Welcome friend

Alongside my heart's
Secret and helpless cry
Shines my soul's
Sacred and powerful smile.

Excerpt from Ten Thousand Flower-Flames, Part 33, Number 3221 –Sri Chinmoy

There we were and here we are

Me, Upasana and my mother, Tooriya. Outwardly it seems we merely changed positions in the intervening 45 years between these two pictures ....  Inwardly another matter altogether. On the left, my pre-meditation days of hesitation and despair versus Tooriya's Camelot glamour as President Kennedy's Ambassador's to Thailand's wife: On the right, the evening Tooriya received her spiritual name from Sri Chinmoy in our mutual post-meditation soul's splendour, Sep 2006.

Getting from there to here

I first met Sri Chinmoy in October of 1979 in Tokyo at a concert, and became a student that very night. Within a year I moved back to New York and have been living in Queens where Sri Chinmoy resided until his Mahasamadhi in October 2007.  Very humbled and honoured to have the guidance of such a sincere spiritual teacher my entire adult life. It all began with a tiny advertisement at the Japanese National Tourist Bureau in Tokyo on 22 October announcing that Sri Chinmoy was going to be giving a concert in Tokyo on the 24th ....

Three decades later, I am still very humbled and honoured to have Sri Chinmoy as a spiritual teacher. His passing has been even more humbling and most of us experience his teachings and presence ever more strongly. As the years and decades roll onwards as they must, his last published poem will echo and re-echo down the corridors of time. (Photo: Sharani Robbins)

My physical death

  Is not the end of my life –

  I am an eternal journey.

  –Sri Chinmoy

My Christmas-New Year-Vacation-Aspiration-Prayers Part 52 

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The Journey In-between