Om Swami sharanam

  " The only thing sweeter than dying by your hands is dying in your hands. How lucky I am, that I am in your hands while I breathe my last ".....  As a frog, I may not foresee or avoid a mighty blow landing on my back and breaking my bones, but it will not break my spirit, my faith, or my surrender.    - From Swamiji's   blog - A word on Surrender.  Beautiful guru-disciple relationships are built on the bedrock of the single-most quality - the ability to surrender. The unquestionable sense of abandon, like Hanuman felt for Lord Ram. I had to understand more... Surrender has not been a big part of my experience..so far. For me, fighting came easier, always. I did not come from a family that invoked surrender through prayer or other practices. And then, t he need to fend for myself too early in life as a motherless child  did not allow much room for me to witness, experience, or practice surrender.    Instead, I built walls to protect my fragile self. I learned revolt and

"Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in your spiritual journey. From this moment on, you can consider yourself initiated by me." I had eagerly awaited this. It was a response to my request for initiation from my now guru  Om Swam i!  The next day, I fractured my foot! I can almost picture Swamiji reading this and bursting into his characteristic laugh at the absurdity of the correlation. "I don’t work like that—wishing people broken bones!" he might say, I think. But I wonder what more would follow. In his memoir, he writes -    "Coincidence generally means the occurrence of something in a striking manner without any causal connection. The truth is there are no accidents in the play of nature. Nothing is non-causal; everything supports a bigger cause." When the minor accident leading to my fracture happened, I was on the 5th day of my Ganesh Sadhana. And if I allow my imagination and intuition to guide me, I can sense a parallel with Ganesha’s own s

 If I were something in nature,   I'd probably be a waterfall   with the knowing that falling too  is an act of grace  To fall is to let go of fears  To fall is to leave a mark  To fall is to trust that  a part of you will continue to flow and part of you will turn into mist,   and will continue to rise -  painting rainbows, sprinkling smiles. An ode to waterfalls around Seattle. So lucky to be living here in the lap of nature's bounty.