Becoming a Mother

Becoming a Mother

Two years ago, I had an opportunity to go on a pilgrimage to Encinitas and Los Angeles. One of our stops was Ananda LA, where I emailed ahead and arranged for a kriya check. Before this, all of my interactions with Ananda had been online. I took the steps to kriya online, became a disciple online, and received kriya initiation online.

Dharmadevi and Narayan

Master says that we don’t need to be with the Guru in the body to become free but one contact with a direct disciple is necessary.  For me, this was through meeting Nayaswamis Narayan and Dharmadevi. This meeting awoke in me a deeper level of discipleship and connection with Master but it also awoke a longing to be “part of Ananda.” I came back to Finland facing a new reality of looking for a job that would provide an income while wishing I could just spread the teachings somehow and fantasizing about moving to Ananda Village.

Being a disciple and devotee in Finland can be lonely. There are very few of us here and the work is only now slowly picking up pace. Around the time of the pilgrimage, I had been teaching meditation to my first and only dedicated student for over a year. She had learned the Energization Exercises, was even open to talking about God (religion is not popular in Finland) and requested the local library to order a copy of Swamiji’s Affirmations for Self-Healing when she couldn’t find it. While I was grateful for her, I now wanted to have students in the plural, not singular.

While I searched for swung between the practicals of the job-search and wistfully daydreaming about my husband and I suddenly moving to Ananda Village, I remembered a line from Autobiography of a Yogi where Trailanga Swami says “Lahiri Mahasaya is like a divine kitten, remaining wherever the Cosmic Mother has placed him.”

I decided to try to be a Divine Kitten. Divine Mother soon obliged. I became pregnant, visited Ananda Assisi for a glorious, heart opening week. Four months later, I found a job that I would never have expected. Shortly after I started working, our son was born and I became a mother. Thus, She set the stage for a new beginning, and a new way for me to be “part of Ananda.”

This realization came when I was feeding my son his evening porridge, a very Finnish practice that is both unfamiliar to me as the daughter of Indian parents born and raised in the US, and normal since my growth as a parent has been purely in Finland.

Sometimes I will decide to put something extra in the porridge to mix things up. And so one day I decided to put Finnish strawberries we had frozen over the summer. I put them after warming the porridge to cool it down faster for my impatient toddler, who was using his power to shriek as loudly as he could.

Sitting at the table and stirring the strawberry in, I saw how the bright red melted slowly into the white of the porridge. The heat also quickly dissipated as the coolness of the strawberry seeped into the rest of the bowl.

The thought popped into my head how this was a reminder of the essence of the spiritual path. As we let God and Guru deeper into our heart, they take care of the delusions we have, slowly purifying us. The chant Light the Lamp of my Love illustrates this so well:

In my house with Thine own hands
Light the lamp of Thy love.
Thy transmuting lamp entrancing
Wondrous are its rays.
Change my darkness to Thy light
And my evil into good.

I noticed though that as the strawberry melted, its scent began to waft in the air. Anyone around us could enjoy the smell as much as my son was enjoying his strawberry porridge. As my heart is purified by the teachings and letting Divine Mother in, I too can emanate Her sweetness. The thought was immediately uplifting.

The strawberry scent wafting through the air was a reminder also of how I am “part of Ananda” even if I don’t teach another student or write another blog or do any of the things that people “at Ananda” do. By serving my family as a disciple, by striving to love my colleagues better, by sharing my vibration, I am doing my part.

The great woman saint, Ananda Moyi Ma never wrote anything. She didn’t travel around giving lectures. Outwardly, she would seem to have done very little. And yet anyone who came close to her was blessed. Another saint who Swamiji met in India also had very few disciples and lived in a small remote village, spending most of his time talking with the villagers about farming. When Swamiji asked why he did not take on more disciples, he replied that this was what Divine Mother wanted him to do.

These stories were known to me even when I was full of that longing to do more. But mistaking outward activity with virtue, I thought that without serving Ananda in some spectacular way, I was not doing enough, not being enough.

Becoming a mother changed that. I now had a whole new set of relationships that could serve as examples of the relationship of the Divine Mother and Her children. I could serve God through my child and see His joy in my son’s face. My son being a happy soul made this easy to do fairly frequently. I think of Master playing with delight as he took children’s toys out of a bag as I make silly sounds and movements to make the little cutie in front of me giggle. I can experience the love Divine Mother feels for Her children in the love I feel for him. And in seeing the devotion in my son’s eyes when he looks at me, I see what it means to be a child of Divine Mother, having complete faith that She will take care of you.

These little moments have slowly washed away all thought of my needing to serve outwardly to be worthy of spiritual progress. Interestingly, Divine Mother has in her own way begun to ask more of me, with more opportunities to serve outwardly with Ananda throughout the past year, even as my free time has shrunk. The prayer to be able to serve Ananda outwardly is being answered even as the attachment to such service diminishes.

The lack of attachment has been good for both the work, which I can now do more selflessly than I would have two years ago, and for my own inner peace. Because now it is so clear that my place is with this soul. Divine Mother has given me so many blessings through him, from the time he was in the womb to now when he runs with his arms outstretched toward me, ready to come into his mother’s arms.

Let us all follow his example, running to our Divine Mother with our arms outstretched, no matter where She has placed us.