Author: Mandala

In the beautiful mountains of Idaho, USA, is a remote town of just 500 people. This is where I live. The opportunity to physically be with a sangha is very rare for me, and while I deeply appreciate that I can connect in other ways with our Himalayan Tradition, at times I long for a more personal interaction.

Last year, I was delighted to attend my first structured Himalayan Tradition seven-day silence retreat with The Meditation Center in Minnesota. If you have experienced a retreat like this, you may relate when I say that I came away with an unbound feeling of connection: the mind in silence closing the gaps around separateness, and creating a ball of cohesive awareness around us all. The energetic vibrations that we as a group produced was palpable, and I knew at the retreat’s end, I would be signing up to come to this year’s silence retreat, without question.

When I received the announcement for AHYMSIN’s Sangha of the Americas, offering ten days of various activities, including presentations from our Himalayan Tradition senior leaders as well as five days of silence, I signed up immediately, knowing that this year, too, I could receive that same feeling of connection.

I started reading about the event and listening to our Himalayan yoga meditation leaders and teachers, and I became curious about why this was being called “Sangha of the Americas.” What is a sangha? How do I offer my sense of spiritual connection to others? I read what Swami Veda said about sangha being a spiritually oriented community: a group working toward stabilizing the spiritual mind field. I hear him asking us the question, “How can we, as a group, help the ‘greater family’ in a spiritual sense?” He says this will evolve if we can succeed in developing a “sentiment of sangha.” It was then I changed my focus–not about coming to the retreat, no, but about how I wanted to experience this time at Sangha of the Americas with our AHYMSIN family.

And so, to embrace the sentiment of sangha, as Swamiji suggests, I will attend this event, not asking what I can receive from this event, (though with the remarkable presenters, musical performances, workshops, and the experience of silence, one can’t help but receive numerous riches!), but this time, in the light of sangha, I am asking, “How can I serve? How can I offer the sentiment of sangha to our AHYMSIN family, and even greater than that, to our world?”

I offer my support to those who plan the event, who speak at the event, to those who attend, to those who can’t attend. I offer my prayers of connectedness. I offer the movement of vibration to envelop us all in love and compassion, in grace and knowing. I offer my meditations to all, that we might not forget who we truly are and how strong we are when we come together as one, as a sangha.

I offer my physical presence at the Sangha of the Americas, to honor our spiritual community. May we all draw strength and connection from each other to lift our troubled world. If my attendance at this inspired event can create some good, then I am all in, not for what I can receive, but for what I can give. My time, my presence, my donations… I offer it all, with sincere service and gratitude for the gift that meditation has given me.

May we all come together at the Sangha of the Americas, in whatever capacity we can, to uplift and support each other in our like-mindedness, making the positive energetic wave of love that is the Himalayan Tradition felt where it is needed in our world. Let us serve that bounty to others. Many hands make light work.

May all beings awaken further. May our hearts soften. I offer this in service to the Guru. Om.

Editor’s Note:

Location: St. Olaf College, 1520 St Olaf Ave, Northfield, MN 55057 & Virtual

Date and time: Thu, Jul 25, 2024 5:00 PM – Sat, Aug 3, 2024 5:00 PM CT

Registration Link: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/dukr9ym

Contact: info@himalayanyogatradition.com

For more information about the event: https://www.ahymsin.org/event/ahymsin-sangha-of-the-americas/

“Childhood is the best of all periods in life, and it never returns. Children are the most beautiful flowers; they can make our society bloom. Without children, no nation can survive. We need the help of children who have been loved, well cared for, and wisely educated, if we really want to improve society.
There is no better foundation for a happy life than a happy childhood”  –  Swami Rama

When I stop and think about the reason I started to share the practice of yoga with children and adolescents, I feel Swami Rama’s words resonate within me and it comes to my mind the light in Swami Veda’s eyes when, in La Verna in June 2012, he announced the Children Retreat, at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama Ashram, inviting the entire Ahymsin family to participate.
In the same way, it arises spontaneously the memory of the experience I made in 2014 during the Children Retreat at the Ashram, again at the presence of our beloved Swami Veda. The image of Swami Veda with children is like a lighthouse that illuminates and guides the path: we don’t teach what we know, but we share what we are.

Swami Rama and Swami Veda Bharati have always encouraged children and adolescents to approach yoga from an early age, future generations in which it is essential to focus, “planting” in them some small seeds that may, with time and care, grow and blossom.
Sharing these teachings, the Himalayan Yoga Institute of Florence has been participating for many years in yoga projects in primary and secondary schools, in collaboration with the Municipality of Florence and the municipalities of other cities.
One of the most known projects is “Tuttinsieme per l’integrazione” of the Municipality of Florence, dedicated to classes where there are kids and adolescents with special needs.

