I whizzed through Sadhguru’s biography by poet Arundhati Subramaniam on Monday. I had attended her session at the Jaipur Lit Fest and was lucky enough to have a few words with her after! While her poetry sent shivers, this book was so phenomenal. Her skill at weaving words made for such a magnificant tale.

Even though I had known many of the details of his life story, the prose was so captivating that I could not put the book down.  Plus, I had only heard bits and pieces before and here was an account that flowed seamlessly from beginning to end with the grace that is Sadhguru…

He was extremely candid about all aspects of his life, even the troubling events surrounding the Dhyanalinga consecration. I hope this puts all the skeptics to rest for a short time.

I would have liked to have read more about Anaadhi in the US, but I guess it was too recent to be included–maybe in part two! Who knows where the story will take us next…?

Catch a clip from their live event here.

Happy Thanksgiving! Since today naturally lends itself to reflection, I figured it was a good chance to get back to blogging. I have been all-consumed by planning for the “My Conversations with the Mystic” event with acclaimed director Shekhar Kapur & Sadhguru–and I’m grateful it’s over!

The event didn’t go quite as hoped (we weren’t able to stream video along with audio), but I certainly learned a lot and of course am so glad to have had the opportunity to see Sadhguru along with Kapur. How did I ever get so lucky?

I only wish I weren’t so hard on myself for the mistakes I made that night. After seeing this post on Beth’s Blog, I think I need to learn from the ladies at MomsRising.org about  Joyful Funerals & constructive reflection after a campaign…

I think I have my work cut out for me this Thanksgiving!

UPDATE: The video recording is now available here:

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(we could only stream audio live due to technical difficulties!)

I felt so inspired throughout the day. I have been feeling particularly charged up since starting Inner Engineering Online, and today was my fifth class. It definitely struck a deep chord.

Lastly, I’ve been curating content for an event we are planning (more details to come). I have basically spent all day reading & watching Sadhguru. If that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what is.

I will share a couple aha moments below. Please check out the rest of the live tweets from @ishafoundation.

The host, Terry Patten, said that Sadhguru sounded so optimistic, to which he replied that he was simply a realist, with this caveat:

So quit your kvetching already!

Isha has been highlighted in Huffington Post Impact section (what a great surprise!):

For today’s Volunteer Spotlight (and since Earth Day is just a week away), we want to recognize the incredible achievement of the Isha Foundation, who organized over 400,000 volunteers to plant two million trees on a mountain in India in just 25 days. This group of volunteers also set the record for most tree seeds (850,000) planted in a single day (a record they plan to continually break in the years ahead).

Sadhguru seemed surprised when I asked him about how to encourage people to volunteer their time. He replied that people should be even more selfish than they already are; after all, taking care of our environment and others helps improve our own lives.

“We’re not saving the planet,” he told me. “We’re saving ourselves.”

Sadhguru does not believe that this volunteer effort should be the work of a select group of activists.

“It’s everybody’s work. All of us breathe, all of us eat, all of us walk on this planet. This is not somebody’s work, it’s everybody’s work. Unless we get it into people’s minds that this is everybody’s work, you will not accomplish much on this planet.”

In addition to the wildly successful environmental initiative, known as Project GreenHands, Isha’s Action for Rural Rejuvenation works to address economic, agricultural and social mobility problems in rural India.

PBS has released a new documentary about the Buddha’s life, complete with celebrity narration (by Richard Gere). It’s fascinating to me how people can be so intrigued by him, yet could completely miss him if he were here today…

An article in the Huffington Post inquires “What Does The Buddha Have To Do With Jesus?” Seems like a redundant question–duh, they were both enlightened. Rather than favoring brevity,  the author takes ages to preach about interreligious dialogue.

But we are terribly short of thinkers and practitioners, clergy and lay, who can think these two traditions together.

Once again, spiritual experience being reduced to religious philosophy. Sad.

Or… See what Sadhguru has said about enlightenment/grace in the bible.

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22)

‘If thine eye be single’ means that you are no more discriminatory. You are seeing everything as one; you are seeing everything as the same. If you become like this, your body shall be filled with light, and that is Grace.

Thanks, Ganesh for the video link!

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Sadhguru has long had a special relationship with Lebanon. He has visited the country almost 10 times since his first visit in 2000, and more than 1,500 people here have taken the Isha Yoga programs designed by Sadhguru.

A number of Lebanese have also become yoga teachers, giving yoga programs in the US, Europe, Asia and Africa. Sadhguru’s Isha Yoga group has brought together volunteers from all of Lebanon’s religions and social classes. In addition, volunteers here have planted more than 1,000 trees in the last two years as part of Isha Yoga’s reforestation project called Project Greenhands.

From the Mystic Eye, Lebanon site–a two day program with Sadhguru is happening there May 1-2.

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“Sadhguru is mystical, insightful, beautiful, funny, wise and grounded. I have taken two of his Isha programs, in Los Angeles and Tennessee, and strongly encourage you to explore this program for yourself–it’s not to be missed.”–Anjelica Huston, Inner Engineering Intensive flyer

From an interview with Huston in Vanity Fair:

She is being helped, she told me, by an Indian guru, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, whose name she spelled out for me like a conscientious schoolgirl. “He reminds me of my husband visually. He has the same lovely brown skin and liquid brown eyes. Very handsome. He’s a modern guru. He plays Frisbee on the beach with us.”

“Do you meditate together?”

“Yes, there are about 70 of us, and you sit cross-legged on the floor for about three days and feel like calcification itself. And then, somehow, you feel a little better. Maybe even get thinner and smarter. We go through a series of exercises, which were kind of familiar to me,” she added, and began to laugh. “I had an Italian grandfather on my mother’s side who became a yogi, and whenever we visited him as children we had to stand on our heads and sing, ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day!’”

Someone is rejecting me, Someone is dying for me… Some work is falling apart, Some work is coming together… Simultaneously, the dualities of life are manifesting around me… And neither is affecting me… Inside I am joyful regardless of what is happening… What I want or what I don’t want… It matters not… For my inner climate is independent of outer events, circumstances and people… Ah, everyone should do Isha… Ah, everyone should be as fortunate as me to have a Master like I do…

It matters not if people love me or hate me, It matters not if I get what I want or I don’t, It matters not if life is good or bad… I wonder with wonder, how am I becoming like this! Such tremendous Grace is being showered on me… I am watching the play of life like a spectator, playing my role as an actor on the stage of life, yet moving away from identification with the roles, faster and faster…

Mr. Geithner has his work cut out for him, economists and policy analysts in both India and the United States say. Reaching economic agreements between the two countries has traditionally been an arduous task.

“On principle, they both agree on everything,” said Jahangir Aziz, chief India economist at J. P. Morgan in Mumbai. “It always comes down to the nitty-gritty and that’s where things get stuck. Part of the problem is neither of them wants to give the other side an inch.”

Shouldn’t the US go a little easier on India, given the size of its market?

It took nearly 20 years for the United States to lift a ban on imports of Indian mangoes, for example, and a deal to allow energy-strapped India access to American nuclear technology, agreed to in principle four years ago, still has not cleared all the legal hurdles that would let American companies sign contracts here. The two countries remain far apart on American farm subsidies and India’s unwillingness to open its markets to foreign farmers, because they both want to protect their agricultural sectors. The countries’ disagreements there helped to scuttle global trade negotiations in 2008.

A funny & relevant tweet from Sadhguru’s public talk yesterday:

When you start thinking only I am right and everybody else is wrong, this is the first step towards madness.

Surely the US qualifies?