We share our soulful gratitude for your participation and presence during 2022 – a year when the Nonprofit has been rebuilding the foundation of its mission: in-person fellowships.

For the first time since 2019 we were able to host His Holiness Swami Vidyadhishananda at fellowships outside of Santa Barbara, including Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and
Carmichael in Northern California. Sadhvi Girija taught in-person workshops on Himalayan breathing in Santa Barbara and Houston. We appreciate that so many of you joined
us for this more intimate return to in-person fellowships.

In September we released a meditation e-course, Learn Mindfulness Meditation on Udemy.com, a global learning platform. This coursework’s high quality along with
its ratings have earned it a place in the Udemy Business Collection, a privilege reserved for the top 3% of courses.

His Holiness and Sadhvi Girija visited Northern California in November to look at potential properties and an offer was made on one property. While the purchase did not go through, this recent experience prepares us for swift action in 2023 as more properties come to market.

Your physical presence means so much as we continue rebuilding our in-person programming. Please save these dates for a return to in-person retreats in 2023:

1. Guru Purnimā Retreat – Camarillo, CA | 1st – 4th July
2. Initiation Meditation Retreats – Nevada City, CA | 10th Sept – 7th Oct

Our Nonprofit remains ever steadfast in its commitment to your spiritual wellbeing. May you keep this organization in your prayers. Thank you for your continuing support.

We convey our heartfelt gratitude to you, our donors and well-wishers, and acknowledge your unwavering support. This Annual Gratitude Report has been prepared in a new format for the first time this year with the goal of giving you a visual understanding of our Nonprofit’s impact.

Much like in 2020, our ability to host in-person events this past year was severely limited. We appreciate that so many of you joined us in fellowship online. Our Academy app and Sambhala ecoursework curriculum continued their rapid development despite the untimely loss of our beloved head of the monastic council, His Holiness Swami Sharadananda Giri.

As your participation binds us together and builds momentum in 2022, let us nurture our Nonprofit in the following ways:

1. Remember our noble Nonprofit in your prayers
2. Subscribe to Hansavedas Academy and download the app
3. Follow the articles and event postings on our main website, hansavedas.org

Our Nonprofit remains unwaveringly committed to your spiritual upliftment. Thank you again for your continuing support and benevolent participation.

I convey my warmest greetings and earnest blessings to you during the year-end holidays. May your holidays be meaningful, joyful, and free from fear. I pray that your hearts are full of gratitude and kindness despite the tough times that we have had to encounter over this past year.

As holidays embrace us, surrounding our hearts with the warmth of familiar ambience, we often like to reflect and ruminate about our successes or failures in the last year. This reflecting becomes more meaningful when we do not lose the lesson, even if we feel like we’ve lost out. Virtue is strengthened by deeper reflection and learning from the experience.

If you are feeling tired, reflect if this a feeling of good tiredness. During these hard times, it was perhaps not enough to be earnest, you might have needed to exert. Despite good intentions and best of efforts, outcomes might be delayed or not yet visible. Labour of love is a value that builds virtues which seep into the subtle layers of our character. Time well spent in a positive direction and made spiritually meaningful will convert the good tiredness into moral strength.

It is not the kind of tired that comes after staying up too late. This is a kind of good tired that comes with exertion for a good cause. In the back of the mind the notion of good serving is prevalent, and morale is high throughout the labour. It’s the kind of good tired that comes from a brisk walkathon to raise awareness of a just cause, a whole day of gardening to create sustenance, or cooking and distributing food to the underprivileged. This kind of good tired comes from helping a homeless family secure affordable housing or running around to deliver much needed essential supplies to senior living and foster homes.

There is often no time to think about body aches, take a shower or soak the tired feet in salt water. The drive to keep on serving comes from the ideal behind serving, resting on the moral high ground that makes us human. No matter the prick in the conscience about the exploitation by cabals and the decadence of governance that affect our trust, our innate kindness drives us toward that good tiredness.

We learn how to anchor during difficult situations, pivot during transitions, adapt to new mandates that do not make sense, and yet be resilient despite the shaming that is often thrust upon us due to our informed choices. Our nascent immunity is built upon the moral values that embellish us and is at the root of our nourishment. This is a good spiritual way to ruminate while overcoming the shortcomings of this past year. Faith is also behind the hope that we can prevail by being generous and gentle. We need not mind being a little tired. We can ride this turbulent tide with faith and moral strength.

I pray that your holiday season will be a respite from the pressure of living to work. This is not the time to exult while opening gift boxes or gorging on sugar, but rather to reflect on how to glow in the collective warmth of human spirit brought about by well-meaning fellowship with careful and prayerful people. Sugar is not a replacement for love even if past habits attract the fake sweetness unknowingly. It is good to find some time for the much-needed rest over the holidays, all the while knowing that the repose of solace is at the core of our year-to-year stamina and fortitude.

Fortitude builds patience and patience supports quietude. Stillness is a natural consequence of quiet reflection, and the silent pauses grow on you. Those pauses are very useful for our stamina. The idea is not to keep feeling tired. Rejuvenation is a natural need of our lives. However mental clearing is at the root of stamina.

