Tag: Blessings

Blessings for Lohri and Sankranti

May this festival enlighten your life with the warmth of glory, good health, and happiness. Wishing you all a very happy and prosperous Sankranti with the fire of knowledge enkindled in your heart. Let the Lohri bonfire light up the darkness of selfishness and unbridled desire to bring wisdom, peace, and happiness to your lives. May the fire of ambition you light within fill your life with warmth and brightness of love.

We gather as a family around the altar of the meditative-heart with each Full Moon Meditation, with repentance and gratitude. We acknowledge unfulfilled desires that penetrate into each day affecting our mind’s melody and emotional tone. Let us release, relax, and let-go for the misery the world contains has come from wanting pleasure for oneself alone.

So, let us begin this New Year together, as sadhakas, initiates, members of the sangha with a commitment.  Let us resolve that this celebration of renewal will enlighten a new day of generosity and giving. Let us realize that in santosha, contentment, we embrace fully the value and purpose of life. May each day reveal all the joy the world contains comes through wishing happiness for others through love, service, and selfless actions.

Let us enkindle aparigraha, non-attachment, to understand the unique value and purpose of our life of sadhana on this path of enlightenment. For as Gurudev has said, “Wisdom or knowledge does not nullify actions, only their binding power. Wisdom and knowledge purify the way of life and action.” May our minds be purified with this sankalpa and attain a state of tranquility. May our attainments become selfless and accepted as Mother’s Grace with appreciation and devotion.

Let this festival brighten your life with warmth, happiness, health, and love. Stay safe and may Divine Love burn brightly in your heart forever.

Yours in service of the Lineage,
srb

Editor’s Note:

13 & 14 January mark as the beginning of the harvesting season in India. As the winter season ends and spring begins, the harvest festivals are celebrated all over India and are known by various names such as – Lohri, Makar Sankranti, Pongal, Bhogali Bihu, Uttarayan, and Paush Parva. This festival is a dedication to the deity Surya (the Sun God) and celebrates our relationship with nature. Thus, it is also celebrated as the beginning of the New Year because the Sun begins to move northwards in the Indian calendar on this date. Celebrations include many pujas, and sharing of gifts, particularly of one’s harvest, with one’s family, neighbours, and friends around a bonfire at night.

Dear AHYMSIN Family,

Blessings of the Lineage to you all. As we are drawn together in this celebration of illumination let us bring the light of the hearts, our compassion, to all those who have experienced hardships, trauma, and misery.

Let the fruits of our meditations be offered: may their suffering be alleviated.
And as to yourselves say, Thy will be done and not mine.

Having thus unburdened yourself of all the claims of ego, remain a dweller of the heart-center, maintaining this awareness through breath and mantram.

I have thought about this extensively and tonight I’d like to share the two words that have come to mind: “resilience and silence”. And I call this resilience and silence returning to the single “I”. For when you drop the “I” of ego, from the “silence” of resilience, you find that you are in silence. In that single presence.

For all of us around the globe, this year has been truly a stress test of resilience and returning again and again to silence.

As we have removed the “I” of ego in resilience, we have become aware of our ability to change and flow with that change.

And as meditators, we have valued the quiet moments and have returned to silence, reminded of the fullness of re-silencing again and again throughout the day. This resilience and re-silence are two sides of the coin of personality and transformation.

Let our meditations be a pause in the constant push and go with the flow of your breath. Let your meditations be a practice resilience and return to the single “I” of silence in stillness, in the fullness of your being.

Om, Shanti, srb

[“The AHYMSIN Board meeting always begins with an offering to the Guru and blessings by Swami Ritavan. Blessings, shared below, extends beyond the meeting, embracing the entire Sangha.” – Rajini Prakash]

ॐ अखण्डमण्डलाकारं व्याप्तं येन चराचरम्।
तत्पदं दर्शितं येन तस्मै श्रीगुरवे नमः॥

सौम्या सौम्यतराशेष सौम्येभ्यस्त्वतिसुन्दरी ।
परापराणां परमा त्वमेव परमेश्वरी ॥
तारे तुत्तारे तुरे स्वाहा ॥

Om Akhaṇḍa-maṇḍalākāram vyāptam yena carācaram
Tat padam darśitam yena, tasmai śrī gurave namah.

Saumyā saumyātarāśeṣā saumyebhyas tvati sundari,
parāparāṇāṁ paramā tvameva parameshvarī.
tāre, tut tāre ture, swāhā.

Namaste, greetings to all.

As we gather in the spirit of Guru’s grace, light of knowledge, and with aspirations for kindness (amity), compassion (karuna), what has been identified as a global pandemic, along with the syndromes of conflict, fear, anger, misery, and the attentive conditions of loss, loss of loved ones, of home, job, livelihood, self-respect and dignity, our task, through our sadhana in applied spirituality, is greater understanding, not only of what is right with the world but how the beauty of that which is right can be applied to beautify in what has become “ugly” in so many eyes, in all those ways mentioned.

We recall those guides and guiding principles of our past and present, and emulating them to forge a strong and steady path to the future. The future of AHYMSIN and of the entire world. Remember, through our applied sadhana, our disciplined mind is trained to rest in this most natural state of beauty, calm and free of conflict. It is the nature of our personality that animates forces to maintain calm, peaceful, harmonious and conflict-free minds in those around us in ever-expanding circles of influence.

Our task today, and each and every day, is to remain aware of that purity as our natural state of personality, and at the same time, remain aware of our acts, emotions, sentiments, words, and expressions of our personality. Through self-observation, through neutrality, through awareness, through conscious choice, through identification with the strong, the pure, the beauty-that is the divine within and through a certain restraint, we become a conqueror. Together as AHYMSIN, we reach-for and reach the promised nature of wisdom, freedom and liberation as One for All.

Editor’s Note:

This message has also been published in the September 2020 edition of the AHYMSIN newsletter.