A major city public school system and a Hollywood director’s foundation must pay millions of dollars for requiring public school students to engage in Transcendental Meditation, at times against their religious objections, a judge has ordered.

The Chicago Board of Education and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace must pay $2.6 million after students of multiple religious backgrounds — including a Christian and a Muslim — were forced to take part in a meditation ceremony that participants say invoked Hindu deities.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly, a Clinton appointee, ordered that the class action settlement be distributed among 773 former Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students in his May 7 ruling.

CPS signed a $170,000 contract for the Lynch Foundation “to provide Quiet Time Program services” to Daniel Hale Williams Prep School of Medicine and Gage Park High School from March 1 through June 30, 2018. The contract states the program would consist of “two restful 15-minute periods providing a counterbalance to the hyper-stimulating tension of urban culture. The key component of Quiet Time is an evidenced-based stress reduction and cognitive development technique known as Transcendental Meditation® (TM).”

The lead plaintiff, 22-year-old Kaya Hudgins, said her school forced her to take part in an innocuously titled classroom exercise called “Quiet Time” when she was 16. But, she said, the avowedly secular relaxation session actually consisted of a Hindu ‘Puja’ worship ceremony, complete with religious paraphernalia and the chanting of mantras containing the names of Hindu gods.

“I was just a teenager when I was pressured into a program I didn’t understand and wasn’t allowed to question,” Hudgins told The Washington Stand. “No student should ever be forced into a religious practice against their will — especially not in a public school. This settlement is a step toward accountability and a reminder that our constitutional rights don’t stop at the classroom door.”

“If youth choose not to meditate, they are free to select another quiet activity, such as sustained silent reading, resting or quiet sitting,” the terms specified. 

But Hudgins, who at the time was a practicing Muslim, said school officials shot down her request to pray to her own deity. “As a Muslim, I was supposed to pray five times a day,” she said. “Although the school made me take time away from class to practice in Transcendental Meditation, it would not allow me to take time away from class for those five daily prayers.”

Her case became a class action lawsuit open to every single student in the troubled Chicago Public Schools system herded into the “Quiet Time” program from Fall 2015 through Spring 2019, and who turned 18 on or after January 13, 2021.

“This settlement vindicates the concerns of former students and parents that the initiation ceremony and daily meditation regime were effectively demonic invocation and thus violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution,” attorney John Mauck, of Mauck & Bauer, a Chicago-based firm that has taken numerous religious liberty cases, who represented the student class in court, told The Washington Stand. “We hope this settlement will deter those who exploit young people and that it will encourage the Chicago Board of Education to be wary of harming students by allowing wolves to prey on the sheep they are obligated to protect.”

The Illinois Circuit Court previously awarded $150,000 in legal fees to Mariyah Green, a Christian also represented by Mauck & Baker, in October 2023 after Chicago Public Schools forced her to take part in the “Quiet Time” exercise.

David Lynch, the director of such works as the violent and hypersexualized movie “Blue Velvet” and the surrealist TV series “Twin Peaks,” was raised Presbyterian but abandoned the Christian faith and took up Transcendental Meditation. He passed away January 16.

‘Mindfulness’: New Age, Hindu, Harmful, Forms of Equity?

Schools have long promoted the use of so-called “mindfulness techniques” under the guise of stress reduction and relaxation. Although these methods are said to be secular, Transcendental Meditation is “wholly and unequivocally Hindu, but never presented as such, at least not in the mainstream,” according to the Hindu American Foundation.

Evidence also calls into question their efficacy for their putative purpose. When tested, so-called “mindfulness” strategies have consumed precious instruction time while producing minimal or negative mental health results for young people. The use of mindfulness techniques “resulted in worse scores on risk of depression and well-being in students at risk of mental health problems,” according to the report of the MY Resilience In ADolescence (MYRIAD) study — which observed more than 28,000 students and 650 teachers in 100 U.K. schools over eight years — in the Evidence Based Mental Health journal.

The Biden-Harris administration encouraged public schools to carry out non-Christian religious practices such as Transcendental Meditation as a way to promote equity.

A report promulgated by the Biden-Harris administration in December 2023 titled “Promoting Mental Health and Well-Being in Schools” states, “Classroom-based mindfulness education” should include “[e]xperiential practice of mindful breathing, meditation, and mindful movement, such as yoga,” as well as holding class “discussion[s] about how to practice mindfulness in everyday situations.”

All six strategies contained in the report, including its call to “Promote Mindfulness,” contain a “Focus on Equity.”

Despite President Donald Trump’s decision to uproot equity and DEI programs from the federal government and his overhaul of the executive branch since returning to office on January 20, this Biden-era meditation and equity advisory remains on the CDC website as of this writing.