NANCY COOKE DE HERRERA

"The goal of meditation is to be in the eye of the storm with it all around you and you are calmly in the middle."

In Paris, 1951, nancy met Luis de Herrera, a member of the American team racing at Le Mans and a year later married the dashing sportsman from Argentina. In Buenos Aires, a daughter, Maria Luisa, was born to this glamorous couple, but tragically, due to atomic radiation exposure, Luis died when the baby was nine months old.

Upon returning to the United States, Nancy turned away from her former life and pursued a career in the fashion world. Chosen by leading fashion czars to be the U.S. Ambassadress of Fashion, Nancy presented American couture around the world for 12 years.

Continually seeking the exciting and meaningful, Nancy is captivated by India, its peoples, its spiritual heritage and tries to return yearly. At her home in Beverly Hills, on is apt to meet activists from all corners of the globe. To quote a syndicated columnist, “Dining with Nancy is like a visit to the United Nations.”

phenomeNEWS: What a life this woman has led! It is so exciting. She is about to share with us some of the most interesting facets of her enlightenment process along the way and perhaps we might learn something about our enlightenment process. Her book is All You Need Is Love: An Eyewitness Account of When Spirituality Spread From the East to the West. The author is Nancy Cooke de Herrera.

Hi Nancy. What an intriguing title!

Nancy Cooke de Herrera: I think one of the reasons that we picked the title is because I was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s liaison with the Beatles and the other celebrities at the ashram in 1968 and it was the most productive two months of the Beatles’ time ever. They wrote so many songs. And of course, that’s the title of one of their songs.

Did they write that when they were at the ashram?

They worked on it, yes. And the fun thing is they usually sat at my dinner table and they’d talk back and forth and strum on their guitars. The whole thing was so amazing, as were their dinner manners.

What were they like? Were they fun?

Oh, they were such fun. So creative. I think one of the phenomena was the change that came over John Lennon, because when he first arrived he was this sort of this gray-faced man who didn’t look at anybody and just acted as though he would have been happier anywhere else. As the weeks passed, he got into longer and longer meditations and had a lot of special attention from Maharishi. All of a sudden, he was a person with pink cheeks and he was laughing. He’d put his arm around his wife and was eventually out with the group playing his guitar and would sign an autograph, even though Maharishi had asked the people, before the Beatles arrived, to please not notice them or take photographs.

What was interesting to me, the group that was there – there were almost 80 and it was a teachers’ course – nobody was really very excited about their even coming because they were so excited about the knowledge that they were getting from Maharishi. The name of the course was The Mechanics of Creation. And we just hoped that they wouldn’t bother us!

My real favorite was George Harrison. He was so dear. One day he came to me and said, “Oh please Nancy, the Kumbha Mela is coming.” The Kumbha Mela happens every 12 years in the valley of the saints in Rishikesh, where all the sadhus and sannyasis and all these weird looking people gather – and George said, “Maharishi insists that we go to the Kumbha Mela on the top of an elephant, but I want to mingle with the crowds and see if I can’t find Babaji sitting underneath a tree.” And then he said, “You know, Nancy, being a Beatle, you live your whole life like on top of an elephant.” So, I loved George. I’m very fond of all of them, actually. Ringo only came for 10 days. One of the papers said that he left because the food was too spicy. When we heard that we all said, “Find out where the spice is” because our food was so bland.

How long did the others stay?

Well, John and George stayed about two months. Paul stayed six weeks. He came with Jane Asher, the English actress. In fact, I was in Maharishi’s room when Paul came in to say goodbye and he got down on his knees and said, “I can never thank you enough, Maharishi, to be protected like you have with us, to give us the quiet, the serenity. It’s the greatest gift you could give a Beatle.”

When they came, Marahrishi said, “If you want anything, go to Nancy, she will be my liaison.” So I had the fun of taking them shopping. When I say shopping, we’d go across the river to Rishikesh and all the little places were like little cardboard sort of enclosures, with the worst-looking things you’d ever seen. The Beatles had so much fun because nobody knew who they were. They brought back all these extraordinary fabrics and it seemed that the ones that were for men they had made into women’s clothing and the women’s fabrics they had made into men’s clothing. The little couture of the ashram, as we called him, was an Indian man who sat on a dirt floor under a tent with a hand-driven sewing machine and yet the things that he produced went on to influence fashion.

