1. 09122021 Gita Satsang Summary

|| Krishnam Vande Jagadgurum ||

Dear Friends,

Hari Om !!

This is a summary of our session held on September 12, 2021.

This was our first session for the new Balavihar year (2021-22) and we were very excited to have all of you join our Satsang. Visveish Ramanathan, Praveen Sharma and I (Ganesh Krishnamurthy) will be facilitating these sessions. We are volunteers here at CMP and are part of the BV Teacher group. This is truly a blessing for us.

We briefly talked about some of our expectations from all of you:

1. Please remember that Vedanta is extremely practical and is present all around us.

2. Our appeal to all of you is have basic positive faith that the scriptures have something to offer. As the saying goes 'Shradhaavaan Labhate Jnanam' - To the one who has the inquisitiveness and faith, knowledge will get assimilated easily.

3. Try to make the knowledge your own - More than just being an academic study, let us all strive to put it to use in our daily life.

Here is our commitment to you:

1. For anyone who is engaged in Vedantic study, it is a no-hypocrisy zone. We will challenge ourselves to not act, say or think contrary to what we are talking about in class.

2. We promise to prepare, reflect and review our content for every Sunday session.

Our schedule will be as follows:

1. Opening Prayers & Dhyaana Shloka

2. Review of the previous week

3. Gita Content

4. Activities/Reflections

5. Closing Prayers

Our path forward will be to complete a review of the first 11 chapters before starting off on Chapter 12. Our goal is to complete all 18 chapters this year.

Regarding Resources, we highly recommend the download of the Holy Geeta.

1. You can download a free e-copy of 'The Holy Geeta' from one of these platforms : Apple Books, Google Books, Amazon Kindle. Hard copy of 'The Holy Geeta' can be ordered from chinmayapublications.com (Note : you need to pay shipping charges)

2. On your smartphone, you can download the Gita 365 app, which will deliver a 2-3 min clip every day on the Gita, by Chapter. This can be considered a daily powerful tonic of Gita, delivered by Pujya Gurudev.

3. Feel free to explore the Gita in a visual way using CMP's own Visual Vedanta tool.

Activity: We also asked everyone for their favorite books and here is a screenshot of everyone's entries. Thank you for participating.

Why Gita ?

We talked about various reasons and perspectives for studying the Gita. Here is a screenshot of what we discussed/saw.

A few families also shared some details about themselves. We will continue this exercise as it gets us to know each other better.

We will reconvene next Sunday to begin our journey, by Bhagwaan's grace into Chapters 1 and 2.

Kindly let us know if you have any questions.

Hari Om !!

Praveen, Visveish, Ganesh

(ganeshk76@yahoo.com | 412-916-8780)