Sampradaya

before the the sun went crazy and he massacred them with a machine gun anyways very interesting story but and they said it was because of a curse but um no it's it's so they have these shrines to the goddesses and and if you know anything about shakta tantra the goddesses usually require obviously this is not true for buddhism so i'm not saying this is true for buddhism but in general there is an idea even in buddhism that they require nectar or blood so They will give goats or buffalo, sometimes chickens.

It depends on the Sampradaya

ritual methodology.

Each temple uses a slightly different one or whomever the family is or whatever.

You have to see that a sense of your own unworthiness comes to you.

In our Sampradaya, this is very, very important.

Bhakti Siddhanta Sarasvati Thakur described or prescribed for his followers a sadhana.

Oh my God, I have it here.

And it's a tacit understanding that if you're giving me the Bhagavad Gita, and it's American especially, then it's like, you know, you blew it, man.

I mean, you're out of the Sampradaya right now.

So if you give them that chance to just appreciate them, their family, their ancestry, everybody already knows Bhagavad Gita, then

they're very likely to give.

We all journey through different things and I truly believe that the medicine that we need is in the struggle that we're having.

Today I'm talking with Zoe Tollefson, a body worker and Ayurvedic practitioner in the Bay Area who's been studying in an unbroken 3,500 year old lineage for nearly 20 years.

But this conversation is really about expression and something many of us share.

The imprints of early childhood and how we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to who we were before we started shrinking.

I've been studying for quite a while within the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, which is a tradition that comes through the Indian subcontinent.

I just feel so grateful to have such a free space to be in connection.

How did you initially connect with this lineage from Scandinavian in the woods of Washington to, you know, an Indian tradition?

Yeah, I think that sometimes we have connected with things longer than this lifetime.

And that is the sampradaya of the book, the sampradaya of distributing knowledge to people.

And when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu came and established his process of devotional service through his disciples the Goswamis who wrote extensively according to the teachings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.

There were literatures to be distributed and in fact there's an account of this even when books were written on palm leaves by hand that the first party of book distributors went out with a bullet cart and it's a long story but that was the mood of the devotees at that time, disciples of Jiva Goswami, to take the literatures out to establish the Sampradaya.

That's why we sang that song from the Goswamis.

And we've inherited that legacy, and it's ours to pass on to other people.