How did you end up being the Maharishi’s liaison?

It all started in 1955 when my beloved husband died. I lived in Argentina. We’d only been married three years and we had a little girl who was just nine-months-old. He died as a result of atomic fallout we were caught in, in St. George, Utah, but that’s all in the book. The only book that seemed to give me any solace at all – not the Christian books that were sent to me – was The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. It was sent to me by an Indian friend. His discussion about reincarnation was so soothing at that time. I just knew that one day I would go to India. I had a lot of questions that needed answering because it was always essential to me to know that there was justice in the universe and I hadn’t been quite convinced yet. I am now.

In 1962, my friend Tom Slick who owned the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, an old, old friend, knew that I was going to be in Tehran putting on a show for the New Path Society, the women who were trying to take chador off the Iranian women, he said, “As long as you’re going to be so close, why don’t you join me and this other parapsychologist. We’re going to spend a month in the Himalayas calling on lamas, swamis, yogis, looking for repeatable psychic and physical phenomena?” And I said, “I’ll be there!” The book starts on the night that I arrive in India, hoping that Tom will be there to meet me, which he was and in the month that followed, I had the honor of sitting at the feet of some of the really great saints of India. I started to ask questions about spirituality. Unfortunately, a lot of the people I was meeting are teaching the way of the monk, which involves a lot of withdrawal and finally when I got to the valley of the saints and I was with Swami Shivananda, who was the great swami in those days, I said, “Your Holiness, I’m very interested in knowing more about spirituality but I am a Westerner and I love my life and I really don’t want to give up a lot of things.” And he said, “Madame, your teacher will be a man named Mahesh. He teaches the way of the householder, which does not require any withdrawal or giving up of anything and his ashram is right across the Ganges River.” So Tom and I took a boat, went across the Ganges, to find that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had just left for California.

So then when I got home, I’d been sending letters to a columnist friend of mine. She wanted to know about maharajas and all that sort of thing. She said the newspapers wouldn’t touch the spiritual part of my letters but she was passing them along to this woman who was dying to meet me. And I said, “Why don’t you ask her for lunch before anybody knows I’m home?” She came for lunch. And guess who stayed at her house? Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He had just gone off to Canada for a week or so. So she talked me into immediately learning TM (Transcendental Meditation) and then they would include me in the course that was going to be given at Catalina just for a group of Canadians that had all been meditating for at least a year. And that’s where I first met Maharishi.

When he walked in that room, it took me one second to know this would be my teacher. Even thought I’m not a member of his organization now because I really don’t like organizations very well, I feel that his knowledge that he passed on to me is the most important knowledge of my life.

That is amazing! And you ended up following him back to India.

Yes. I’ve gone to India almost every year since 1962. But after that course at Catalina, I had an experience in meditation in which I have always felt he gave me a special gift. It was then that I thought I would make the rest of the world know who this man is and to know his knowledge.

But it wasn’t as easy as I thought, because first of all most of my friends thought I’d really lost it. They would say, “You’re not old, you’re not sick. Why do you need such a thing?” But Maharishi’s main message in those days was, would Americans like to learn how to live so that stress never becomes distress? I said, “You’ve got it.” And then for the next seven years I really spent a great deal of time taking him around to different parts of the world. I took him all around South America and opened six foundations for him. And then upon return, there were about 500 people at the airport to meet us and I mention this because so often people will say, “Oh, that’s the guru that the Beatles found.” But he was doing very well already in Germany, in England, in Canada and quite well in the United States before he ever met the Beatles. So I don’t think they deserve all the credit for finding him.

