On the second day of our stay in the lower Alps at the Gitanananda Ashram, we had a special meeting with what we called the Lakshmi Team. Lakshmi is the name of Svami Yogananda Giri's publishing house, which has been  publishing for decades.

We met in Shanti Mandir, the main ashram chalet. Their team had set out about three dozen books they have published over the years, and we were impressed with the collection--both the content, which is thorough and authentic, and the production values, which are elegant and, importantly, consistent in style. One immediately sees the entire body of work as a single and unified unit. The word euphony came to mind as we explored the titles on a large table.

We sat in a sun-filled room, and, to our delight, Swamiji joined us for the discussions (we should have known he would, but were still learning at the time how engaged he is with every tiny detail of the ashram and its work).

Their main team is four strong, but seven attended, as they share extended responsibilities in this important area. As with us, publications are central to their teaching and outreach and a significant amount of their seva is committed to the printed word.

Joining the peripatetic Hawaiian sadhus were: Svami Yoganandaji, Svamini Hamsananda, Svamini Nirajitananda, Ila, Malini and Kamala Devi.

Svami Yogananda Giri was amazingly familiar with all of our works, books and magazine. Hamsanandaji shared Lakshmi's past projects and future publishing ambitions. As the conversation moved around the room, we soon became aware that this is a group that Gurudeva would describe as "over-qualified for the job." They are knowledgable in most of the European languages, plus Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit, Latin and more. The team is fully ensconced in InDesign, enough to have discovered its flawed indexing functions. Like us, they have struggled with diacritical marks, which are key in their technical texts, and there was ample discussion about fonts and the typesetting of Devanagari script, about which our monastery has had a hand in advising Adobe's software engineers in the last few years.

We shared Himalayan Academy's publishing efforts and strategies, both in books and online, and identified a couple of areas that we could help them with (not an easy thing to find): firstly, taking two of their key books and creating ebook formats which they can put online so their readers and students can have access to the resources on their iPads, Kindles, Nooks and Android readers, plus PDFs for downloading.

Like us, Lakshmi and the ashram are deeply immersed in South Indian art, culture and scripture, so secondly we offered them access to our broad collection of art for such works as Tirukural, Periyapuranam and such.  They may use some of our children's book and Hindu History text assets.

In turn, they offered to translate some of Bodhinatha's Publisher's Desk articles into Italian, which would be a great boon for Hinduism Today in Europe.

What a joy it was to see another group spreading authentic Hindu teachings, their roots firmly in India, their branches spreading across Europe.

After this meeting, we were taken to a large satsang hall where some 20 or so yoga students had gathered to meet the swamis from Hawaii. They are all here, living at the ashram for the weekend, following a course of yoga asanas, pranayama and philosophy which goes from dawn to dusk for several days. The monks handled this so effortlessly; we could see they had honed the skill of having so many seekers in their midst.

We were invited to sit on the stage while Svamini Hamsananda introduced us. Paramacharya spoke of our own life of yoga in the monastery and then of our recent discoveries of yoga in America (including the just-concluded lawsuit in Encinitas, California) and Europe and responded to a couple of questions, one among them a request to say a few words about Siva Peruman, which he described as All in all, immanent and transcendent, love and consciousness, the divine and the ordinary. It was all translated into Italian for the yogis. This last question is indicative of the ashram's wonderful depth of teaching yoga, which is inclusive of temple worship, Durga puja, scriptural study, yamas and niyamas and more.

More to come of this visit as we are able to carve out little windows of time to process photos and write of our experiences.

Note: This post contains new content that didn't make it into its original posting

As described in our previous post, arriving at the Svami Gitananda Ashram in Altare, in the province of Savona, Italy, was a colorful delight beginning with an orange sunset on one side and a cadre of orange-robed monks on the other. But this was not the only colorful delight. As our two days at this mountain monastery unfolded, walking the hilly grounds where there is nary a square meter of flat space, reminiscent of the Himalayas, we encountered one shrine after the other, each with one or more black granite murtis (all carved in Mahabalipuram), the pillars and roofs of the Chola-style shrines all carved from plaster and painted in the traditional South Indian way.

Self-sufficiency is one of the cardinal principles of the founding guru Svami Yogananda Giri's South Indian monastery, and they do virtually everything themselves, from growing the food to splitting wood for the winter fires (100,000 kg for that each year, it turns out). That ideal expresses itself in the dozens of ornate shrines that proudly stand along the pathways. When the Indian silpis were here for some 10 months building the temple, the monks took pains to learn the craft and when the silpis returned the monks went to work to design, build, sculpt and paint these delightful Chola-style monuments, each holding a Hindu deity.

