Recently in South Africa, students of Sri Chinmoy organised a festival which brought together spiritual seekers and peace-lovers from many different countries.
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Among the events was a tree planting ceremony attended by officials from the nearby Parks Department, accompanied by a plaque with quotes from Sri Chinmoy and the United Nations Declaration.
Later on, members and friends of the Sri Chinmoy Centre met together for an evening of japa (meditative chanting).
The ‘Run and Become’ chain of running stores was started in the early 1980’s in London by one of Sri Chinmoy’s students Ongkar Tony Smith. The name comes from one of Sri Chinmoy’s aphorisms: ‘Run and Become, Become and Run. Run to succeed in the outer world. Become to proceed in the inner world.’ There are now two other shops, in Edinburgh and Cardiff.
After 20 years in business, the Edinburgh store has just moved to a new City Centre location in Queensferry Street. This follows on from a major renovation of the London store 18 months ago.
To mark the opening, there was a small ceremony attended by many Scottish athletics luminaries.
More information: Run and Become blog
It have been a very active month for the World Harmony Run – the European Run is currently proceeding through the British Isles while the Asia-Pacific run started in Auckland, NZ and travelled through that country before arriving in Australia.
The Irish team spent St Patricks Day in traditional style – by participating in the St Patricks Day Parade in the town of Drogheda
The run then continued on to Scotland and the UK where they have been running through some beautiful scenery on their way to London
The Asia-Pacific run began on March 5 with an opening ceremony in Auckland’s central square
On March 19, the runners crossed from New Zealand to Australia, with a welcoming ceremony for the runners in Adelaide which included representatives from 25 countries releasing 25 doves to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Harmony Run
The Songs of the Soul concert tour began 2010 with three enthusiastically received concerts in Guatemala.
Songs of the Soul began in 2008 as a way to celebrate and introduce people to Sri Chinmoy’s musical legacy. The concerts feature Sri Chinmoy’s music played in different styles by many different groups, from instrumental duets to huge 100-member orchestras. In 2009, 19 such concerts were performed across 3 continents.
The first Guatemalan concert was performed in Panajachel overlooking beautiful Lake Atitlan. The second concert took place in Guatemala city.
The last concert was an outdoor performance in front Hermita de Santa Cruz in the ancient colonial town of Antigua. Much of the town was destroyed in earthquakes in 1773, leaving many impressive ruined structures behind. Around the building there is an outdoor amphitheater which seated 600 people for the concert.
More from songsofthesoul.com:
The Songs of the Soul tour began on Sunday with a warmly received concert in the Czech city of ZlÃn.
The full house audience was extremely moved by the concert, which featured performances by a range of artists (Adesh and Sadanand, Mandu and Visuddhi, Arthada’s group, Agnikana’s group, Pavaka Richot, and Matthijs Jongpier) culminating in the final performance by Gandharva Loka Orchestra (pictured above)
The Songs of the Soul concert series began in 2008 as a way of bringing the depth and beauty of Sri Chinmoy’s music to audiences worldwide in a variety of styles. Since then the concerts have taken place all around the world, in places ranging from Bali to St Petersburg.
Sunday was the beginning of a 9-day tour. On Monday, they played in Bratislava and tonight (Tuesday) and tomorrow they will play in the Hungarian cities of Budapest and Gyor. Also scheduled are concerts in the Austrian cities of Vienna, Salzburg and Graz, and in the Slovenian cities of Ljubljana and Maribor.
See songsofthesoul.com for more details…
Sri Chinmoy always saw sports – and running in particular – as tremendously beneficial to the spiritual life, both in terms of keeping the body healthy and for the opportunities it afforded for people to reach their highest potential. In 1977, he founded the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team to serve the worldwide running community, and it has since grown to be the largest organiser of endurance sports events in the world. One very popular race it organises is the 24 Hour Self Transcendence Race in London every October. Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team member Matthias Eckerle went over to help, and he has kindly provided us with this eyewitness report:
The race started at 12pm Saturday, continuing around a 400m track right through the night till 12pm the next day. The field of runners came from many different countries. As well as organising the race, there were also two members of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team participating. One of the, Asprihanal Aalto from Finland, has the distinction of being a four-time winner of the world’s longest race, the 3100 Mile Self-Transcendence race. Alongside the faster runners, it was especially aspiring to see many older people also participating – the oldest was 77 years!
For me, it was a nice experience to take care of the runners and to meet their requests for coffee, tea and soup – even after hours of running most of them were still able to smile! With in a couple of hours, we knew the names of all the runners, and they really appreciated this personal treatment.
Some of them (including the winner) ran very fast in the beginning before slowing down towards the end of the race. Others were mre constant, including Asprihanal, who in the last hour put on a surprising burst of speed to run 7 kilometers in 40 minutes to end up in 7th place. One of our jobs as helpers is to run along with the runners forthe last 2 or 3 minutes to mark thir finishing spot – I was running with Asprihanal, and it was a very nice feeling – he really is a very humble guy who doesnt think of boasting about his considerable achievements.
The race was won by Chris Finhill covering a distance of 243km followed in 2nd place by Ireland’s Eoin Keith who ran 235km, breaking the Irish national record along the way. However, a race like this is really all about competing, and at the end everybody was honoured with a race medal and photo commemorating their achievement. It was very inspiring for me, and I think I will definitely work towards entering this race myself at some point in the future.
