Atlanta, GA, January 6, 2021: At the dawn of a new year, India’s eminent spiritual leaders came together to welcome peace and embrace humanity. Heartfulness, an organization that promotes a form of meditation that is practiced by millions of people across 130 countries worldwide conducted Reset, Refresh, Re-Heart, a 3-Day virtual event to promote meditation as a path to peace. Graced by the finest preachers the country revels in, the event was hosted by Daaji, guide of Heartfulness, moderated by filmmaking talent Shekhar Kapur and featured cultivated insights from Baba Ramdev, Sister B.K. Shivani and Shri Gaur Gopal Das.
2020 witnessed a mammoth of a health and economic crisis, a massive hit on both our physical and emotional wellbeing. Day 1 – Reset witnessed Baba Ramdev and Daaji, immersed in an insightful conversation centered on harnessing good energy this year and channelizing it into yoga and mindful meditation. Mr. Shekhar Kapur, the moderator and renowned film-maker, commenced the session with the urgent need for meditation. “ We need to meditate because we’ve forgotten who we are. We’ve forgotten that we are beings of love. We’ve forgotten that we are the tendrils of the imagination of eternity, of nature. We have forgotten that we are just energy balls, potentially of love, that have somehow individualized ourselves by the words ‘my nature’. Meditation essentially reminds you that you are a human being”.
Speaking in praise of this spiritual society, Baba Ramdev said, Heartfulness means to bring out the Love, Compassion, and Divinity that is present in everyone’s heart. In this regard, Daaji’s work is unparalleled”. Sharing his thoughts on the practice of Yoga, he added, “ This New Year, I invite everyone to make a resolution that they will meditate daily. One must not focus on the outer world so much that they forget the Self”. In a carefully put analogy, Daaji alluded to these thoughts, saying ”With meditation, when the soul becomes so pure, so full of love, then it becomes the foundation. Let’s take the example of a house. The house may be very strong, but if the foundation is built on sand, it will collapse. We may be physically, mentally and emotionally strong, but if we don’t have character, which is our moral strength, our world will come to an end”.
Day 2 – Refresh piqued the curiosity of the attendees with an interesting conversation on ‘The Past: To hold or to let go?’. Mr. Shekhar Kapur brilliantly spoke against greed in a conversation about identity and the negative connotation of identity. He said, “Sometimes, we identify ourselves with what we don’t have, and that’s where the negative idea of our identity seems to be affecting us most”. Speaking on curbing the negativity and what we need to do as a society, Sister B.K Shivani said, “ Let us consume and create positivity, pray, meditate, create affirmations and radiate healing energy to the planet. We are the creators of our destiny; we are the creators of our world — Sankalp se Srishti”. Adding to these observations, Daaji also spoke on the power of thoughts and their road to become sankalpa.
Encouraging mindful meditation and speaking about the benefits of the heartfulness way of meditation, Daaji said, “ One of them is that the heart becomes purer. Second, you become a fit vessel to receive this pranahuti we talked about — yogic Transmission. The third thing that happens is that you become enabled to clear out negativity”.
Day 3 – Re-Heart, was joined by Lifestyle Guru Shri Gaur Gopal Das in a session on how one can activate transformation through inner-connection. He said, “When we are worked up with the situations in our life, there is a lot of noise created by our negative thoughts, our negative emotions, our frustrations, our worries and our anxieties. And in that worked-up state, it’s hard to find our answers. When you just sit back and practise silence in your mind, you can listen to your true inner voice”. Commenting on how one can attain this state of calm, Daaji said, “Once you have decided what to achieve, ‘how to’ – the means to achieve that ‘what’ – becomes palpable easily, through the Heartfulness way of practice. It is said that the language of God, if you want to learn it, is only one language – silence”.
Mr. Shekhar Kapur also shared insights on the human obsession with defining, he said, “ The problem with our minds is that everything has to be defined. And so we come across a block by the need of our ego, by the need of our mind to constantly define. And that’s why the greatest seekers have been meditators because they don’t need to define anything. They are not looking for definition. They are not looking for answers, they are looking for an experience”.
The 3-Day event witnessed participation from audiences set across the globe. Ending on a high note, Daaji thanked all the spiritual leaders who joined the heartfulness guide on this event to herald a new beginning.
The three day-virtual event can be watched at this link:
hfn.link/refresh2021
Heartfulness Institute will continue to hold Live meditation sessions with Daaji at 9am IST on every Sunday via heartfulness youtube channel : http://youtube.com/heartfulness/live
Heartfulness offers a simple set of meditative practices and lifestyle changes, first developed at the turn of the twentieth century and formalized into a teaching through Shri Ram Chandra Mission in 1945 in India. These practices are a modern form of Yoga designed to support contentment, inner calm and stillness, compassion, courage, and clarity of thought, as the first step towards a purposeful life. They are simple and easily adopted and are appropriate for people from all walks of life, cultures, religious beliefs and economic situations, who are over the age of fifteen. Ongoing training in the Heartfulness practices is going on at thousands of schools and colleges, and over 100,000 professionals are meditating in corporations, non-governmental and government bodies worldwide. More than 5,000 Heartfulness Centres are supported by many thousands of certified volunteer trainers in 130 countries.