Mother worship and Omkar

Tonight we just had our 4th Puja of the course. The pujas are ceremonial events with a lot of chanting and singing and fire and dress up and offerings and beautiful yantra designs and all sorts of traditional symbolism.

The first 3 were held in an outdoor covered corridor (because we had pretty big fires going) and they all sucked. It was uncomfortable, cold, wet, bugs everywhere, and you felt disconnected unless you were in the 4-5 person front row. By the 3rd puja, I just showed up early and sat in the back so I could zone out and be comfy.

So needless to say I wasn't very excited about tonight's event. However, it turned out to be awesome. We held the puja indoors, with fantastically organized seating arrangement, beautiful candles everywhere, and it was a tribute to Devi, the Devine/supreme mother, or whatever you want to call her. The names aren't important, but the symbolism was. The main yantra is in the picture from 2 posts back. I am sure there are many star of David fans reading this so they should get a kick out of it. Lots of these in Vedanta symbols.

This time, instead of ceremoniously celebrating a confusing deity, this time we were told to focus our thoughts on our own mother, as she and Devi are the same thing in essence. This made things nice and practical. I'll spare the details on the chanting and the offerings, but suffice to say it was a beautiful ceremony and I got to think about my mom the whole time. (I wonder if she reads this blog). I feel this effectively makes up for my mothers day inactivity. The previous blog post is a picture of my "offering" area which you can see I put a lot of passion into as opposed to the folks siting next to me.

I also spent some time thinking about the other mothers who are near to me (Gigi, auntie belle, etc) and thought it was an excellent way to celebrate the meaningfulness of motherhood.

After the ceremony finished, swamiji had me come over to him to be given a spiritual name. A few other people in the class had received their names earlier in the course but I didn't want one then because I didn't think he could know me well enough by then. Tonight was a perfect opportunity to get the name, and it was funny because about 20 girls were standing there anxiously awaiting to find out what it would be. Swami started saying..."your spiritual name is..." an then because of the crowd, changed it to "his spiritual name is...Omkar". Which means "the sound of Om". Everyone oohed and Ahhed as apparently this is a highly valued name within India (with movies and songs about it as well).

Om is obviously a pretty important sound in yoga and has many high level meanings and symbolisms which you can go and wikipedia on your own. I'm happy with it.

Midnight and time for bed.