Race photos: Alan Young
Athletics inspiration…
Tatyana Lebedeva, winner of the triple jump in the Athens Olympics and two time silver medalist in Beijing, first met Sri Chinmoy in 2004. Recently, upon returning from the Beijing Olympics she gave a very nice interview with the International Athletics Federation where she talks about how Sri Chinmoy has encouraged her. “His philosophy of constant Self-Transcendence left a deep trace in my life, and I always try to improve myself, no matter how tired I may feel.†she reflected in the interview. “It is impossible to live only in sport. I need to learn a lot, so that when I finish my sports career, I would have a chance to bring real benefits to the sport of athletics. This is my internal task and I formulated it thanks to the philosophy of Sri Chinmoy.†Tatyana has no intention of ending her athletics career just yet, and already has her sights fixed on Olympic gold in London in 2012. Read interview here…
Karteek swims channel for 9th time
Karteek Clarke from the Sri Chinmoy Centre in Edinburgh cmpleted the gruelling swim from Dover to Calais, making it his 9th time! Quite a few of Sri Chinmoy’s students have swum the channel, and in fact the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team (the sporting organisation founded by Sri Chinmoy as a service to the sporting community) holds the record for the team with the most Channel crossings.
Gandharva Loka Orchestra
In April 2008 and again in August 2008, two beautiful concerts were performed in tribute to Sri Chinmoy and his music. These concerts, called ‘Songs of the Soul’ featured well known musicians such as Philip Glass, Roberta Flack, Boris Purushottama Grebenshikov and Kristin Hoffman. One highlight of both concerts was the Gandharva Loka Orchestra, a 75 member instrumental and choral ensemble of Sri Chinmoy’s students, performing dazzling orchestral arrangements of Sri Chinmoy’s songs which brought the audience to their feet. The orchestra are now scheduled for a European tour in November, taking in the cities of Berlin, Prague, Munich, Milan, Zurich and Heidelberg and a North American and Canadian tour next spring.
All across the world, plans are at an advanced stage to make the 2008 incarnation of the World Harmony Run an absolutely gigantic event. Already the run has made its way through South East Asia and the Middle East, and is currently in north Africa.
The European leg of the Run will begin in Rome at the end of March, and will visit over 50 countries on its route. Among the many events planned will be Guinness World record attempts in Dublin, Ireland and Cambridge, England.
The US run will begin on April 10 and cover all 50 states in a four month journey. At the end of April, the Oceania leg of the Harmony Run will embark upon an unprecedented journey around Australia, before continuing its journey in New Zealand in September. There will also be Canadian and Russian legs of the Run – making it an event which truly spans the globe.
You can catch up on the recent news at www.worldharmonyrun.org
Some photo albums have appeared on the Sri Chinmoy Centre site remembering aspects of Sri Chinmoy’s life in different ways:
This picture is taken from a lovely photo album called ‘Beautiful Sri Chinmoy’ by Jowan Gauthier which is exactly that – beautiful pictures taken of Sri Chinmoy from his trip to St. Petersburg and his visit to Mongolia which took place in May of this Year. There is also a photo album by Projjwal Pohland, who accompanied Sri Chinmoy on his last trip abroad to St. Petersburg and shares with us some beautiful photographs.
Two recent prayer-poems written by Sri Chinmoy have recently come to light on the Sri Chinmoy Inspiration Group which seem especially poignant now given the Master’s passing.
Every Saturday morning whenever he was in New York, Sri Chinmoy would arrive at the 2 mile race held by his students to give out the prizes, which (in keeping with the participation-rather-than-winning focus of the races) usually consisted of a banana for each of the first three male and female finishers. Before giving the prizes, he would spontaneously compose a race prayer – sometimes this prayer would even be set to music! Sri Chinmoy composed his final race prayer on the morning of September 29th – here we can see how in the eye of a spiritual Master, the body’s trials and tribulations pale in comparison the soul’s delight:
The fever of the body
Comes and goes.
May my God-love-heart fever
Remain forever and forever.
The fever of the body
Is torture unbearable.
My God-love-heart fever
Is rapture unimaginable.
(unofficial version, not yet published)
The second poem came to light during a meditation function held by Sri Chinmoy’s students in New York yesterday evening. For the past two years, Sri Chinmoy had been composing a series of rhyming couplets, one for every day of the year, in a collection ‘My God-Hunger Cry’. This collection was not released in book form like most of Sri Chinmoy’s output, but rather in sheets containing a week’s worth of poems. Last night, the final sheet was made available during the meditation function, containing prayer-poems Sri Chinmoy had written for the week ending November 1; the following was the last poem on the sheet.
“Alas, my whole body has started to decay.
But I am so happy that every day
My Lord is getting younger day by day.”
Thank you to Meriem Ait-Ouyahia and Arpan De Angelo for posting these two poems on the Inspiration Group. Photograph by Kedar Misani on Sri Chinmoy Galleries.
A very beautiful recording of Sri Chinmoy singing the word ‘gratitude’ over and over again, spontaneously putting music to the words as he sang, was played during Sri Chinmoy’s memorial ceremony, and again when his body was finally laid to rest. The recording took place on 13 April 1986, 22 years to the day Sri Chinmoy first arrived in America. Prachar Stegemann recalls the occasion:
“Guru was seated at our then-meeting place ‘Progress-Promise,’ painting Jharna Kalas on a table in front of him. He spontaneously started humming, then singing the word ‘Gratitude’ over and over. After a short while, Dhanu brought a microphone and placed it in front of Guru while he continued to sing and paint. From time to time you can hear the rapid sounds of the sponges Guru was using to paint with striking the paper.”
“When the cassette was produced and ready for sale, Guru refused to charge any money for it. He simply gave it away to all…”
These recollections appeared on the Sri Chinmoy Inspiration Group, where students of Sri Chinmoy have recently penned many beautiful memories of their teacher and of the week-long vigil following his passing.
Listen to this recording on Radio Sri Chinmoy….
(Photo of gratitude-flower: Sharani Robins)