Sumangali Morhall presents us with a conclusion that echoes the wisdom of ancient sages quoted within her very pages: to find a…
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Having been meditating as a student of meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy for over seventeen years now, I get asked for advice and…
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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 unappreciated... for now. Although yet to find a publisher, his voluminous self-published work received the highest possible praise from Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald, who said that “If everything on the planet were destroyed, some future race could reconstruct the practice of painting from this volume alone”. One suspects that like the famous painters he wrote about, Pranavanta will be better known by generations yet to come. The following obituary for Pranavanta was written by Mark Juddery and appeared in the June 16 Sydney Morning Herald:Read more about Pranavanta the artist and seeker: Profound painter and teacher by Mark Juddery, Sydney Morning Herald, June 16, 2011Profound painter and teacher
For his last 22 years the artist John Montefiore was known to many of his friends as ''Pranavanta'', a name given to him by his meditation teacher, Sri Chinmoy, meaning ''full of life energy''. You didn't have to be a spiritual giant to know that this was a particularly apt designation. Even as he lay in hospital suffering from cancer, he couldn't wait to leave and return to his painting.
Such enthusiasm resulted in epic works. His 18-metre-high, multi-panelled Life Series painting took him more than 20 years to complete - and was worth the wait. It won the Sir John Sulman Prize in 1993, awarded by the Art Gallery of NSW, and is now permanently at Macquarie University.
Montefiore was an aficionado, someone who could wax lyrical on many aspects of the world: not just the beauty that he strived to portray in his artwork but also the sweet sounds of music, the aroma of a flower, even the joy of a terrible pun.
When people say ''Words can't express it'', they obviously never accompanied their words with the enthusiasm of Montefiore. His marathon artworks were best accompanied by his own commentary, as he guided you through the story he was telling with his work. Every dot of paint, its position and shape, had profound significance.
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 listen to his music at pavaka.com.
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, and furthermore, he said that we can do so too. This is the uplifting message of Challenging Impossibility, a documentary which premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. Spiritual master turned strongman Sri Chinmoy, who passed away in 2007, is shown lifting not just weights but aircraft, elephants, cars and a who’s who of 20th Century luminaries including Nelson Mandela and Sting. By doing so, the Indian-born poet born again as powerlifter challenged impossibility itself. When Sri Chinmoy lifts weights, “It’s like gravity stops” says former Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis, a personal friend of the weightlifting guru. And gravity indeed is denied when Sri Chinmoy lifts a 2000-pound car on film. How can such feats of strength be possible? The answer is “all in the mind”, according to five-time Canada’s Strongest Man and documentary cast-member Hugo Girard, who credits Sri Chinmoy with helping him to realise that powerlifting is first and foremost internal. “You get to the place where it doesn’t matter how much something weighs, it’s going to move. If you think how much it weighs, you’re going to fail.” All in the mind, and in the heart and soul as well, for as Sri Chinmoy explained, the capacity he drew upon to literally raise the impossible is deep within us all, able to be accessed through the powers of concentration and meditation. “Many, many things I have done which my physical mind cannot believe” he explained. “But then again, when I concentrate, I am not afraid of it. When I am one with it, I act like a hero.” “It's been very motivational for me,” three-time Mr Olympia Frank Zane commented on the documentary, himself a pro body-builder who has merged meditation with weight-training since the age of 14. “You know, there are times in your training when you don't feel like doing it, then you just look at what he's doing and you're in again.” Challenging Impossibility Co-director Sanjay Rawal, a student of the weightlifting meditation teacher for 16 years, said his ultimate wish in making the film was to share Sri Chinmoy’s personal example of challenging the impossible. “The one thing that I learned from him is to never give up. There's no such thing as an impossible dream.”Challenging Impossibility Trailer
More on Challenging Impossibility
- Challenging Impossibility website
- Sri Chinmoy News: Feats of Strength and Inner Peace
- Challenging Impossibility by Sumangali Morhall
- Video interview with Challenging Impossibility Directors Sanjay Rawal and Natabara Rollosson
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 rest of my Yelp review here.