From Hollywood to Holy Woods | Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati | TEDxUniversityOfSanFrancisco

so most people go to India seeking enlightenment or at least advanced yoga studies I went because I liked the food 20 years ago I had graduated from Stanford and was doing my PhD in psychology with only my dissertation left it was time for a travel break I agreed to go to India a place I knew nothing about only because I was a staunch vegetarian or vegetarian as my friends used to say in India at least I knew I wouldn't have to grill waiters in languages I didn't speak about whether there was chicken broth in their vegetable soup or in the water they used to boil rice I was not religious I was not even one of those people who say well I'm not religious but I'm spiritual I had a bat mitzvah to make my grandparents happy it was just what you did I was an academic and a hippie if anyone ever said you couldn't dance all night on Saturday at a Grateful Dead show and still ace a psycho neurology exam on Monday morning I would have proven them wrong I was not consciously seeking or searching or yearning for God's grace and yet 36 months after being one of the only students to ever get an a-plus in dr. Phil Zimbardo psychology of mind control class I was sitting on the edge of the sacred Ganga river in Rishikesh India was tears of ecstasy streaming down my face the transformation happened suddenly I'm gonna put my feet in the river I had said after we dropped our bags at the hotel I was not expecting spiritual awakening but it happened before my toes even touched the water they were not sad tears I was crying of course but they weren't even happy tears they were tears of the truth tears of coming home I spent the next several days here in meditative bliss okay so this was where I belonged but where how doing what my connection was Parmar Snicket on the ashram where I now live began simply as the pathway for me to go from the hotel to the river I was walking through the option one day and I heard a voice say you must stay here so I looked around to see who had spoken if there was a voice clearly someone had spoken there was no one now in my entire sphere of reference and experience the only people who heard voices were schizophrenic and of course Joan of Arc but since I definitely was not Joan of Arc and I really hoped I was not schizophrenic I did what any self-respecting scientist would do I ignored the voice if no one had spoken I didn't hear anything about 30 seconds later I heard it again you must stay here so I look up when I see a sign that says office I went in and told them I wanted to stay spiritual India was not very open to following women they were perfectly polite but they said I was going to have to get special permission from the president of the ashram and unfortunately he was out of town okay so when has he due back I asked maybe tomorrow they said being American I understood maybe tomorrow to mean maybe tomorrow and every day I go and ask if he was back and every day they'd say maybe tomorrow which I only later learned is Indian English for I have no idea finally he did come back and he turned out to be not only the administrative head of the Austral but Swami Chidananda Saraswathi ji one of the most revered spiritual leaders of India you are welcome to stay Swamiji said unfortunately by now we had already made plans to go to the mountains the next day no problem Swamiji said stay when you get back this is your home so I left his room and I headed back to the hotel but my feet froze literally as I reached the turn to walk out of the ashram back to the hotel it was as though someone had stuck crazy glue on the bottom of my feet oh my god I thought I've contracted some horrible illness I've got to I've got polio I've got something I was supposed to be vaccinated against then I thought okay maybe they've just fallen asleep I'm not used to sitting on the ground as I was sitting with Swamiji so I reach down to massage them but there was no pins or needles no tingling they weren't asleep they just wouldn't okay my scientist self decided I'm going to fix this and so I visualized the motor neurons in my left brain firing to make my right leg move but nothing at this point a group of kids came running down the pathway playing tag and instinctively I just moved back oh great I'm free I thought but now even though I had just moved backwards I couldn't take one step power okay I'm a scientist I reasoned I must have some obscure condition in which I can only walk backwards I will therefore walk out of the ashram backwards but it didn't work I could not take one step out of the ashram either forward or backward but I could move back in the direction from which I'd come back towards mommy Gees room as I had done when the kids came running down the bend so I realized and I walked easily and freely back into small meters room I think I said I think I'm host to stay now that was what you could call the beginning I've spent the last 20 years in Rishikesh engaged in study of the self and in service to others so what is living in India Tommy first stay open the universe has a plan for you yes of course we have to choose a path and lock it but we only do that until we get a signal that says turn right now look at the caterpillar the caterpillar spends most of its life crawling on the ground and then one day it hears a voice or it gets a signal that says climb the tree now it's never seen anyone go up that tree and come back mom's gone up dad's gone up no one has come back that tree is the Bermuda Triangle caterpillars but when