It is difficult to share, through words, the experience lived during the years within this path: the eyes and the joy of kids and adoloscents, with and without special needs, in finally feeling accepted and part of a group without perceiving differences in comparison to their companions, cannot be told, but can only be imagined! And this allows us to feel the true strength and power of yoga, a tool for overcoming all those barriers that our minds often create: a ‘universal language’ that everyone can understand and that allows us to get in touch with others, understanding that we are all unique and unrepeatable.

Through simple lessons based on the eight steps of ashtanga yoga, where students experience an activity that integrates body-breath-mind, the depth of the teachings of the Himalayan Tradition is expressed in all its fullness and colours.
Yoga educates, transforms, creates unity, develops self-confidence, awareness and self-discipline; facilitates intercultural understanding, individual and collective peace; enables the acceptance of all forms of diversity; develops a sense of belonging to a group; encourages inclusion and active participation of children and adolescents with special needs; proposes relationships models, in the class and in the society, based on ethical principles of non-violence, respect and tolerance; develops self-esteem, strengthens talents, potential and qualities and, finally, creates joy.

The experience of practicing yoga with children/adolescents is a wonderful ‘mirror’, because they have so much to teach to adults and they invite us to deeply reflect on the quality of the future we would like to offer them. At the same time, it is a great responsibility: the delicate age and the emotional fragility, children and adolescents experience, make us feel how these young generations are increasingly searching for values and reference points that may give them an anchor. The competitive society we live in and the pandemic have increased feelings of unease, anxiety and stress in the younger generations. We strongly feel the importance of sharing and transmitting yoga as a tool to offer children and adolescents the opportunity to assimilate a practice that may accompany and support them in their growth, to build a personal philosophy of life.

And again, the remembrance of Swami Veda appears, like a lighthouse that illuminates and guides us: we don’t teach what we know, but we share what we are.

“Let peace prevail in the minds of all those who have been educated in the art of becoming free from conflict.”  –  Swami Veda

In loving gratitude,
Ilaria

It’s not every day that one meets a teacher like Professor Christopher Chapple. He is the Founder of the world-class Yoga Studies Program at Loyola-Marymount University, in Los Angeles. (LMU). I was fortunate to meet him many years ago while assisting Swami Veda on a couple of visits he made to Los Angeles. Years later, after consulting with Dr. Chapple, I enrolled in, and completed, LMU’s Certificate program in Yoga Philosophy and found the program to be phenomenal. I especially loved the weekly Sanskrit class with Professor Chapple in which we worked as a class to translate ancient Sanskrit texts.

Over the years, I’ve come to have the greatest respect for Dr. Chapple, not only is he a distinguished academic (he is the Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at LMU, the Founder of  LMU’s respected Yoga Studies Program, and the Director of LMU’s Master of Arts in Yoga Studies program), but also a true disciple of Yoga who strives to embody his Gurudevi’s teachings. I’ve have found him to be brilliant, humble, kind and extremely approachable and generous.

In the years since completing the Certificate Program, I’ve worked with Dr. Chapple to bring programs to LMU to familiarize their students with the Himalayan Tradition. We’ve now held several such programs, with teachers including Stoma, Swami Radha, Sanjay Shastri, and myself.

This year, Professor Chapple contacted me with a request for another program, and Swami Ritavan asked me to put it together. So I had the joyous opportunity to work with Dr. Chapple and his delightful staff and teachers to design it.

The two-day meditation retreat occurred over the weekend of January 27^th and 28, 2024, at the LMU Center for Prayer and Peace. There is a small plaza just outside where one can view the Pacific Ocean in the distance. It was an exquisite environment for a meditation retreat. Some folks sat on the floor and others on chairs. Dr. Chapple and Zoe Slatoff, who teaches Sanskrit at LMU, offered prayers and mantras to get us started in the mornings.

The retreat provided basic practices that would enable attendees to build their own personal daily yoga-meditation practices, and covered joints and glands practices, sitting, breathing, relaxation, mantra and meditation, and contemplative walking (with a view of the Pacific ocean), spiced with philosophy and stories from my experience in the Tradition. About two dozen people attended over the two days, sometimes more and sometimes less. The participants were very attentive and interested.

