Mukunda’s parents were deeply devoted to Lahiri Mahasaya. They always kept a beautiful picture of Lahiri on a small altar in their home. Many times Mukunda could be found meditating in front of the altar with his mother. He learned to love Lahiri more and more as the years passed. Often, during his meditations Lahiri’s picture would change from a photograph to a living form and sit before the young Mukunda. However when he would try to reach out and touch the master’s feet, the vision would return to being a photograph again.
When Mukunda was eight years old, he became very ill. He was so sick that he couldn’t get up from bed. The doctors could do nothing and everyone was afraid that he might not live. Mukunda’s mother was very scared, but she had great faith in her guru. She motioned to the picture of Lahiri that hung on the wall above Mukunda’s bed. “Bow to him mentally!” She knew that Mukunda was too weak to do it physically. “If you really show your devotion and inwardly kneel before him, your life will be spared!”
Healing Light from Lahiri Mahasaya
As Mukunda gazed at the photograph a bright light came out of the picture and filled his whole body as well as the entire room. Instantly he was healed. His illness was gone and his strength returned. Yogananda knelt to touch his mother’s feet to thank her for her wondrous faith in her guru. Gyan Prabha repeatedly pressed her head against the little picture of Lahiri saying, “O omnipresent master, I thank thee that thou hath healed my son!” Mukunda realized that his mother had also seen that beautiful healing light that had come out of the photograph. Mukunda loved that photograph which had been given to his father by Lahiri himself.
It’s been months since I’ve written. Life is full to overflowing, and every day is a new challenge just to keep up. I’m sure that sounds familiar – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel busy and pressed for time. I have found blessings in busyness though.
More than any other time in my life, I feel the horizons of my experience keep stretching me beyond the tightly held limitations I define myself by.
Teaching at the Living Wisdom School has brought 9 children into my life and this week we round up to 10, with a visiting 4th grader. All of those students have parents and many have siblings in the school. There are also 11 other staff members and helpers I work with. Once a month I take part in an Education For Life teacher training and join more than a dozen other educators and parents in classes. Just the act of taking on this job has enlarged my circle of contacts and responsibility enormously.
My imaginary circle had to grow as I experienced health issues with my mother and my husband. My world had to take in doctors, nurses, other caregivers and all the concerned loved ones I was in touch with.
My children are growing and I have to expand my circle to include all their friends and activities. I take the light rail transit to work and I expand my circle to include hundreds of people I cross paths with each day. I don’t even speak to most of them, but I reach out and feel my circle wrapping around each person as they get on or off the train.
It slowly occurred to me that I don’t feel “stretched thin” or “stretched to the breaking point”, like a piece of bread dough, although it seemed as if I should. It felt as if God were just asking me to get bigger. Every time that imaginary circle settles into one size, there is a need to expand. Then there is a feeling of opening and including, without tension or stress. God just makes me bigger.
I thought about the connection I feel with all of my Ananda spiritual family. I know people in this family all over the world. I am in contact with many hundreds, through email, letters, and through the Ananda Portland center. There are thousands of others I include by association – all of you reading this, as well. There is no stress to include them all in my circle, only joy and gratitude.
Then I remembered Yogananda’s description of God as being “center everywhere, circumference nowhere”. My imaginary circle evaporated and I realized it was my center connecting with all those other centers. God was showing me that circumference is nowhere – it’s an illusion that we end somewhere and others begin. That’s why I feel bigger – because spirit is endless.
This must be a little taste of what Swami Kriyananda and other saints feel – no limitations, no circumference, only center everywhere and in everyone. Read what Swami Kriyananda says about relating to life at the center in the post from April 1, 2008.
Today has been the first day I have had a couple hours at the computer, for weeks. My little desk is at the end of the kitchen, not far from activities of four other people in the house. I have three guinea pigs at my feet, and the interruptions have been continuous, as the rest of the family comes into the kitchen for one reason or another. Tomorrow is Monday and another busy week begins. I’m sure God will show me that I’m not yet big enough.
As you can tell from Ananda’s homepage, we had a wonderful Winter Renewal Week, with Divine Mother’s added gift of snow. It began snowing Monday morning, and I was amazed to see how many people braved the weather to come to the classes.
On Wednesday evening, it snowed about 4 or 5 inches within an hour, and I was able to make it to the Expanding Light that evening on the back of a pick up truck, gazing upward at the snow covered trees - it was simply magical. We led an Ananda Music Sing-along evening with 30-40 people, going tremendously deep into the powerful vibrations of the music.
On Thursday morning we were treated to a stunningly clear morning, and Madhavi and I were able to take these few pictures of the sun and snow.
I could feel the effects of being surrounded by devotees going deeper in God all week, and was especially thrilled to be able to wake up earlier than normal to meditate, even before Caitlin awoke!
Our Concert of Divine Love was on Saturday evening, and the Expanding Light temple was filled to capacity. It was a very special concert filled with devotional music.
Here is a recording of What Is Love?, and you can listen to more tracks on Ananda’s website.
Have you ever clicked on “Daily Inspiration” on the home page of www.ananda.org? If you have, you’ll have seen a saying taken from the book Do It Now! (Do It Well, as of August 2009), probably with a related talk by Swami Kriyananda. The sayings are short, inspiring, and extremely practical.
I suppose there’s some cosmic law at work here, but I’ve noticed that the more energetically I apply the sayings to my life, the more they are appropriate to my daily circumstances. Another way of putting this is: when I apply them, they apply to me.
This comes and goes in phases. At least once or twice, a day’s saying has been shockingly apropos. A perfect example is the following story, which occurred during one of those times when the sayings are consistently applicable to my daily life.