the signal comes that says climb it does and then the signal says now go out on the branch now weave yourself into a cocoon and then burst forth jump you can say it has no idea how to fly it's never flown but when that signal comes that says jump it does and you never hear of a caterpillar that missed the chance to become a butterfly because it was too scared to climb the tree or because it didn't know how to wave a cocoon or because it jumped out of the cocoon too soon and plummeted on the ground or of a butterfly that climbed back down tree instead of flying because it didn't believe it really could fly there is an intelligence in the universe that pervades all of creation including us but we have to trust it and we have to be quiet and still enough to hear it if the caterpillar spent its entire life bemoaning the fact that the millipede got a thousand legs and he only got 12 he might miss the call that said climb the tree the second lesson is that yourself is much more important than your shelf most of us spend a lot of time and energy focused on filling our shelves with possessions and we spend very little time thinking about the fullness of our self but it is in that fullness the real abundance lies in this culture no matter how much we have most of us want more if I could just have that or achieve this then I'd be happy but if our happiness is contingent upon something to fill our shelves then happiness and abundance will always be an arm's length away but in India even the poorest of the poor are so eager to share please please come home for a meal come for a cup of tea come for a cold drink people who cannot even afford to properly feed their families ask and ask until you agree abundance is not building mansions while others live in shacks or eating caviar while others starve abundance is connecting deeply with the fullness of our self recognizing that our cup runneth over and eagerly sharing with others lastly and most importantly in service to others I have discovered the fullness of myself not service from the perspective of one who has to those who don't or humanitarian serving the masses but service of self to self if you trip and you injure your right leg your left leg will pick up the extra weight we call that limping no one had to say oh great humanitarian left leg would you mind picking up a little bit of extra weight the left leg is not waiting for an award or a gold star it does it because it understands the right leg is self that is the goal of service to serve myself in you in serving the children I found myself here are a few images of the service that I've been blessed to be part of we build schools and orphanages women's empowerment programs medical care programs and now we build toilets and hand-washing stations and water filters how many of you have ever considered the possibility that you might have to go to the bathroom and there wouldn't be a toilet around this is how 600 million people in India about half of the population and two and a half billion people in the world go to the bathroom they don't have access to a toilet now if you were a boy or a man on culture you would have been raised to believe it was perfectly fine to drop your pants to urinate or defecate in public but if you were a girl or a woman in that culture you would have been raised to protect your body from public view you would not raise your sari in public which means you would not go to the bathroom in daylight across India girls and women wait for darkness to heed the call of nature they don't drink water or eat food during the day because if they drink they will have to pee and if they eat they will have to defecate the dehydration and malnutrition wreaks havoc on their bodies and of course on their unborn babies as well across the world more than 4,000 children die every day from diarrhea simply due to lack of clean water lack of sanitation and lack of hygiene about forty five of them have died just since I began this talk and so as family G always said we need to shift our focus from temples to toilets so we started building toilets and hand-washing stations and teaching proper sanitation and we formed the global interfaith wash alliance leaders of many different religions coming together to say it is time to expand our definition of peace it is no longer enough to simply say thou shalt not kill children across the world are suffering and dying they are our responsibility spiritual awakening does not take us further from the world it brings us closer spiritual awakening does not separate us it collects us spiritual awakening is not about my bliss in the midst of your misery spiritual awakening is awakening from the illusion that who we are is based on what we earn acquire or achieve an awakening into the reality that each of us is an embodiment of the divine it is awakening out of the illusion of our separateness into the reality of our oneness a reality in which there is no place that I end and you begin it is awakening from a life that is in pieces into a life of peace thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 240,744

Rating: 4.9179521 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Achievement, Activism, Adventure, America, Behavior, Cause, Change, Choice, Compassion, Consciousness, Decision making, Faith, God, Happiness, Hope, Ideas, Identity, Individualism, Meditation, Mindfulness, Peace, Personal growth, Psychology, Purpose, Religion, Schools, Self, Self improvement, Self-help, Spirituality, Travel, Truth, Volunteering, Water, Women

Id: oxYqIjqwHuc

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2017