So many shrines, including ten forms of the Goddess Sri Lalita Tripurasundari (who is also enshrined in the monastery's main temple--more on that later), Siva, Ganesha, Valli-Devayanai-Shanmugam, Panchamukha Ganapati, Durga Mahadevi, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Sheshanaga Narayanar, Sri Akara-Ukara-Makara (three murtis representing Pranava Aum), and on and on.

And the bells! Wow, the bells. Two massive metal bells, cast in the Vatican's not-too-far-away bell forge in Brescia, are installed on huge armatures. Along with regular clappers (which must weigh tons each), they have electric hammers that are controlled by a computerized, timed system that Svami Nityapriyananda set up himself. So, at set times, the bells ring, first the smaller (still huge) of the two, in a lilting pattern, and then the enormous one, tolling the hour of the day. The bells must be able to be heard from miles around, but the monastery is so deep in the forest, so far even from the nearest villages of Altare and Carcare, that the residents of those towns may only hear a faint whisper of what starts as a commanding announcement onsite. 

Between the tightly but somehow perfectly, divinely arranged temples and shrines dotting the rolling landscape of the main monastery area, gorgeous landscaping is a feast for the eyes. Unlike the tropical plants of our home, here the flora is of the low Alps, where the monastery is located. Evergreen trees, grasses, flowering bushes, apples, apricots, plums, cherries, gardenias. This is all the masterful work of one of the founding residents of the monastery, Svamini Ma Uma Shakti, and her small team. But if you ask how she did it, she will smile sweetly and place the garden at Durga's feet.

Daily offerings to the Deities are extensive, and, to fulfill the need, the monastery has gone to great effort to plant over 5,000 rose bushes on a steep, sun-facing hillside, standing out from the otherwise all-surrounding chestnut forest. Here, more than enough flowers are grown for the temple pujas and offerings to the many shrines, and to the guru, Svami Yogananda Giri, who quietly, intuitively, masterfully leads the monks here in their hermit life of sadhana and service. So many varieties of roses, nearly all fragrant--as the monks here say that fragrance is the essence of the flower, the physical counterpart to its subtle prana, and without fragrance, a flower would be pointless to offer. Svami Isvarananda tends the roses along with his many other duties. All the monks have multiple duties, and come together whenever tasks require it, so their skill set is amazingly broad.

Not to mention the dogs. As a little side business that they hope will help support the monastery someday, the monks breed large Spaniels. These enormous, furry creatures are quite a job to take care of, walk, feed and play with (the puppies are so much fun), but, like everything else, this is the job of one or two of the monks, and they do it with such precision and joy. Svamini Hamsananda, who ingeniously manages the monastery's teaching, PR and publication programs--as well as our two-day stay here--takes care of a wrinkled old bulldog named Yogi. Yogi likes to be taken around in a wheelbarrow, and Svamini, as his chief of staff, dutifully obliges. Yogi is nothing short of adorable and ridiculous, reminding us of some of our feline friends back home on Kauai.

Feasting wasn't only for the eyes here, it turned out. We were privileged to take our meals in a designated room upstairs in the main monastery building, joined always by five of the senior swamis as well as Svami Yogananda, the guru. This was a real treat, and these informal times with our brother swamis and swaminis were precious opportunities to talk monk stuff, including how their life works, how our life at our monastery goes, their projects, our projects, their philosophy, our philosophy, and on and on. It turns out we are quite remarkably alike, astonishingly so. They eat such a healthy diet, filled with fresh herbs and home-made breads. But back to feasting for a moment.

These Italian monks, as you might imagine, are amazing cooks. One of the sannyasinis is from Napoli--yes, Napoli, a.k.a. Naples, where pizza was invented. And with a traditional wood-fire brick oven, the swamis and brahmacharis make pizza once a week. They put it off a couple of days to time it with our visit, much to our surprise--and delight! It was without question the most amazing pizza we have ever enjoyed. Not one was the same as another. The variety was as mind-boggling as the taste (and educational for one of our own monthly monastery pizza chefs). Clearly the monks' love and dedication extends to every part of their life, as it does in our monastery. They are a living example of Gurudeva's instructions years ago: "Life is meant to be lived joyously."

More tomorrow on the deeper aspects of our amazing visit.

On July 4th the monks celebrated the completion of the monastery's new solar array, and its partial independence from the Island's diesel-generated power grid. A short blessing was performed and the array switch was turned on by Bodhinatha. You can see our array's activity live online at: enlighten.enphaseenergy.com
In the ensuing months the monastery will monitor its daytime power usage and begin to adjust energy use for maximum solar effectivity. For example dehumidifiers can be timed for peak solar power hours rather then running at night. The hope is that a very large percent of all our power usage will be from our new array. The whole monastery and the Siddhidata Kulam especially want to thank Kulapati Easvan Param for all the work he has done to see this project come to reality. Over the past several years he has been selflessly providing consulting during all phases of the project and flying over to Kauai to assist with installation. He has even gone through the State of Hawaii, Electricians License exams to maintain a Hawaiian Electrician's license, just to be able to help the monastery in an official capacity. And with that in hand he did the final crucial hook up of the solar array to the grid. Mikka Nandri Easvan!

