A young girl explores the vibrant rainbow of items for sale in a southern Indian street market as she searches for a gift for her mother. Includes facts about the items mentioned and markets around the world, as well as photographs taken by the author in her hometown of Chennai, India.

Globally known as Amma, meaning "Mother," Mata Amritanandamayi has developed a massive transnational humanitarian organization based in hugs. She is familiar to millions as the "hugging saint," a moniker that derives from her elaborate darshan programs wherein nearly every day ten thousand people are embraced by the guru one at a time, events that routinely last ten to twenty hours without any rest for her. Although she was born in 1953 as a low-caste girl in a South Indian fishing village, today millions revere her as guru and goddess, a living embodiment of the divine on earth. Reflections of Amma focuses on communities of Amma’s devotees in the United States, showing how they endeavor to mirror their guru’s behaviors and transform themselves to emulate the ethos of the movement. This study argues that "inheritors" and "adopters" of Hindu traditions differently interpret Hindu goddesses, Amma, and her relation to feminism and women’s empowerment because of their inherited religious, cultural, and political dispositions. In this insightful ethnographic analysis, Amanda J. Lucia discovers how the politics of American multiculturalism reifies these cultural differences in "de facto congregations," despite the fact that Amma’s embrace attempts to erase communal boundaries in favor of global unity.

This book very subtly but effectively highlights the importance of daily conversations through the lens of a mother and daughter. Its universal application is the beauty of these interactions. While reading you will discover that these experiences happen to us regularly with our family, friends and at our professional set-up. Our real happiness resides in how we respond to these stimuli. Through short stories, dialogues, poems, illustrations, Bringing Up a Vedantic Mother gives us different insights on ways to embrace every experience/emotion unconditionally and relish every ‘ras’ in its purest form as the wisdom lies in these unfiltered conversations between them. Great philosophers said, ‘Life is a series of experiences.’ This book is a testimonial for it. This book shows us the importance of ‘being in the present’. It weaves all the human emotions like touching, feeling, appreciating, resenting, hating but letting it go. It tells us the importance of stringing little moments to add value to one’s life.

GLAM

A search for shipwrecked ancestors, forgotten histories, and a sense of home Fascinating and intimate , The Girl from Foreign is one woman's search for ancient family secrets that leads to an adventure in far-off lands. Sadia Shepard, the daughter of a white Protestant from Colorado and a Muslim from Pakistan, was shocked to discover that her grandmother was a descendant of the Bene Israel, a tiny Jewish community shipwrecked in India two thousand years ago. After traveling to India to put the pieces of her family's past together, her quest for identity unlocks a myriad of profound religious and cultural revelations that Shepard gracefully weaves into this touching, eye-opening memoir.

Mindfulness is defined as non-judgmental present moment awareness. Most people think that mindfulness meditation can only happen while seated in one position for extended periods of time in order to cultivate the inner quietude necessary for reducing stress and alleviating suffering. In this book, Kristy takes you on her personal mindfulness journey. She tells the stories of a few friends she meets along the way. As she explores alternate means to cultivating mindfulness skills, she finds that mindfulness can be achieved in almost any activity that fully engages the senses and brings awareness to what is happening in the body. When we become aware of body sensations, we are brought into the present moment. The mind lives in the past and the future. The body is here, now.

Have you ever felt a call from somewhere deep within telling you there must be more to life? For Meredith Rom, this call came at age twenty-two while she was lying in savasana on the floor of a packed New York City yoga studio. It came on the heels of an unpleasant breakup and an unforeseen turn in the economic market―so, with no job offers in sight, she chose to listen. Rom followed her intuition across the country to San Francisco, and soon after, halfway around the world to India. This coming-of-age memoir takes you inside the ashrams of gurus and sages of the far East, where one woman learns to heal her heart, believe in the magical happenstance of the universe, and find an unshakable love and trust within herself.