I was especially moved when Zoe Slatoff led the group in chanting mantras and when Professor Chapple opened the Sunday morning session by placing us in time and space as one might do at the beginning of a Puja. He even alluded to the indigenous people who lived in the area before America was born.

It was a beautiful weekend, and much was covered. Professor Chapple later wrote to me saying people were very enthusiastic about what they had learned.

Embarking on the sacred mission of love, serve, and remember, our Ashram has been trying to bring transformative changes to the lives of many for more than two decades through its diverse charitable endeavours. We are thrilled to share with our spiritual family a brief overview of some of the activities we have undertaken.

Our initiatives include:

1. Social welfare projects
2. Women empowerment project
3. Sadhu seva project
4. Covid welfare project
5. Supporting Sanskrit education
6. Education welfare project for economically weaker sections
7. Infrastructure development of schools
8. Free distribution of books and educational materials
9. Adolescent resource centre (ARC)
10. Free yoga meditation sessions in schools
11. Animal welfare
12. Support to Rural Development Institute (RDI), HIHT, Dehradun
13. Support to KHEL charities, Dehradun
14. Supporting Nava Prabhat Public Charitable Trust, Odisha

Our social welfare project extended a helping hand and financial aid to those facing adversity, transforming the lives of many who were navigating through financial hardships. Our efforts were not limited to financial support only; we also distributed essential items like blankets, quilts, mattresses, furniture, and electrical home appliances to more than 400 families to provide comfort and warmth to the marginalized during severe winter months. Our medical care project provided financial support to many underprivileged families for their critical care.

We created a beautiful space for fitness and fun for families in our local community by building a small public park that is also equipped with some exercise machines. We provided critical support to our nearby local community of 40 families whose homes were flooded during the heavy monsoons this year, offering them with basic sustenance materials and a supply of groceries.

In our efforts to support rural women on their journey towards financial independence, we were able to train 68 women at our various sewing centers. This opened new avenues of income generation through tailoring. We also encouraged and trained a community of women in a rural area in Dehradun to grow organic turmeric, and helped them in selling their cultivation of about 200 Kg of organic turmeric.

In line with Swami Rama’s instructions, we continue our support for the Sadhus in Gangotri as well as in other areas by providing them with necessary and required grocery items, vegetables, woolens, heaters, water heaters, solar lights, medicines, quilts, shoes and everything else they might need to survive the harsh winters in the Himalayas.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns where millions suffered across the globe, we offered essential grocery items to more than 1000 families in Rishikesh who lost their livelihood. We also offered our support to more than 500 front line workers by offering them 5000 N-95 masks and hand sanitizers. We also extended financial aid to those families who lost their
only earing member and to those children who were unfortunately orphaned because of the pandemic.

As we know, our beloved Swami Veda Bharati loved the Sanskrit language dearly, we are doing our small bit to preserve this ancient language in the changing times. We have supported four Sanskrit schools by helping them develop their infrastructure (hostel buildings, classrooms, furniture etc.), by providing books and uniforms to the stude

nts, and by also sponsoring teachers’ dakshina. More than 300+ students studying at these schools have been benefited by these efforts.

We also have an educational welfare project to help students from economically weaker sections in Rishikesh and nearby ar

eas. In addition to supporting their school fees, we also provide resources tailored to meet their educational needs including books, notebooks, stationary, uniforms, yoga mats, etc. This project has benefited more than 800+ students in 20 schools across various districts of Uttarakhand.

In addition, 1500+ students have undergone transformative training through our Adolescent resource centre (ARC), which sensitises them about physical and emotional changes that they are going through. This includes sharing age-sensitive and culturally appropriate knowledge regarding menstrual hygiene, personal hygiene, gender roles, physical and psychological well-being, etc. They also receive personality development, effective communication, life skills, and time management training. All the students under the ARC training also learn yoga meditation within the Himalayan Tradition, including joints & glands exercises, hatha yoga, diaphragmatic breathing, relaxation, and meditation.

We are happy to share that apart from taking care of the beautiful cows in our gaushala, we have also extended support towards other organizations who are dedicated to taking care of stray animals, including sick, abandones cows and dogs. One of them houses more than 250 abandoned, sick, paralyzed and old dogs, including 25 receiving intensive care in their dedicated Special Care Unit.

In addition to our internal charity projects, we have also extended financial aid to our sister charitable organizations including the Rural Development Institute at HIHT, KHEL Charities and Nava Prabhat ashram in supporting their mission to serve the society.

In our journey of selfless service, we seek the guidance of our Guru and lineage, expressing heartfelt gratitude to our benevolent family members whose generous donations have been a constant source of support.