I used a thesaurus tonight to try to come up with some new words I could use to describe the Ananda LA event held at Church of the Recessional at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California. I would normally use the words wonderful, or beautiful or amazing—all of which would be fitting. The thesaurus suggested words like fantastic or awesome and even out of this world, but sublime is the one that seemed to be the best. The setting, the music, the talk given by Swami Kriyananda was sublime. I have several photos to share with you at the end of this post.
I completely enjoyed the architecture and the lighting, the choir in their jeweltoned outfits looked dramatic underneath the soaring arch of the church. Visually Swamiji looked small when compared to the large space and the hundreds of people in the audience but gave a talk that was very powerful and insightful.
He began by singing Love is a Magician in a voice that was clear and strong. He then sat a read chapter 38, from The New Path relating Yognananda’s final days. I am sure I was not the only one that cried. This talk is already on ananda.org. I am sure you will love it. The talk itself is divided into two parts: the talk and then a question answer session that was almost an hour long.
At the end out in the court yard he blessed individually the long line of people wanting to meet or greet him. It was a sweet ending to a special weekend.
Dave and I had to rush back to where we were staying so we could pack up and head to the airport for our flight home. I was very sad to leave. But, today I received a very special gift from Divine Mother. For a long time I have had a desire for my mother to meet Swami Kriyananda. She is not on this path but seems to always enjoy hearing about what I do and what is going on at Ananda and with Swamiji. Today we went on an outing that included lunch at the Roseville Whole Foods Store. As we sat outside in the warm son Devi came up to touch my shoulder and there with her was Jyotish and Lila AND Swamiji. They were on their return trip from Los Angeles! I was able to introduce my mom to everyone. She and Swamiji shook hands and were able talk for just a bit. I was SO touched and mom was very pleased.
Well. I will end this post here. Many, many, many blessings to you all. With love, Barbara
Joy
The Church of the Recessional at Forest Lawn in Glendale
The choir looked and sounded wonderful in the main chapel.
Swamiji began with a song: Love is a Magician
Swamiji read the chapter from The New Path about Master’s mahasamadhi.
Swamiji spoke for nearly an hour
Swamiji then spent nearly an hour answering questions.
A long line of devotees formed outside the chapel.
Swamiji spent at least an hour greeting everyone.
Swamiji radiated love to everyone.
Greetings everyone. I have spent the day going through over 400 photographs taken this past weekend in Los Angeles. Fortunately for you, I will not be posting all of them. It was a challenge to pick out just a few photos that would hopefully portray what a visually and spiritually beautiful event occurred the past few days in Southern California.
Friday afternoon a large group of volunteers from Ananda Los Angeles and Ananda South Bay gathered to host a talk by Swami Kriyananda at the Ford Theater in Hollywood. There was such a sweet spirit of cooperation and harmony while preparing and such joy when greeting the over 1000 people that came to see Swamiji.
The event was the official launch of The New Path, Swamiji’s rewrite of The Path. I have a particular fondness for The Path. It was reading this book that answered my soul call for a guru. So I am very grateful to Swamiji and to that book. The New Path so far, is wonderful.
The launch began with a four piece ensemble playing Life is a Quest for Joy. It set the tone for a very devotional evening. Ananda World Brotherhood Choir, again sounding like angels, sang a few numbers as the night sky grew darker and the lighting in the outdoor theater got more colorful and dramatic.
Brook and Sean, the co-directors of Ananda Los Angeles spoke about the growing Ananda community in Southern California. It was a fun moment for me, because Brook is my daughter. I was especially pleased to see all the effort that went into planning begin to blossom into such a beautiful event with blessings that will linger on for many people.
Brook introduced Reverend Michael Beckwith, who in turn gave the introduction of Swamiji. Michael’s talk was very sweet and the prayer he led us all in was quite moving.
Swamiji then took the stage and shared stories of his time with Paramhansa Yogananda. He spoke at length while standing at the microphone. Then he picked up The New Path, sat down, and read from the book. It felt as if everyone snuggled in their seat a bit and relaxed and soaked up Swamiji’s vibration and stories. What a night.
This talk is already on Ananda.org and being watched by hundreds of people. Technology has made the world seem small. Both Dave and I get a real joy out of knowing that our friends and gurubais are with us at these events. This talk felt as if it sowed spiritual seeds in the ether. Swamiji also gave a talk at Forest Lawn, the huge and beautiful cemetery where Master’s body resides. I will share photos from that talk in another post.
