‘Hugging Saint’ brings loving touch to Castro Valley
By Laura Casey, STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 06/06/2007 03:45:27 AM PDT
CASTRO VALLEY — Amma’s embrace is like no other.
In her native India, hundreds of thousands of people line up for a hug from Mata Amritanandamayi, better known as Amma the “hugging saint.” In the Bay Area, where Amma is visiting now until June 15, up to 10,000 people are expected to wait for hours to kneel at her feet and receive an embrace.
People cry as they lean against her shoulder. They often end the hug stunned and forever changed, they say.
San Francisco resident Sharanjit Sandhu, a yoga instructor, clearly remembers her first hug. She received it seven years ago, during one of Amma’s twice-annual visits to the Bay Area that year.
“You can feel a transmission from her hug,” Sandhu said Tuesday as she waited her turn for a second embrace from Amma. “It stays with you for a while. It softens you. It brings you back to your original nature. You feel at peace.”
For Mill Valley resident Jerry Burt, the experience is nourishing. Burt, who works for a vitamin company, visits with Amma each time she comes to the the M.A. Center in Castro Valley, a spiritual retreat center. She quiets him. She calms him. She makes him feel restful.
“It was surprising because I felt so relaxed after the hug and that is something I don’t normally feel,” he said ofhis first hug from Amma.
Amma, a humanitarian, spiritual leader and teacher, is known in the Bay Area for opening “Mother’s Kitchen,” a soup kitchen for the poor which started in Oakland and spread to more than 30 cities nationwide.
Over the years she has raised millions of dollars for a variety of causes around the world, including disaster relief. Her more recent campaigns have raised money to help victims of the 2004 tsunami along the Indian Ocean and Hurricane Katrina. She’s now trying to raise $46 million to help impoverished farmers in central India where dire economic conditions have led to a suicide epidemic.
She has received several awards, including the James Park Morton award, and oversees a network of charitable organizations.
Amma also loves to sing and does it daily, for hours, and followers say the woman hardly sleeps.
We were given a quick moment to ask Amma a couple of questions, including what she considers the most dire humanitarian crisis of today. Her answer? The environment.
“Protecting nature is the first and foremost thing that we human beings should focus on now,” she said through a translator on her first day in the Bay Area. She next said that humans should eradicate poverty and live in a more natural fashion, embracing the earth and its resources rather than using poisons and pesticides to change its natural course.
Who needs a hug the most?
“Who doesn’t need it?” she replied. She said that everything in this world is made of vibrations and the most beautiful and pure vibration is that of love.
“The vibration of pure love transforms you completely,” she said.
Amma’s arrival Tuesday was not shrouded in pomp and circumstance. She arrived seated in the back seat of a tan Lexus and entered the two-story wooden building quietly, touching the hands of followers who then pressed their hands to their faces. One follower quietly tapped a gong. Another blew in a conch shell.
After a 10-minute meditation session, the 53-year-old Amma began her routine embracing sessions.
Now, these are not just any hugs. Not the pat-on-your-back-and-goodbye-type hugs. Amma guides the head of the person she is about to hug to her right shoulder and presses it against her body. She dips her head to the person’s ear and murmurs a personalized saying.
Amma smells like sage and spice. She is soft and warm. For a moment, though surrounded by hundreds of followers, it is just Amma and the person in her embrace.
The hug is a more prolonged affair here in the Bay Area than it is in India, as fewer people come to see Amma in the U.S. than they do in her homeland. Still, it is under the watchful eyes of hundreds who have waited hours for their chance at meeting and hugging Amma.
Amma usually first hugs people who have never received a hug from her — or darshan as her followers call it — before hugging repeat visitors.
She will be hugging people from today until June 13, starting at 10 a.m. and at 7:30 p.m. She will not appear June 11. Her final Bay Area public program will be at 7 p.m. June 15.
The M.A. Center is at 10200 Crow Canyon Road in Castro Valley. Call (510) 537-9417 for more information.