“Does environmental cleanliness have anything to do with inner transformation?”
“Is it possible to build a meaningful connection with someone in less than a day without speaking their language?”
 
    Bela, Birju and Audrey gave incredible insights on these questions and many more during our forest call last Saturday. The three of them have volunteered at the Gandhi Ashram during different times in the past few years and shared stories from their time there.


 
    The Gandhi ashram has been an abode of experiments in moral and spiritual values since its inception by Mahatma Gandhi. Today, decades later, the ashram inspires thousands of people in its pursuits of universal love and service. The ashram is home to several projects, to name a few:
Manav Sadhna is a non profit that serves the underprivileged with the sole motto of “Love all, Serve all”.
Moved by Love is an effort to create projects that are designed to shift our culture towards a greater sense of trust, connection and community.
Servicespace has worked closely with Gandhi ashram in hosting several giftivism retreats based on the principles of generosity and unconditional love.    

   Bela is a writer and one of the conspirers behind forest calls. She has anchored Wednesdays in DC and has taken an active part in ServiceSpace activities in the East Coast. She has generously shared the gifts of her pen through beautiful articles about many of our forest call guests.
         
    Birju is a long time volunteer of ServiceSpace who plays a crucial role in anchoring Wednesdays at New York or holding the ServiceSpace retreats in the East Coast. He does innovative experiments in bringing mindfulness and spiritual thinking into the corporate world.
 
    Audrey is an ardent poet and a gifted writer. She has featured many of our forest call guests in her writing. Audrey has done several experiments in inner transformation may it be spending several months in a Buddhist monastery or walking fifty five miles from Santa Clara to Berkeley to attend Wednesdays.
 
    We asked our guests to share their most memorable experiences and takeaways from their trip. Our star volunteers gave us a generous peek into their ideas and experiences:
 
Being vs. doing – the power of being in the moment:
     Bela reflected on her initial plans when she went to volunteer at Manav Sadhna for six weeks. She was keen on making the most of her time and had an elaborately planned checklist and ideas of projects she would work on while she was there. Some of the leaders at the ashram advised her to go with the flow of her heart and to spend some time in meditation while she was there. Bela was anxious about doing all that she wanted to do but relented anyway.

 
    Bela recalls meeting Raghubhai. Raghubhai lost the use of his legs when he was affected by polio as a child. The polio could not beat his indomitable spirit for universal love and service. He delivers special meals to homeless individuals living in the slums surrounding the ashram. Bela was inspired by his devotion to delivering food everyday, rain or shine, weekday or weekend. What inspired Bela the most about Raghubhai was the presence he brought to each individual he delivered the food to. He would take the time to connect with them and spend lighter moments singing songs in their company. His presence lights up the lives of the old men and women who feel tremendously blessed to receive his loving attention and hand delivered meals.  He also delivers Tulsi plants as a sign of peace to families in the slums affected by quarrels or disagreements. He would sit with them and talk to them about amicable ways of resolving their differences. Bela wrote a beautiful article about her time with Raghubhai when she returned from India.
 
     “What I learned from seeing him live with such presence and purity of intention was a ripple into heart-led being instead of mind-led doing and that is something I am very much working on and when you come from a place of heart led being, you cant even measure the ripples or see the ripples that are being created but it is just beautiful.”  
 
Environmental cleanliness and taking the broom to our mind:
 
      Birju recalled attending the two year death anniversary of Ishwar Dada while he was at the ashram. “Ishwar Dada is the father of the toilet movement, the sanitation movement in India. and in many ways the patriarch of the entire community coz it was his inner shifts that caused a lot of these ripples to happen as time went on...” Birju was asked to reflect on Ishwar Dada’s impact on his life and he realized that he had met Ishwar Dada very briefly four years ago and yet the ripples of the impact were pretty deep. He recalls meeting him at ESI, the Enviromental Sanitation Institute which conducted training programs to teach people about cleanliness and building regenerative toilets that had zero waste and worked in different cultural and climatological conditions. “..There were several people at the training program which ended with Ishwar Dada’s speech about the importance of cleanliness in life as I was listening to him I realized that he was speaking to a root a root that could go grow into something as time went on and you would have to trust him on his word on what would grow.”  This was in 2008 and Birju decided to step it up in his personal life by taking a more active role in cleaning up his home and surroundings.

