27 Jan, Tirunelveli<\/p>\n
We arrived in Tirunelveli at about 3am.\u00a0 The women were staying at the Sri Sarada Devi Woman\u2019s College and Hostel \u2013 a school founded by Vivekananda and inspired by Sri Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi.\u00a0 The students here typically go to bed at 9:30pm and wake up between 3 and 4am for morning meditation.\u00a0 But this night, many had been up since 11:30pm so that they could be awake and greet us when we arrived.\u00a0 A beautiful mandala, artfully drawn with colored powders adorned the sidewalk at the entrance to the hostel where we were staying.\u00a0 Beneath it read \u2018Welcome\u2019 in large colorful letters.<\/p>\n
Giving us a little time to get settled, the girls then asked us to come to the dining hall for snacks.\u00a0 There, they had us sit side by side on clean mats while they served us plates adorned with bananas, grapes, and various types of biscuits along with chai.\u00a0 After completing a small seva task and taking a bath, I meditated and went to bed.<\/p>\n
The sound of young women\u2019s voices singing awakened me early.\u00a0 I gently dressed and tried to trace the music to its source.\u00a0 Students in the halls intercepted me and in response to my questioning, they led me to a large auditorium.\u00a0 There sat about 150-200 girls in emerald green saris.\u00a0 They had just finished singing their morning prayers.<\/p>\n
My escorts insisted that I sit in a chair and wait while they spoke to the group\u2019s instructor.\u00a0 They returned saying that the group would sing more prayers for me.
\nBy Amma\u2019s Grace, I was then blessed with a concert of two beautiful songs.\u00a0 The first was a bhajan that was sung with strong energy and spirit.\u00a0 The second was more gentle, with a call and response led by the instructor.\u00a0 Some of the girls kept glancing back at me with big smiles to see my response to their singing.\u00a0 A the end of the chants, the instructor approached me innocently and asked, \u2018Is it enough?\u2019\u00a0 I smiled and said \u2018Yes\u2019 and thanked them for their generous gift.\u00a0 Then I was off to my next adventure at this amazing college.<\/p>\n
Malini – USA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
27 Jan, Tirunelveli We arrived in Tirunelveli at about 3am.\u00a0 The women were staying at the Sri Sarada Devi Woman\u2019s College and Hostel \u2013 a school founded by Vivekananda and inspired by Sri Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi.\u00a0 The students here typically go to bed at 9:30pm and wake up between 3 and 4am for morning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-with-amma"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}