Motherhood-Personal and Universal
This Christmas Eve, my daughter Pooja completed 45 summers! Hard to believe in 5 years she will hit half a century. Hard to believe I will be the mother of a 50-year-old lady. How did this happen when I don’t feel a 50-year-old relic? Truth be told, we have no control over the chronological age but the freedom to feel young, youthful, and purposeful is our prerogative. Nature has no control over that. Totally up to the individual.
However, writing about ageing is not the intention of this write-up. While I was showering this morning, thoughts about motherhood hovered over my mind. At the time I found my spiritual path and a living Spiritual Guru in Sri Sri Ravi Shankar ji and soon began sharing His teachings as a volunteer faculty of the NGO/ organization called the Art of Living, found utmost fulfilment in relieving stress and bringing peace and calm in individual’s mind, I would still give the experience a second place to the joy of motherhood. I said to myself and others ‘ Being an instrument of the divine is ultimate but next only to the joy of motherhood’. I even dared to tell my non-judgemental, compassionate, and unconditionally loving Gurudev that I was a mother first and then everything else. He smiled and nodded His head!
After some more years, with a large body of work, interacting, guiding, and giving comfort to countless people through knowledge and techniques imparted by the Master, I began to doubt my belief! I was playing mother to them all who attended my programs or otherwise. Was my biological daughter any different? With a jolt, I realized He had made me a universal mother even though my love for my daughter remained undisturbed. 24 years ago, he asked us, Teacher Training participants ‘ Can you be a mother to everyone’?. I had nodded my head not knowing the full purport of it. Today, I think I know what that means, to an extent.
This expanded awareness, stretching personal love to universal love, is the gift of my Master. True to His word, He is making us realize through our own experience ‘ Whatever I am capable of, you are too’. While keeping all categories of personal love intact, be it parental love, romantic love, friendly love, or societal love, to experience the total of all compartmentalized love, the ‘Divine Love’ is to evolve into the full potential of human birth.
Three months into our marriage in 1976, we had dreamed of having a girl child and naming her Pooja. Twenty+ years later, my Guru made us understand the meaning of Pooja. ‘ poo means fullness, ja means that which is born out of fullness’. So, I can easily deduce my daughter Pooja is symbolic of what was to evolve later.
As I wind up 2023, I feel a complete sense of fullness both at a personal and universal level. How could this have been possible without my guide, friend, and philosopher, Gurudev, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Ji? I am grateful. I am blessed. I am blissed out awaiting His plans to lead me further on this path of love, the highest power on earth.
Leela Ramesh
Volunteer teacher@The Art of Living.