 
       Four years flow by and many changes have happened in the ashram since. He was visiting a museum with Jayesh Bhai and talking about cleanliness and serving in the moment when Jayesh Bhai pointed to a janitor who was sweeping the floor and asked Birju to relieve the janitor for a few minutes. Birju went to the janitor and after some initial awkward moments of trying to make a connection, Birju managed to convince the janitor to give him the broom. “Eventually he relents and I take over and I do a relatively poor job of sweeping but I put my heart and soul into it and I try to connect with him to hear a little bit about what he is upto and why he is here in this space and time and after a few minutes our tour group is moving on and I thank the gentleman for giving me the opportunity and the look on his face, it was an acknowledgement of recognizing that we tried to connect, it is not like I made his life any easier in terms of the work that he had to do but I think there is a psychic burden that is relieved when you know you are not alone and I felt  that and my sense is he did as well and so it was kind of a deepening of understanding of Ishwar dada’s message: cleanliness can happen at a mundane level, the cleanliness creates connection within society if you do it in a way  that is geared towards others.”  Later, at a gathering of 400 people, Anarben spoke about Ishwar Dada’s message of cleanliness and pointed out that when Ishwar Dada spoke about cleanliness all his life, he was really talking about the subtle meaning of cleanliness and that he was really working on internal safai or internal cleanliness.

 
     These experiences made Birju reflect on the true meaning of cleanliness and the effects of taking the broom to the inner recesses of our mind.
 



Communicating without a language:
      Audrey recalls spending an evening with a family in the slums when she was at the ashram. Each volunteer was paired off with a family, one volunteer spent the evening with a janitor while another volunteer spent the evening with a street vendor who sells chai. Audrey spent the evening with Champaben and her family. Champaben is a vegetable vendor. Audrey had picked up on some Gujarati words while she was at the ashram and realized that Champaben spoke a different dialect and Audrey had no clue what Champaben was saying. “….It was this creative constraint of “ok if I don’t have words what do I have and I really wanted to just understand her life and just connect with her and so our communication had a lot of charades and a lot of you know I would say something in English and motion it out and she would say something in her language and try to motion it and but at the same time at the end of the day the words did not even matter because we both felt that level of respect for each other and that level of open wanting to understand and connect with each other and before we left to go to her house, JayeshBhai had pointed to Champaben and said “this is my sister” and pointed to me and said “this is my daughter” to Champaben… in a way it was like we are already family.” Audrey recalls watching Champaben’s daughter making perfectly round rotis for dinner.  Audrey was eager to help and managed to roll out a crudely shaped triangular roti. Later, when Champaben served dinner, she reverently held Audrey’s roti and said “audrey’s roti, I am going to eat it”. “When you have that kind of respect for each other .. the words don’t even matter as much because you know the intention there and that makes sense.”
      
    Audrey recalled another memorable experience at the ashram when she was at ESI. Audrey witnessed a group of children and women coming together and planting a tree with a lot of reverence. Audrey mentioned her surprise at having witnessed a beautiful tree planting sight to Jayeshbhai when he asked her and some fellow volunteers to spend sometime hugging the trees in the area. Audrey was initially hesitant but surrendered with faith in JayeshBhai's direction. She noticed as she hugged the trees that each tree had its own personality and unique beauty. "You know everything is a reflection of something sacred, it was this moment when I started to see the notion of god in everything and everywhere... in any given moment everything around me is sacred and is an expression of god and there is this realization of how we are all connected and when we see the world in that way your heart just opens up and you connect on a much deeper level with the people and the environment around you."  


 

In retrospect, I am one of the thousands of volunteers who has spent some priceless moments at the Gandhi ashram. The service heroes at the ashram serve the people in the surrounding slums with such unconditional love and goodness. The joy around the place is so palpable and I thought that there is no other place in the universe that can have that energy. After listening to our guests, I realize that this energy can be created in any place. All it needs is the goodness and love of leaders like Bela, Birju and Audrey who will unflinchingly gift themselves in the spirit of service. With deep gratitude to three stewards for bringing the spirit of love and service into our space.
 
Birju continues his spiritual experiments in inner transformation and outer service through his meditation and service activities in New York.
 
Audrey continues tagging the world with anonymous acts of kindness and is working with a non profit on educating school children about conserving resources.
 
For more incredible stories from our service heroes on their trips to the Gandhi Ashram, please listen to the audio recording of the interview.