Bodhinatha will be in Maryland on August 9th and 10th. Join in the festivities!

Off to Italy

From Barcelona we flew two hours to Italy, landing in Venice only to take a water taxi to the lobby of our hotel. That's a first! We are here just a few hours enroute to Milan, but we do manage to get lost for 90 minutes late in the night. It turns out that streets here almost all end at a waterway, a dock for boats. The water taxi that took us into the city, down a canal and right to the pier of our hotel, which was in a centuries-old building (all buildings here are centuries-old, actually) that was originally a monastery, then later a gondola factory before it was remodeled inside as a hotel. An evening and morning were spent in this unusual city, with its tiny alleys, canals, frontage paths and such. There are no cars here, at least past one area, Piazzale di Roma, where busses and taxis can cross a bridge and drop people off.


Otherwise transportation throughout the entire city is by foot, gondola and water taxis called vaporetto (plural: vaporetti), which are long, skinny power boats, frequently made of wood in the style that you would imagine from James Bond movies and such. It's so easy to get lost here because all the paths and foot bridges over the canals look pretty much the same. And boy did we get lost. So you can walk half a mile down a narrow alley, only to stop at the waters edge, brick walls rising five feet apart on each side and no way to continue. So back you (we) go, down another and another. Certainly there is a method that we don't understand, and we end up after midnight at our hotel. Siva clearly wants us to exercise more. It's a magical little city, though, and the people are wonderful.

Our train to Milan gives us a chance to write about the adventures in Spain, and two hours later we are met at the train station by Svamini Hamsanandaji and Svami Nityapriyananda from the alpine ashram in Italy's northwest.

Hamsananda is one of the founding members of the Svami Gitananda Ashram in Altare. She is absolutely sharp, intelligent and so warm and wonderfully friendly. She is in charge of their publications as well as their participation in the Italian Hindu Union (which just a few months ago accomplished with great effort to get Hinduism officially recognized as a religion by the Italian government), as well as likely other matters in the monastery. The 31-year-old Nityapriyananda is basically their Siddhidatta Kulam talaivar. He takes care of all the buildings and grounds at the monastery, with the only two other male monks as his team. He is so bright, so intelligent, so friendly, so disciplined. (More about them and their monastery and our brother and sister monks in a later post.)

The swamis from the monastery in the northwest had driven over five hours to pick us up and take us throughout the rest of the North to visit three temples in less than 24 hours on the way back to their monastery.

The four of us drive through the Milan countryside, which has grape vineyards as far as the eye can see, ending up at our B&B atop a hillock, complete with a small church. We get settled, then off we go to our first Hinduism Today interview in Italy, held at a small temple that is just beginning. In fact, that seems to be a pattern here. Some 20 years ago a large group of Panjabis arrived from India, eager for work, which was plentiful in those days. But in the intervening years Italy has suffered a rather severe economic depression, and what few jobs there are the Italians are inclined to give to their own. The Panjabi men struggle with support of their families, and many are leaving Italy for other European nations. This exodus is having an impact on the Hindu population in Italy, and many here are worried. Oops, we are moving into the HT story, back to the mission at hand.

The next day the four saffron-clad swamis move from one village temple to the next, gathering in each one with the leaders of the community and asking our questions about their history, their present circumstances and what they see for their future.

The two swamis from the Svami Gitananda Ashram were infinitely patient with our interviews, and have deep knowledge of Hinduism here in Italy and all over Europe, having been instrumental in the creation of the recently ratified Italian Hindu Forum which guarantees certain rights for Hindus here. We pass the long hours on the road talking about monastic life, about sannyas, gurus and our surprisingly similar missions. Of this, more soon.

Day's end comes as we pass Genova on the Mediterranean sea coast, then turn inland at Savona, to climb into the hills where the ashram is located. The paved road turns into a mountain trail, narrow and well-worn, passing through a forest of blossoming chestnut trees. Up and up we climb, around tight corners, mile follows mile. It seems to us to be late afternoon, but it's 9:30pm and the sun is just setting over the mountains on the other side of the valley. As we get out of the car, the bright orange sun is on our left and a smiling group of bright orange swamis are on the right, gathered to greet their Hawaiian sannyasin brothers. We are home!

Mr and Mrs. Soma Rajah are visiting for the first time from Birmingham, England, on their way to attend her cousin's (Ravi Nadarajah for those who know the family) daughter's wedding. They both hail from Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Her family members were named after Satguru Yogaswami and her family home was just about a mile from his hut. They are founder-trustees of Shri Venkateswara Balaji Temple near Birmingham, known as the "largest Hindu temple of South Indian architecture in Europe." venkateswara.org.uk