You know, when he came to the United States originally, he came because he thought he could go faster because in India he had to go against so much of the traditional teachings of their Gita, (Thwe Hindu Bible) which he felt were misinterpreted. In India, they’re likely to say, “Well, if life is not so good now, put up with it. It’ll be better next time.” And Maharishi said, “No, that’s a sin against life. While you have a human nervous system, you have to raise your conscious level, because that’s all you take out with you when you die.”

And, speaking of dying, he said in the Western world, they don’t teach you very much about death and it’s a part of life. It’s sort of like giving a course in oceanography and just studying the waves. I was going very slowly. Not many people seemed terribly excited about coming to meet a man from the valley of the saints. In 1962, I must have called 100 people to get 35 to come two nights in a row to hear him. And I think they came because I promised catered desserts!

You got them there any way you could.

That’s right. But it’s been an amazing journey. I’ve gone back to India again and again and I’ve had a wonderful relationship with Sai Baba, who is the number one saint of India. I have great friends in the Buddhist world. I think one of the chapters that I really love in the book is my meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama when he was 26-years-old and we were celebrating the second year anniversary of his escape from Lhasa. We had a wonderful conversation, especially about the Yeti.

What a fascinating life you’ve had, and you’re still having.

I’ve got a lot more to do.

It sounds like you’re very energetic.

Well, I think that meditation has a lot to do with it, correct meditation I might add, because there are a lot of people who are teaching meditation incorrectly. For instance, if you go to a yoga class, you do your asanas and then your yoga teacher has you close your eyes and meditate and she goes on speaking in dulcet tones. That is guided relaxation. That is not meditation. There’s a lot of confusion between contemplation, concentration and meditation. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about meditation.

This has had such a great influence on my family. I have three sons and a daughter. I have never had a problem with one of my four children. I give a lot of that credit to Maharishi’s influence. During the 60s I had sons at Yale, Stanford and UCLA. They never got into the drug scene because they had a technique that was just as cool as smoking marijuana. I feel it’s had a wonderful influence in our lives and I think that I can owe lot of my energy, vitality and happiness to my practice of TM.

We’d have to agree with you on that, Nancy, because we practice TM also. Meditation makes all the difference in the world. It’s a technique that is so easy and simple. Before you know it, you’re just dropping into it.

Traveling a whole lot, it’s so great on a plane, especially if the weather gets scary. I just use my mantra the whole time. You know, it’s interesting. My oldest son was on the crew at UCLA and he would always step aside and meditate for a little while and then he would step into the shell and little by little, every one of the crew members came to me and I taught them meditation. No one broke their record. I don’t know if they even have to this day.

You know, David Lynch, he was taught in March of 1972 and he has never missed a meditation. Isn’t that amazing?

I’ll bet there are a lot of people in the Hollywood scene who do meditation.

I have to tell you one little thing about David, because I love him dearly. I was going through an old address book, the kind where you push a button and this little piece of paper fell out and it was a little note from Helen Luce whose husband used to be the head of Maharishi’s organization for years and she said on this, “If you need somebody who does carpentry and a little painting, there is this young man who lives in a garage around the corner from me and his name is David Lynch.” I’ve shown that to David.

He’s come a long way from carpenter.

Yes, he’s come a long way.

Now since you still travel to India, do you continue to meet the sacred beings and avatars?

You know, I’ve done so much traveling in India, I don’t think I’ve even met an Indian who’s been as many places in India as I have by now.

There was one fabulous saint that I always called on, Tatwala Baba. He was 124-years-old, lived in a cave and he had hair that fell in dreadlocks to the ground. There wasn’t a wrinkle on his whole body. He was tall, powerfully-built man, who wore just a little loin cloth. He lived in a cave about a 20-minute walk from Maharishi’s ashram.

One time I went with my eldest son, who had been a National Geographic photographer for many years and he asked Tatwala Baba if he could bring his tripod and take a picture. Tatwala Baba said fine. So we went, took the picture of him and then we went on to the source of the Ganges, a five-day trip up in the mountains, a really difficult trip. It wasn’t until we got back to Rishikesh, that we found out Tatwala Baba had been shot and killed by a follower who thought he was indestructible. We were horrified! I went to Maharishi’s second man and said, “How is it possible that somebody could shoot a man like Tatwala Baba?” And he said, “Oh Nancy, it happens all the time. Sometimes it’s the only way those boys will ever go.” That’s so India.

