The Monk’s Podcast 91 with Giriraj Maharaj – End-of-life care and bhakti wisdom

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So today we discussed about this topic of end of life care and Bhakti wisdom because we went to a lot of territories I’ll try to broadly cover so you talked about how you became although it’s our philosophy talks about it your specific journey began with Archa Vigraha Mataji’s diagnosis and then her departure and then that’s how the hospice idea started and then almost 7-8 years, 5-6 years later it manifested and you were you were among the first or second hospices in India the first in a holy place and I’m sure that must have required a lot of effort just thinking that you had to get people from India to come from get people to come to San Diego to get the training for that that itself indicates how much herculean efforts you put in to make that happen and then there it’s the hospice is at one level providing care to people in the hospice as well as helping family members take care of people at their homes and then we talked about how those who come into hospice care they are naturally spiritually inclined otherwise it will become too morbid for them and as devotees we, our tradition it is, it has a lot of, although all traditions talk about having remembering the lord at the time of death but our tradition offers far more resources for remembering many pastimes of the lord and many names of the lord and many different devotional activities that we can do so in that sense we have a rich resource and through your literature I think you have been the pioneer in making the wisdom of the bhakti tradition available for those who are in this field of hospice care so this is also one of the areas in which people are becoming more elevated in their consciousness and being receptive to spirituality and so in the way you told me about I didn’t know that in the second edition of your book you had carefully edited to make the book more accessible to new people so this is we also discussed how this is an area where devotees can actually enter into a profession also which is very congenial to spirituality because we can ourselves gain spiritual realizations and share spiritual wisdom so then you talked about how our the principles of the bhagavad gita and the bhakti tradition are universal and there are certain specifics but like say you talked about wearing dhoti kurta which reminds you of Shila Prabhupada that is something which is that is not the central thing so if you present the principles then people can appreciate that not only do we have a profound philosophy but it’s like a science to help people aid them in their final stages of their life and you also shared your experiences of how people have been the caregiver the staff has been appreciative even came to the temple that is generally they try to stay a little detached because their profession is like that but for them to come it was that’s quite remarkable to hear and then we also discussed about devotees if they can contribute to writing in this area one is of course devotees going to hospice care the other is that devotees learn that skills for themselves in case their family members are there so you mentioned about Sangeeta Mataji providing online courses as well as personal as well as training through courses and then if some devotees want to write writing is very individual so after we write we actually find out what we wanted to say but there is a lot which you said there is a welcome contribution in this area somebody wants to write and then toward the end we discussed about Mishra Prabhupada’s instruction to you about writing this book writing the book on the Juhu project so we shared some very very illuminating at once challenging as well as illuminating past time from that book and also I think the the back matter of the book that you shared is very inspiring how different Vaishnavas are appreciated this is among the few books that Prabhupada directly wanted to be written so thank you very much for sharing all this wisdom and nectar Maharaj it is as I said sobering but still at the same time it’s inspiring to see that as a movement we have we are providing more and more resources for our devotees as you said it has happened in Vrindavan and devotees are becoming more and more aware elsewhere so you have been a pioneer for this and thank you for sparing your time today for sharing your experiences here thank you Maharaj this is a beautiful summary