And huge thanks to everyone, especially Ananda LA and Ananda South Bay members involved in the planning, and hosting this talk. All the beautiful smiles and joyful work created a inspiring evening for us all.
Bless you all. In Master’s light, Barbara
The four piece ensemble playing before a large crowd.
Ben Skillman (age 16), David Eby, Krishna Dewey, Karen Gamow.
Ananda World Brotherhood Choir
Brook Cassady and Sean Meshorer
Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith
Our dear, Swamiji sharing Master’s love.
Swamiji reading from The New Path
Swamiji and Reverend Beckwith were sharing a quiet moment backstage before the talks, they asked to have a photo taken.
You may have read in the recent posts about the 61st anniversary of Swami Kriyananda’s Discipleship to Paramhansa Yogananda. The essence of the celebration was captured by Barbara Bingham with her beautiful photos of Swamiji, the choir, and the crowd of celebrants.
I too was able to “attend” Swamiji’s talks, thanks to the live video broadcast. When Swamiji gave Sunday Service, I was in Mumbai (Bombay), India with a few friends (one is pictured to the left). We stayed up until 11:30pm to watch the broadcast, which finished at 1:00am. We gathered in the kitchen so as not to disturb the sleeping residents of the house. We felt a part of the celebrations, as if we were sitting in the front row, although we were over 8,000 miles away.
We offer heartfelt thanks to the tremendous service of Kent Williams, Dave Bingham, and others, who work hard to provide these broadcasts. And we bow to the miracle of the internet, which keeps us spiritually connected in ever-new ways.
(Missed the event? You can watch the video or listen to the audio here.)
I decided during Spiritual Renewal Week in August to join Ananda’s monastery for one year at the Ananda Meditation Retreat. In celebration of Swami Kriyananda’s discipleship anniversary, the vows of monasticism were taken last Sunday. The idea of monasticism had often inspired me, but in the past I had never quite felt like I would be able “cut the mustard” so to speak, as a monk. This summer I had several realizations that made think that being a monk would not only be possible, but would be the best possible thing for me at this point in my life.
The first was that nothing outside myself would ever give me happiness and fulfillment (with the exception of Hagan Daz ice cream, right?). The lines from one of Swami Kriyananda’s songs called “One Day When I was Roaming” caught my attention. The song isn’t sung very often, I think because it seems like a sad song, but Swami can be heard singing it on the CD, I’ve passed my life as a Stranger. The ending lines were particularly meaningful to me:
For life he thought these meadows,
would give to be his own;
But life he gave not first to them,
and life he’s never known
(These lines repeat twice, and “life” is replaced first with “peace,” and then with “joy.”)
What we are looking for is inside ourselves! As long as we think that it lies in things, we will be sorely disappointed. From one point of view this seems like a grim statement: Nothing in this world can bring you lasting fulfillment and happiness. But on the other hand, the keys to happiness are within us and not dependent on anything external. We can choose to be happy anytime and all the time! Anytime we think something outside ourselves will give us joy, that joy is within us already. In other words joy is within you (where have I heard that before?).
The second realization came while watching the rehearsals for Swami Kriyananda’s play, The Peace Treaty. In watching the characters Gazella and Ponder (who in the end, become monastics), I saw that renunciation is not a denial of life and love, but a joyful celebration of the soul’s freedom and devotion in God. Instead of being cold and dry, it is an affirmation to seek love in God alone. It is, after all, from God that all love originates. Any love that we feel can be offered upward and shared with God. In this it is impersonalized and in fact made greater.
The monks at Ananda’s Meditation Retreat
As I join my fellow monks and look at this year ahead, I hope and pray that this year will help me deepen my realization of the Divine within me, and help me to share that love, light and joy more fully and freely with others. In making this decision, it has been beautiful to see how the community has supported and encouraged me. It is truly a blessing to live in a place that so wholeheartedly supports the inward search for God, no matter what form it takes.
Here are a few songs from the evening concert at Swami Kriyananda’s Spiritual Anniversary celebration on September 12 at Ananda Village.
The concert included readings from The New Path, Swamiji’s autobiography, and songs written by him over the years. Performance by Swami Kriyananda and Ananda Choir.
Enjoy!
“God, God, God,” poem by Paramhansa Yogananda, music by Swami Kriyananda
“Where Has My Love Gone,” a mystical love song by Swami Kriyananda
This weekend we celebrated Swami Kriyananda’s 61st year of discipleship to Paramhansa Yogananda. It was a very colorful weekend filled with beautiful blue skies, sunsets, flowers, and altars. Fall is in the air here, still a little warm during the day, but cools off a bit at night. The angle of the sun highlighted the golden grasses and gave dimension to the trees. The breeze gave us gorgeous clouds.