Cindy: It is so India. I had the wonderful honor of taking my first trip to India in 2002 and fell in love the minute my foot touched the ground. I knew it was home.

They say India is a country covered with maya. It’s like a film across it and only those who are meant to know India will see below it. So you must have been meant to see it.

Cindy: I saw the magic and the mystical. I was there for 18 wondrous days. I went with a friend and we were lucky to have a man escort us around with a driver. We went on a spiritual pilgrimage. We had such an adventure. India calls to me.

When I get off the plane in India, I feel like I’m home. And yet, every time I’m there now, I think to myself, it’s getting so crowded. The population has tripled since I’ve been going and I think I’m not coming back anymore. Then I go home and one day, a package arrives and the smell of India comes into the house. And there’s the hook bringing me back.

What’s your favorite place in India?

I love the mountains. I love the area around the valley of the saints. I love the Rishikesh area and up above. But I always center in Delhi and I’ve got such great pals in Bombay and also great friends in Calcutta. Strangely enough, I’ve always had a very good time in Calcutta, despite the terrible poverty that one does see. But I think as you get to know more about India, you start understanding about the poverty a little better.

When you came back to the United States, what kind of response did you get?

It’s interesting. A lot of the people who thought I was just being taken advantage of and I was being foolish about it, later on in life when they had a problem, a lot of them have come to me to be taught TM. So it’s very satisfying.

There’s one story that I love to tell and that’s when I took Maharishi around South America and he worked so hard and we had fantastic audiences. Then one day, in Bogota, Columbia, it was el Dia de los Muertos, the day of the dead, and I said, Maharishi, nobody’s coming to see us on this day. Let’s go out and do a little sight-seeing. So we went into the big cathedral that was right across the plaza from the hotel. He’d never been in a Catholic church or I think any Christian church. When we first walked in, the church was filled and we saw these “little houses” on the side. He asked what they were and I explained they were confessionals. And he said, “You mean to say they think that by telling somebody else what they’ve done that there’s no reactions to their actions, no karma?” That he could not understand. Then he saw all the statues of Jesus and you know, they’re very big on stigmata in South America. Lots of thorns and blood. And he looked up and said, “Oh, how terrible! They allow children in here?” So we decided to leave.

One thing I love about India, in the Western world they say, perform good acts and you will know God. In India they say, no, you’re part of God. It’s natural to perform good acts.

You know, the Dalai Lama has said, “It is time to forget about religion. More people have been killed in the name of religion than any other cause. We are one world now. What we need is compassion and spirituality.” And I was so glad that he stated a difference between spirituality and religion. I think he’s one of the few saintly persons I have met that has no ego at all. He still considers himself just an ordinary monk. I’ve seen him many times over the years since 1962 when I had the interview with him. I love him dearly.

One of the reasons that we wanted to put the word love in the book title is because there’s been so much misunderstanding about love in the Western world. You know, love is a learned emotion. A parent only has the obligation to cover, to feed and to clothe their children. They’re not obliged to love their children. Children have the same obligation to their parents. There’s no obligation to love. Maharishi said that the guilt accumulates because we don’t love somebody that we’re taught we have to love. We don’t have to love. He said to forget about guilt because the only part you really have is to make yourself strong enough that when your reaction to your action that causes you to have guilt comes, if you’re strong enough, you handle it well. So guilt is a wasteful emotion.

Very wise. We never had the opportunity to meet the Maharishi, but we get his energy from his videos and from the people who have met him.

Yes and Deepak Chopra, who is a great friend, says to me so often, “Oh Nancy, you’re so lucky to have had all those years with Maharishi in the beginning, when he was so available and so open.” I feel sorry now that the organization has changed because Maharishi said that money should never keep a person from meditating. At one time I was teaching a lot of men who had HIV and AIDS. Someone said I had to charge something, so I charged what we charged 35 years ago. I’ve taught quite a few rock stars. In fact, Sheryl Crow is one that I’m really proud of. When Sheryl came to me, she was feeling old, she had no energy and she was depressed. Then she came back a year later to be checked and brought her father so I could teach him. He said if it hadn’t been for meditation, her singing career would have been over. And I think Paula Abdul would say the same thing. And I taught Madonna years ago, just before she was going to court to face a stalker, who she was very afraid of. Then she went on to Argentina to play the role in Evita.

