AHYMSIN-Americas Newsletter Articles

  Message from Swami Ritavan 2025 IS-WAS-IS TODAY 2026, you wanted it, and now you have it. That personality you chose yesterday, and in each day of 2025, is your mask and role on this life-stage today. And today, you can change that habit and play the role as you are meant to be. You cannot continue to do something for long if you are not meant to do it. Your choice of emotions shapes your thinking, which in turn shapes your behavior. Yet, deeper than these character habits, stillness and silence can reveal your true nature. Your positive emotions, pleasant thoughts, kind and selfless actions all have arisen from that pure source of being.  This day Is Your Choice , thereby your destiny. Choose wisely, for as meditators, you have all the skills and tools to sculpt your personality, using it as your architect for joyful living. Practice-Practice-Practice. May the masks and roles you play throughout 2026 reflect your true nature: ever-wise, ever-pure, ever-free. May grace besto...

  A Time to Do and a Time to Be by amrita mckinney    This summer, I participated in an 84-day intensive retreat at Swami Rama Sadhaka Gram. During the retreat, Rabindra encouraged us to make a habit of sitting for 10 minutes and do nothing. It is difficult to do nothing. Our DNA seems to expect us to always be doing something, anything. How many times as a child had I heard my mom say, “go do something”—as if doing was the cure and boredom one of the deadly sins.  How easily we choose distractions. Sometimes life seems to be one big distraction—so big we forget the purpose of life. My eldest sister is a doer, always on the go. On occasion, I have said, “sit, relax”, while I, myself was busy doing. I just wasn’t moving at warped speed. I was reading or writing and judged my busyness to be of higher worth. Yet, I was just as disconnected from my inner self. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, “The mind has a terror of boredom” and that terror keeps us ever doing.  Swami ...

  What i s Love by Jenny May “The most ancient traveler in the Universe, is Love." This quote from Swami Rama has always inspired me to contemplate, and so recently, in a 108-day practice with the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra, I began asking, “What is Love?”   I began the journey focusing on the pinpoint of presence right before action. The spark of divinity just before the fruit falls off the vine, as the mantra’s vibration invites. I feel it as the space that Swami Veda has asked us to notice in meditation; the very moment just before the out-breath turns and becomes the in-breath. What I began to recognize is that this sacred space, this pinpoint of presence from which everything emerges, is Love.   As I focus on this space, I experience what I believe is the profound essence Swami Rama is referring to when he says, “The most ancient traveler in the Universe, is Love.” As I practice witnessing this space, I begin to recognize it by many names, including Silence, Tr...