Hari OM.
Dear Sunday Morning Grade 4 Parents,
We had our 3rd Balavihar session on Sunday, Sep 23rd. Our next class is this coming Sunday, 30th.
On Sunday (23rd) at 9:15AM, when class started, we had 6 students in class; while we ended the class at 11:00 with 18 students.
During our first class, we asked the students to do everything that they can do to help the family arrive at Balavihar on time. Some ideas we discussed were, get to bed early enough on Saturday night, getting up early enough on Sunday morning and helping their parents and siblings with any chores that may be getting in the way of leaving the home on time. We ask the same of the parents: Please do everything you can do to prioritize punctual attendance of Balavihar. Our goal is to start the class at 9:15 with morning prayers and meditation. It is said that there is power in prayer (*1) and that powerful feeling is even more resonant when one is part of a group prayer session. We would love for all the children to be part of this experience. However, if the prayer and meditation has already proceeded when your child arrives, we ask that he/she wait outside the class room until the meditation is done.
(*1) - Click here to see Swami Shantanada's talk on the Power of Prayer.
Here is our sequence of events for this class:
Opening Prayers
Meditation
CORD Walkathon Presentation and Discussion
Your child and the whole family is encouraged to participate in the CORD Walkathon. CORD is the Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development. On October 28th, we will conduct our Balavihar class at the Mercer County Park where the CORD Walkathon will take place. This is a fund raising event and all funds raised from this event will go to support CORD activities in India. Each student was given a pledge form that they can use to solicit donations from relatives, friends, neighbors etc. Please help your child complete this seva activity safely by accompanying them or pair them up with an older sibling, if they choose to solicit in your community. As previously communicated by our CORD Walkathon team, it is very important to register for the Walkathon. You can do that here. For those inclined to help, there will also be several adult volunteer opportunities available that day.
The lesson for this week centered around these topics:
1. What is a teacher?
2. Why do we need a teacher?
3. Attitude of a Disciple (with a focus on Humility)
4. How do we recognize a teacher
5. How do we gain knowledge
We used the following illustrations to show how much more fruit can be produced by a tree that is well taken care of by a Gardner as opposed to one that grows uncontrolled on its own:
We used the following illustration to show how the the disciple should have humility to receive as much as possible of what the teacher has to give.
We used these topics today to highlight the Guru/Shishya system that is part of our tradition. We talked about how Swami Shantananda is our guru and how he is part of a guru parampara that includes Swami Chinmayananda, Swami Tapovan Maharaj, Adi Shankaracharya, Veda Vyasa et al. While discussing this, one student rightly observed how Swami Tapovan Maharaj could not have Adi Shankaracharya as a Guru because these people were not alive at the same time. This opened up further discussion about the need for a living guru and deep study of the scriptures. We ourselves, were stumped to name Adi Shankaracharya's "living guru" and have that as home work to report back this week. Some of the students, we suspect, will also be asking you the answer to this question. We had a lot of fun with the discussions about the disciple, guru parampara etc. The more that you talk about these topics, the Krishna stories etc at home, the more confidence your child will have discussing the same in class. We will try our best to give you some run way to discuss upcoming topics by using this forum to communicate future topics.
We also started Geetha chanting practice this week. We're learning to chant Chapter 18, starting with Verse #41. There are a few resources that we have available to help us improve our chanting technique.
- Video of Swami Shantananda chanting the Geetha can fe found here. For adults, Swami-ji also conducts a monthly Satsang on these same verses of the Geetha at Vrindavan during your child's Balavihar session.
- On-line learning tool developed by the late Jim Gaines where he used Swami Brahmananda's audio can be found here.
Our coordinators have also setup a blog where you can find out what each class is learning, including our 4th Grade. All sessions and all grades are there. Just look for the Sunday AM 4th Grade session to find our postings. You can find the Vrindavan Teacher's Blog here.
That is all for this week. We will repeat this communication via WhatsAp for those who don't check email. If you would like to be on the WhatAp group for this grade, please let us know. We hope to see you all Sunday morning…at or before 9:15AM! :-) Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Yamuna and Raj
Sunday Morning Grade 4 Sevaks
