Our first Shanti Seminar was scheduled for Sunday at 10:00 am and the day before Chiracbhai and his family, a total of 10 people, arrived at the Ashram to enjoy the tranquility of the place with more time.
The next day, the rest of the participants arrive each at their own time and once we have left the necessary time, our day begins with a yoga session guided by Evabhen. Pranayama, joint warm-up, Virabhadrasana I, II and III as asanas for focus, concentration and stability and a kriya for auric balance and nervous system.
The session ends and we open a satsang moment, talking about the benefits of taking care of the body and respecting it, not only with the physical part, but also with the emotional part and with the food we eat. Our entire being is a microcosm that needs to be in harmony for everything to work in our lives.
Nature is a very good guide if we observe it and connect with it. At Life in Harmony we always have it as a reference. And that was what Sanjein explained to us in his talk when he told us that when you plant a tree you put a new life in the earth and you know that in return later that tree will give you fruits and shade to protect you from the heat when you need it. That if you connect with nature, the symbiosis is constant in that cycle of planting, helping it grow, seeing the fruits and being able to enjoy them. How important it is to turn off the external music and listen to what the earth has to tell us, he told us!
After his talk, in which his chiku eyes shone like the mid-afternoon Indian sun and his entire face shone in company, we shared the moment of food. Men and women eating at the same time, a custom that depending on where you are in India is sometimes not so common. We set the intention to eat as consciously and silently as possible and to be grateful for the food present, thanking the mother earth from which it came and the women who cooked it (and we say women because in this case it was literally like that and we set the intention that in future occasions it will be men and women who equally collaborate in preparing, serving and collecting).
During the afternoon break, there was a nap, talks in small groups and some group games until tea time with a delicious Ayurvedic infusion that we prepared marked the beginning of the games that Chiracbhai had prepared for us. We played and had a lot of fun with the “hot plate”, you pass a plate around while a sound plays and whoever has it in their hands when that sound stops is eliminated. The second game freed us all: we walked in a circle and when the guide called, you had to choose between 4 sacred places. The guide would take out a paper and read the name of one of those places and the people who were there would go to “moksha” and exit the game.
The last game had us laughing and moving, testing our agility and quickness as a team. There were two teams: one was Life and the other Harmony. In each team there is a leader who has to collect what the game guide asks for and put it on a plate. The team that manages to bring to the leader what is requested at each moment in the shortest time possible scores a point. So between laughing and running, we look for fruits, spoons, glasses, hair clips, flip flops, stones, rose flowers, tulsi leaves, cables, coins, the tallest in the group, a gray hair, the baldest in the group, the person with the whitest hair, a belt, a photo of a divinity, a phone ringing with a mantra...
We will tell you that we had a lot of fun and the score between groups was super close.
And just as everything good has a beginning, it also comes to an end... And around 5 in the afternoon, we said goodbye after a small group feedback in which all the participants agreed that it was a very nice day, that they felt happy, calm, relaxed, fun, with less tension, with the desire of not to leave and with the desire to return.
For our part, after listening all their comments and seeing their happy faces, there is nothing to add. Only the hope of continuing to open the doors of this wonderful place and the hope of sustaining life in harmony to share more and more, better and better and already with the energy put into the date of the II Shanti Seminar next month.
