5 Spiritual rituals that changed my perspective on life forever.
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Spirituality awakening.
I was born into an orthodox and religious family. To be precise I am a Hindu Brahmin. When I was a child and teenager, I came across a lot of religious rituals and rigid tradition-oriented discipline in our family. Few examples of the rituals are:
- Being a Teetoler and Non-smoker,
- Being a VEGETARIAN
- Lighting sesame oil lamp in an earthen pot,
- waking up before Dawn hits.
- Doing Japa ( chanting with prayer beads),
- Sandhyavandanam Salutation to the goddess of Dawn and dusk ( Sun salutation),
- Pranayama ( breathing exercise) during puja,
- Devatha Aradhana ( Conducting a lengthy prayer with the food offering in sacred clothes).
- Sacred cleaning and cooking in the kitchen.
- Offering food to God first and many more,
All of these rituals never made great sense to me until I moved to a different country and started living on my own. I believe in God, but I felt that people were wasting time in these religious rituals, assuming that God is watching them 24/7. I was completely wrong and ignorant in that regard.
What really changed my thinking?
By nature I am an inquisitive person, I always had questions like
- What is the purpose of my birth/life?
- Why was I born as a human and not as some other creature?
- What happens after death?
- Do hell and heaven really exist? so on and so forth
I used to pose these questions to many of my elders. Everybody would come up with a unique answer. Interestingly, in my early 20s, I received a profound suggestion from my grandfather to read the spiritual scripture “Bhagavadgita”.
I instantly replied to my grandfather “ I am modern person and I would want to read a new age philosophy and not Bhagavadgita!”
My Grad father retorted, “ Well my dear, Bhagavadgita is infinite times modern and advanced than you and your thinking”.