The first prominent actress who I taught was Greta Garbo. She was a very good friend of mine for the last ten years of her life. I have a chapter on Gayelord Hauser, who was a health food man and his great friend Garbo. I spent a lot of time with them. She used to say to me, “I’m so much less afraid of life now that I know how to meditate.” So I’ve seen wonderful benefits.

Absolutely. And it’s benefited you, obviously, in your life, too. Besides the regimen of morning and afternoon meditation, do you do anything special with diet?

Well, because of my input from Gayelord Hauser and a great friend, Dr. Henry Bieler who wrote Food Is Your Best Medicine, I’ve been very careful about eating well. I don’t eat any junk food and I think that has a lot to do with it. I’m not a vegetarian. I probably eat meat once a week. If I go to Argentina maybe I’ll have a steak every day because they’re so delicious. Luckily I live in California where you have so much fresh produce. We have great choices. But I do think that diet is very important. Maharishi said, “I don’t ask you to give up anything because if you’re doing something that is not right for you, as you meditate you will lose the desire for it.” And I’ve seen that happen, especially with people who smoke.

So meditating has many side benefits.

Oh yes. I know that, as a young person, I was sort of shot out of a gun. When I didn’t know what to do, I went off in all different directions. Now I know enough that when I don’t know what to do, I meditate, I stay quieter and what is meant to be in my life is going to find me. And if I’d been so busy, I never would have heard the door open.

Yes. You needed that stillness. What are some of the miracles that you witnessed with Maharishi?

Well one distinct one was, one night he returned. We picked him up at the airport about 1 AM and went back to Mother Olsen’s, where he stayed and he was talking away. We had told him that there was this follower of his, Millie, who was dying of cancer in this hospital and she was praying that she would get to see Maharishi because he had promised her that he’d be there before she died. We were talking and it’s getting to be 2 AM and I decided to go home. I was about to leave, when all of a sudden, Maharishi stopped talking and he said, “I will be back shortly.” I was standing by the door, I saw him run up the stairs. I’d never seen Maharishi hurry before. He went up the stairs. He was gone maybe 10 minutes and then he came down. He resumed talking and I said goodnight and went home. The next morning Helen called me and said, “Millie died last night.” And I said, “Oh, what a shame. She was praying that she would see Maharishi before she died.” And Helen said, “The exciting thing, Nancy, is she did.” Evidently right at 2 a.m. the nurses had on their report that they saw this person come out of the darkness. They thought it was woman at first and then they realized it was a man with a long beard and long hair, carrying flowers and he went right to the room where Millie was. A nurse came out from behind her station, went to the door, saw this man just make sort of a gesture over Millie’s head. He turned around, smiled at them and left. Now, where we were, if you had been in an airplane, you couldn’t have gotten from that address in Los Angeles out to Santa Monica to the hospital and yet he was there. So he kept his promise.

We’ve heard that avatars and saints can do that sort of thing.

Without question. Sai Baba is just extraordinary the way he materializes things. I do know that teleportation is something that’s absolutely accepted.When I was in India, almost the first day, Tom took me to see this yogi who was lying down and he could send blood to any part of his body. He could make this foot get warm and red and also he was capable of stopping his heart. We found a funny little yogi in Hardwar, which is the second holiest place next to Rishikesh and he was sitting on the top of this temple in the sun. And the other parapsychologist who was Indian, talked and talked to him, asking him to please show us some of his powers, which he was very reticent to share. But in order to get the title of yogi, they have to be able to demonstrate their mastery over nature. So a man brought a glass of water. We put our fingers in the water and then the yogi turned it to ice. We knew we’d seen something that was not possible. He was in the sun. But it happened. I won’t say I believe in everything, but I disbelieve in nothing.