Some months ago, a choice had to be made regarding one of Ananda’s web sites. The outcome was ultimately out of my hands, but it still seemed very important to me. The decision would happen during a Friday morning meeting, and I was attached to a particular option. (That attachment was blinding me to the full range of possibilities.)
The morning of the meeting, I woke up, and, as is my habit, read the day’s saying from Do It Now!.
It said:
“May 21. Whenever it is convenient, turn the palms of your hands upward. You’ll develop attitudes of relaxation and acceptance.”
“Uh-oh,” I thought.
During the meeting, I expressed my thoughts, and others expressed theirs. By the end, the right decision had been made… but not the one I originally wanted.
The quote from the morning, however, was very helpful. I kept my palms upraised when I could think to do so. It was such a small thing – the least I could do – but it was a conscious decision to move in the right direction and let go of attachment. As I did so, I could almost feel God’s blessing, working through that tiny action to help keep my mind and heart open.
In time – even in those moments – everything turned out for the best. The option we chose, together, has proven to be a good one. It was painful, but now I can only look back and feel gratitude for spiritual growth.
That was God’s grace. That is His love. Through my small steps in the right direction, He was able to help me, in time, to break my attachment, and move onward into a place of peace.
In the ancient land of India, in the year 1893, Bhagabati Charan Gosh and Gyan Prabha Gosh had a son they named Mukunda. This divine child would grow up to be the great master Paramhansa Yogananda.
Lahiri’s Blessing
Mukunda’s mother was a very saintly woman. She knew he was a great soul even when he was still very young. When Mukunda was still but a babe, she carried him to see her guru Lahiri Mahasaya. While she held little Mukunda in her arms, she prayed silently that Lahiri notice her, even though she could hardly see him from behind the throng of disciples that gathered around the master. Lahiri sat rapt in deep meditation. She prayed with deep, divine love that he would give her child a spiritual blessing. When she opened her eyes Lahiri Mahasaya had come out of his meditation and motioned for her to come forward. She knelt to touch her guru’s feet to show her love and respect. Lahiri took her baby on his lap, and placed his hand on the baby’s forehead to bless him. He then said, “Little mother, thy son will be a yogi. As a spiritual engine he will carry many souls to God’s kingdom.” Gyan Prabha Gosh was overjoyed that her great guru had answered her secret prayer.
Download the Lahiri’s Blessing story and picture in PDF format (1.62 MB).
A group of us at Ananda Village are exploring technologies involved in giving the Ananda Sangha, Expanding Light Retreat and Crystal Clarity Publishers an ability to offer online courses for distance learning.
As the economic downturn continues and people’s travel budgets are decreasing, we are looking into ways of bringing Yogananda’s teachings closer to people, so that truth-seeking students can attend classes inexpensively in the comfort of their own homes and at the time of their choosing. This also simplifies the logistics of hosting people, providing accommodations, meals, etc. However, the distance education model has its own challenges.
To begin with, there are a number of different models for providing distance education. Real-time versus on-demand (similar to broadcast TV vs video-on-demand), video vs audio-only, scheduled classes vs self-paced learning, etc. As we look at various combinations of these models, we are evaluating the technologies that will enable us to make this initiative a reality.
One of the techologies we are looking at is an open-source software called Moodle. Moodle looks very promising for our needs as an on-line course development and delivery tool.
As we embark on this new chapter of Ananda’s outreach, we sincerely ask for your prayers, as well as for your support. If you are a person (or know of someone) who has experience in this type of teaching and especially experience with Moodle, and who would like to serve Ananda’s work in this manner, we’d love to hear from you. We need all the help we can get to get this project launched in the shortest time possible.
My Mother and Father always made a point to keep Paramhansa Yogananda as part of my life. Some of my earliest memories are hearing stories of his life when they would paraphrase stories from the Autobiography of a Yogi. I also remember informally acting out several scenes from his life when my Mother did an Ananda preschool in our home.
It was important to my parents also that I not have a narrow view of God. I remember beautiful children’s books of the Bible, and of Buddha. Also dear to my heart were the stories of Krishna, the Ramayana, Saint Francis, and other saints of east and west. I learned that throughout all time there have been sincere seekers of God and truth. God was to be seen as something bigger than just our own family and also greater than any one religion. I learned that God has come to this earth in many different forms to help us out of delusion. And so I came to see God as a part of life, one and inseparable.
To this day, however, there remains little in the way of resources to help parents share the life of Yogananda with their children. My parents had worked hard to come up with ways to make him come alive for me. For years my Mother had hoped to create a children’s book of Yogananda’s life, but never had the time to take the project on. We had talked about it in the past, but I now felt inspired to do the writing myself. Chitra Sudhakaran, a friend of mine, and a talented art student at the Ananda Institute of Alternative Living, heard about the project and was inspired to create illustrations for the stories. We wanted to make the dream a reality. The goal was to make a beautiful and magnetic resource for inspiring children.
I have now completed writing a handful of stories drawn from the Autobiography of a Yogi. While I try to simplify the writing for children, I strive always to keep the beauty and inspiration of Master’s own writing. It has been a wonderful exercise in attunement for me.
Chitra and I at the Ananda Meditation Retreat
Chitra has now completed several drawings for this project. They are quite well done and I think she captures the beauty and devotion of the different scenes.
So in the coming weeks I will begin posting the short stories of Yogananda’s life along with the drawings. We may at some point put them together in a book, but I wanted to make them available to share with your children now. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Master said, “To those who think me near, I will be near.” I hope that through this project more children will think him near and feel his presence in their hearts.
