A Sensitivity to Things

Australian Sri Chinmoy Centre member and painter Pranavanta John Montefiore passed away recently. Art critic, university lecturer, illustrator and exhibited seven times, Pranavanta was also an author 30 years in the making—his magnum opus on painting The Making of Paintings published in 2007. Like spirituality in today’s unashamedly material world, Pranavanta the author remains mostly [...]

Canadian musician and meditation-rocker Pavaka Ritchot recently toured Japan as a part of the Songs of the Soul concerts, performing in Tokyo, Kamakura and Kyoto. Pavaka, a student of meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy, performs music composed by the late Indian spiritual master, and has released two albums of these melodies. Learn more about Pavaka and [...]

Photos from the recent Songs of the Soul concert in Tokyo, Japan.

Article first published as Movie Review: Challenging Impossibility on Blogcritics. Sri Chinmoy’s weightlifting defies belief. People just can not lift the weights that he did, let alone people past the age of retirement. Yet in a two-decade long weightlifting career which only lifted off at age 54, raise the impossible to comprehend Sri Chinmoy did, [...]

Panorama Café in Queens, New York puts the love in the coffee. A charming, eclectic, homely neighbourhood cafe in Queens, Panorama Café has the best coffee in a part of town that isn’t that homely, literally the only café for miles to serve espresso as it’s meant to be roasted, ground and made… Read the [...]

With apologies and thanks to Walt Whitman for the title lifted, a brief ode—first published in Inspiration-Letters—to the now faded, sun-filled days of childhood, and the eternal summer of meditation, where the inner child, bathed in a sunshine that will never fade, eternally plays. The journey from child to man is said to be a [...]

As featured in Inspiration-Letters 17, a biographical account of a journey in search of self; a journey in search of the sunlit path. He was a bear of a man, with a bear-like, straggly grey beard, the last vestige and visage of the Rabbinical life-path his Hebrew parents had probably intended, in a preacher-like occupation—Religious [...]

A visit to a Zen monastery in Japan, meeting with a monk, more similarities than meet the eye. Hotel Mets, Ofuna, Japan. On the outskirts of Tokyo, a city that begins and then never seems to end. I am here on a whirlwind, week long visit with Sri Chinmoy and students, sharing a room with [...]

I can’t speak highly enough of meditation. It has truly, irrecoverably changed my life. If someone told you that you could do something for only fifteen minutes a day that would make you happier, less stressed, have more energy and be more creative, you would do it right? Why on earth wouldn’t you? Learning to [...]

Out of the corner of my eye someone is waving to me. Out of corner of hearing, headphones on and music playing, someone is speaking to me. “Excuse me…” Seat 23A, right next to the window, United Airlines flight 870 from Sydney to San Francisco, several hours in and several thousand kilometres into journey, I’m [...]