What would you say to people right now who want to explore further, what would be your advice to them?

Meditate. It’s one of the reasons I wrote my book, because I frankly couldn’t recommend a book on meditation. In my book, I want the reader to travel with me, seeing how I was being quite skeptical because I didn’t want to be foolish and be taken. So I kept watching Maharishi and examining everything. There is a part of my book where we call on Lama Anagarika Govinda and I was very impressed when he said that Professor Werner Heisenberg had been there just two weeks before. And I said, “What was he doing here?” And he said, “You know, modern mathematics are coming out with such complicated conclusions, they know that they must learn to work with fourth dimension, which we are very familiar with.” And he was the first one who, when I asked him about learning more about spirituality, he said I must learn to meditate. He was the first one who mentioned about a mantra, a mantra being a sound vibration that stimulates the intuitive powers of the brain and produces life-supportive vibrations. So he was the one who first opened my mind and set me on the right path.

You know, you cannot teach yourself meditation, unfortunately. There is the devotional path which can be followed also. And there are wonderful other teachers, like Sai Baba, Muktananda, Gurumayi, Yogananda, in fact, they’re all the same tradition as Maharishi. Maharishi has very good credentials because his guru – I don’t know if you remember but in India you have four Shankaracharya. They’re like popes. There’s one for the east, the west, the north and the south. Maharishi’s guru was the Shankaracharya for the north. He had a little more than others because within his domain was the sacred Ganges. So Maharishi has very good credentials. I think that’s important because I have encountered a few people who were traveling around. Some of them dressed just like Maharishi, tried to make themselves sound just like Maharishi, but they do not have the same background at all.

I think you have to be a little bit discerning about who you get as a teacher, because you need a teacher. But then, a good teacher picks you out of the mass. They have an old saying in India: you don’t go into the bank and look at the money. You bring the money out and spend it in the market place. The householder’s path, which was almost forgotten, teaches that it’s not important what happens to you within your meditation. You judge it by what happens in your daily life. So we try to get people to be very consistent so they know that a new dimension has come into their lives. Otherwise they’re not going to fight for the prize. One of the things that happens in meditation, eventually you start getting more energy. Then you take on more things to do and then you have less time to meditate.

Right. It’s a double-edge sword. Now for people who don’t understand what TM is, it’s a structured form of meditation.

Transcendental Meditation is a technique. Maharishi would say you don’t have to like it. You don’t have to understand it. You just have to do it. I was in Tibet and they were worried about our getting pulmonary edema. A man said we could get out of there, take oxygen or TM. I said, “Are you a meditator?” And he said, “Yes.” He said it was the best thing in altitude. He said you get your breath so subtle that you can get along just fine with that small amount of oxygen. So it has a practical side, also. And I think it’s the Number One treatment for high blood pressure in England today.

And it’s a simple procedure. Twenty minutes morning and evening.

Maharishi even said 15 minutes is enough. So many people are meditating now that we don’t have to meditate as long. Whatever works for you. It pays off in the long run. I think, also, if you’re in terrible traffic or scared on a plane, you just return to your mantra and it’s very soothing. Remember, the goal of meditation is to be in the eye of the storm with it all around you and you are calmly in the middle.

Yes. That’s how you feel. And it brings great clarity, too.

That’s right.

Once you come out, you’re really sharp and you’re focused. Answers come to you that were eluding you before, that’s what we’ve found.

I think you’re the first interviewers I’ve had who were also TM’ers! That’s great!

We like that!

It’s been great fun for me.

We so appreciate your taking the time to be with us, Nancy. The name of the book is All You Need is Love: An Eyewitness Account of When Spirituality Spread From the East to the West, published by Jodere Group. We feel very blessed to have had you share your experiences with us.

If you had a last pearl of wisdom to leave with us, what would that be?

I’d just like to say Jai Gurudev to everybody.

Editors note: Jai Gurudev means, “Let the greatness, biggest in me win over the small little chattering mind.”

Thank you so much.