country in Europe.’
To present transcendental meditation to US schools, Donovan teamed up with the David Lynch Foundation, set up by the American filmmaker famed for TV drama Twin Peaks and films such as Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man.
Donovan believes Scotland could be the leading country in the UK to implement this form of meditation in the education system.
The father of five said: ‘The focus since the Industrial Revolution has been on the material world, how to use, exploit and waste it.
‘When children use this meditation at school, if it is applied in time, two generations down the road it will be very different the way young people grow up. We already see the results, it is extraordinary.
‘Families want it but governments don’t even think about it.
‘Scotland has a role to play, it’s the leading country for education and education is free.’