Most importantly, the weekend was filled with spiritual depth. I could feel the sincerity of all my gurubhais, the ones here at Ananda Village and all over the world. In fact, thanks to modern technology and a few dedicated souls (Kent and Dave) a live feed allowed people to watch Swamiji’s talks and Sunday Service as they happened.
Swamiji’s talks were very powerful and inspiring. They are always joyful and sometimes punctuated with humorous stories and laughter. Those are the times that I generally snap a photo so as not to be disruptive with my camera. The smiles that I capture illustrate the overall joy that is in the air. But often, Swamiji’s talks are very serious and heartfelt, where he encourages us to waste no more time — he wants us to find God in this lifetime. He had many stories of his time with Yogananda, some with details I had never heard before. The talks will be on Ananda.org soon and I know you will like them.
The weekend also included beautiful music and readings from The New Path. The still air of an Expanding Light evening means the music wafts up into the trees, hills and heavens. Amazing.
Like most people, after a beautiful spiritual retreat (one that happens in my neighborhood) I have to return to work. But I return with a renewed commitment to keep God upper most in my thoughts, or at least to dedicate my projects to Him, and express gratitude for the energy that flows through me and into my work.
The next public event we can all look forward to is Swami Kriyananda’s talk “My Life with Paramhansa Yogananda,” at the Ford Theater in Los Angeles. I have seen the theater in pictures and it will be a beautiful venue. I am planning to be there with my husband, Dave. Hopefully, we will have lots to share with you.
In the meantime, I hope you feel bliss and peace in your lives and hearts.
Love, from Ananda (and Barbara)
The choir surprised Swamiji and tossed rose petals to honor his 61 years of discipleship.
It was a stunning evening of color and beautiful music.
In 2005 I was asked to create the Swami Kriyananda website as part of my work with Ananda’s outreach ministry. It will probably remain one of the best writing projects I’ll ever work on, though I continue to write for 60 years or more.
Particularly amusing — and also indicative of Ananda’s good character in the way it serves its members, rather than expecting to be served by them — was that at that time, I was one of the few people at Ananda Village who had never met Swami Kriyananda in person! I was also the youngest person in Ananda’s outreach ministry, and there, the only one who had never met Swamiji in person.
If that wasn’t enough, I was also almost completely untried as a writer. But somehow, owing to my job with websites and the fact that my job commitments were flexible (I was able to set aside of lot of time to tackle a specific project), I had this opportunity.
2005 was also my first year as a monk; during that time I usually spent Saturdays in silence and partial seclusion.
My Saturday routine, after being given this assignment, soon changed to this: after a long morning meditation, I would return to my bungalow and write as much as I could in an uplifted state of consciousness, filling in the details of an outline proposed by Dave Warner. In the afternoon I usually took a walk. I might do some editing, or read something of Swamiji’s, before meditating again in the evening.
Devi Novak, one of the founding members of Ananda and a close friend of Swamiji’s, helped with the editing and made suggestions for the writing. Her biography of him, Faith is My Armor, was the primary guide for me in determining how to treat Swamiji’s life.
One section of Swamiji’s life that I was leaving out was the period of time when Ananda was attacked with dual lawsuits (you can read more about it in The Lawsuits, and the Fight for Freedom). Strangely — I don’t know why — my experience mirrors the one Devi describes in writing her book.
In an interview in Clarity Magazine, she said,
I had collected a lot of information on the lawsuit, but when it came time to write about it, I decided not to discuss it in depth.
Interestingly, Swamiji called around that time and asked, “How are you going to deal with the lawsuit?”
I said, “So much has been written about it already that I’ll only touch on it lightly – two or three pages.”
He replied, “Oh, okay.”
That night I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning, and I saw how to do the entire chapter on the lawsuit.… I later refined it, but the entire chapter came in that flow of energy.
I knew quite a lot about the lawsuits, but was hoping I could skirt by without needing to address them in depth — “Maybe just two or three paragraphs,” I thought. Then Devi asked me if I was going to write about them. Suddenly, remembering her story above, I said, “They need to be dealt with!”
Thinking on it later, I realized, “Of course you have to deal with those lawsuits in telling Swamiji’s story.” It is a story with an incredible, beautiful conclusion of triumph. Even the title for Devi’s book is a quote from Swamiji about that period of time. (She had told him she didn’t think she could go through what he had gone through, and he replied, with conviction, “I didn’t know that I had the strength, but faith is my armor.”) However, as Swamiji had done for her, Devi gave me the choice whether or not to address them.
