Bye-bye Amritapuri and Amma

Travel Day 956 – Amritapuri Ashram, Kerala, INDIA

While my day still revolved a fair bit around the fact that I never finished packing and re-organizing my backpack yesterday, I also couldn’t help and reminisce about my time in the Amritapuri Ashram…

Amma’s Teachings from Amritapuri

Initially I wanted to leave the ashram in the afternoon today while taking a boat along the backwaters. But because of the unbearable heat at this time of the day and the fact I never got as much done as I wanted, I rather decided to take off first thing tomorrow morning. One of the reasons that I never got as much done as I wanted was because of the people I always met and the conversation that I usually had with them…

Actually the people and the conversations were one of the main reasons why I stayed as long as I did. Yes, of course it was nice to be around Amma, but since she was never directly accessible for me, talking to all the people who had been around her for a long time and who had certain stories to tell, became one of the most interesting things for me in Amritapuri. It was almost like learning from a tutor or a senior student. Those people usually had a more practical approach of the matter, even if usually everything they said was usually opinionated in one way or another. But filtering through the different opinions and finding the bit of truth behind the stories had become an interesting task for me…

Still one thing I never managed to find out while I was in Amritapuri was how best to describe Amma to other people who were asking about her. So far I had heard a lot of different names for Amma and so some called her a saint, some said she was divine, or someone who attained god-realization, others said she was enlightened, or self-realized, she was supposed to be a mahatma, an avatar, and many things more. For me personally all these names didn’t mean too much and probably Amma herself couldn’t care less about them or the label that they were providing for her…

Quite frankly, in the end it didn’t even matter to me what Amma really was or what she was called. The mere fact that she was born to a poor fisher family in the backwaters of Kerala and that she managed to establish an ashram that drew thousands and thousands of people to it was simply a miracle. Not only was she born as a poor and dark-skinned woman in a conservative and chauvinistic Indian society, but she also went through suppression, protests, hindering and even assassination attempts to finally rise and touch the hearts of people from all over the world…

The important thing for me was that Amma seemed to be sincerely living her teachings and selflessly giving her life for the benefit of all others. That and the fact that she was trying to help people through numerous organizations around the world was simply amazing and something I deeply respected. Yeah, the visit in the Amritapuri Ashram was definitely something special and I probably would need quite some time to digest everything that had happened and that I had learned here…

But while I was saying bye-bye to Amritapuri and to Amma, I knew already that it would not be a final good-bye and that I would surely be back here sooner or later… : )