The real bulk of the writing was done during a four-day seclusion at Ananda’s Meditation Retreat. (I recalled Devi saying that she had needed to go into seclusion to write sections of Faith is My Armor.) These several days remain my treasured gift to Swami Kriyananda — which it was my blessing and honor to give.
During the seclusion, I would wake up, meditate longer than usual, eat breakfast, and spend the morning writing new sections of the site. In the afternoon I would edit. Then I meditated again as evening fell, and after dinner read or listened to a talk of Swami Kriyananda’s.
Writing took longer than I imagined it would — so many hours for so few pages! I tried to deeply understand the meaning in the words and be conscientious in writing. Especially important, I tried to tune in to the consciousness of Swami Kriyananda, and even tried to feel that he was writing it. How successful I was in this, I can’t say. But by making the attempt, I felt that insights came which wouldn’t have otherwise.
Truth told, I did feel, particularly during that seclusion, that I had a lot of help in writing the site. Certainly I prayed to God and to Yogananda to be guided in what I was doing.
Once the writing was done, Jyotish and Devi Novak, Spiritual Directors of Ananda Worldwide, contributed to the editing, as well as Maria Warner, who manages Ananda.org and the other websites of Ananda’s worldwide outreach ministry.
And at this point we come to a fascinating part of the story.
They edited so little.
It isn’t that the writing was perfect. Far from it! I read through it all more than a year later on my own and found a number of mistakes. But Jyotish, Devi, and Maria were demonstrating two principles which I’ve seen applied so often at Ananda:
A willingness to really let others go ahead and make mistakes, if it will help them learn
Guiding a person when they are receptive, but not to the point where that person might become dependant upon their guidance
As I look back on one of the old edited copies of the site (we printed everything out before editing), I see that many of the suggested changes have spiritual lessons behind them.
These are a few:
In the sentence, “Many times his Guru told Kriyananda, ‘You have a great work to do,’ — or perhaps, ‘You must do such and such, because you have a great work to do,’” she crossed off “or perhaps,” and suggested “and also” in its place, because the latter expresses greater conviction. Literarily, I think both ways work, but for me, this change provided a useful lesson.
Devi changed “lead a Sunday Service” to “conduct a Sunday Service,” shifting the personal emphasis on the importance of the minister to a more impersonal emphasis on the Service itself.
In place of “Given thousands of lectures all over the world,” Devi suggested “Given thousands of lectures based on his Guru’s teachings.” This edit clarifies what is really important: not just reaching large numbers of people, but reaching them with something of value, something that is in tune with what Yogananda brought.
In this first round of editing, when you would expect the most changes, there were rarely more than a couple of suggestions per page.
Considering that Devi had recently finished a 250-page book on the same subject, one which she considered incredibly important (she described herself as feeling “inadequate” to the “magnitude” of the work — of needing to do justice to such a great soul like Swamiji), I find the willingness to give me this degree of freedom doubly-amazing.
Today, almost 1,000 monthly visitors come to www.swamikriyananda.org, and there have been nearly 50,000 visits to the site since it was first launched. A special newsletter, which has its goal as keeping people up to date on Swami Kriyananda’s new projects, talks, and public services, has close to 500 subscribers. (Since we’ve never advertised the newsletter, this seems like a reasonable number. If you want to sign up, you can do so on the home page of the website.) Of course, I’m very grateful to have played a part in its creation.
The greatest honor, though, came about a year ago, when Swami Kriyananda finally read the site himself (he’s not much of a web surfer! I think someone printed it for him). I was told that, reading it, he exclaimed, “Who wrote this? This is excellent!”
When I first heard that, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I must be a good writer,” but something in his choice of words made me pause. I remembered the seclusion, and how I had tried to tune into what he and Yogananda wanted to write through me. Anything that was inspired, therefore, I couldn’t claim as my own.
Like the painter who paints a beautiful sunset, and cannot claim credit for the scene, the quality of the canvas, or the brilliant hues of the paint, I was drawing material from sources that others had put together, using an outline suggested by a friend, and helped by others’ editing.
Besides, it was Swami Kriyananda who had lived the drama in the first place, and had made his life worth writing about — a life which he, in turn, gives all the credit for to God. My only work was in adapting his story for the web, which in comparison was nothing at all!
“Of course it’s good,” I realized, laughing to myself. “He wrote it!”