Making the holidays uplifting is within your reach, through attemptable affirmations. We need to adapt to the changes inherent in the nature of the world that is, in spiritual terms, constantly slipping away from us. Our current times feel like they are accelerating, rife with clashes of ethos and bipolar ideologies. Now is the time to anchor with moral strength and practical sense.

Tiredness manifests in the body and is usually not an obstacle as long as the mind is imbued with clarity and inspiration. Residing free of rent in a house that is not really yours, how is it possible to avoid its distemperatures? Ashes collected from cremation are merged into the water as the final ablution, such is the essence of our skeletal framework.

The sole shackle is the invasion of unchecked desires in this house which stoke our afflictions. Satisfaction is temporary, whereas genuine fulfillment is lasting. Food is a satisfaction for hunger but understanding the hunger at a subtle emotional level and sharing the food may bring about a fulfilling experience.

Reflecting deeply on our desires (such as the holiday rush for sugar or toys) might allow access to its psychic counterpart, aspiration. Ask yourself what your true holiday aspiration is. If a light bulb moment happens, then it was worth all the good tiredness and the nagging aches. Both the mind and the body evolve into a greater state of being disaffected by aging or occasional overuse. Physical decay may cause waxing and waning of mental strength but touches not the core of your being.

Aspiration by its own make up is innately spiritual and is at the root of all noble affirmations. From a spiritual perspective your body and home are refractory as they are not really yours. Henceforth puny desires go awry. Complete fulfillment is not easily given to us by means of this intractable body. The body helps us when we know how to cultivate its strengths. Good tiredness is a way to pause for reflection, finding a greater meaning about life’s purpose. We repose in our faith when we search deeper. Faith is the forerunner of all that we care for through serving. Faith is ultimately the conviction about a supreme being who is free from the shackles of karma and its impressions.

We are born free, and never meant to be draped in fancy wrappers that are laced in fear from our projections. The daily dose of general dread can be overcome with spiritual fortitude and faith in the supreme being. Holidays are meant for regaining our confidence and deepening our conviction through faith in the supreme being. God-centred living brings about a faithful and honourable life; this is the experience. Earnest prayers to that supreme being can protect us from the imbalance of adversity and prosperity. Good tiredness might just enable us to repose in our divinity and the purpose of spiritual realization.

Thanksgiving welcomes the season of gratitude and giving. Being thankful is a way of showing appreciation. It is an expression of gratitude and Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on all of our blessings. Giving encompasses the spirit of participation, sharing committed time, ardently serving hand-in-hand, and distributing resources connected to wealth. However, before we can understand how giving enriches the giver evermore, we need to reflect on how gratitude and thanksgiving begin the cycle of reciprocal altruism.

The Thanksgiving tradition in the US started in 1621 by the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. It is known to be a harvest celebration, a time to give thanks for the bounty of the new land and to be with those we care about. In 1941, the US Congress made Thanksgiving a national holiday, commemorated on the fourth Thursday of November.

Throughout history and around the world, philosophers, meditators, spiritual practitioners, and religious worshipers have extolled the value of gratitude and the virtue of expressing gratitude. Since ancient times the elements of grace and gratitude have been part of a lifestyle for those who live a prayerful God-centered life.

Recognition of grace and expression of gratitude are imbibed as a foundational way of being by those renunciates and spiritualists who claim that without feeling gratitude, grace cannot be recognized. Before we thank others, we express gratitude toward the creator and his creation by recognizing grace.

There is recognition of this other external source which leads to an upwelling of gratitude after having experienced a favourable outcome, be it a source of joy – and that precedes thanksgiving. We thank the creator for the bounty of harvest and harness the benefit with gratitude. While faith is intangible, grace is deemed tangible – a palpable feeling that is often filled with a spontaneous outpouring of gratitude.

Gratitude is not simply a cultural ethos. It has deep roots in the idea of reciprocal altruism that is embedded in our evolutionary history. Non-humans as varied as birds and fish engage in reciprocal altruism — behaviors in which they reciprocate good deeds done to them by others. Elements of grace and gratitude are both evident among most creatures and are verily behind the drive for reciprocal altruism.

Animals and humans are known to share their virtues and bounties first with their own kith and kin who had groomed them earlier. We are more likely to assist others first who have helped us in the past. Sets of identical twins have been known to show a higher correlation of self-reported gratitude than fraternal twins — the genetic component to gratitude develops over many lifetimes and this blueprint expresses in somewhat predictable ways as we would expect.

As an extension of expression of gratitude, the spirit of monastic service inculcates compassion for all, where serving is imbued with a pleasant expression of gratitude through all times without discrimination. Herein fairness is exhibited due to an unshakable compassion that is prevalent as a state of being – indeed a higher evolved trait where acts of kindness are superseded by the achieved state of compassion.

Kindness is a quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. It is helpfulness towards someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the giver, but for the sake of giving. While kindness might subside somewhat after the act and might rise again at an appropriate opportunity, compassion is said to be a state of being whereupon the evenness of mind exudes a natural benevolence through constant thanksgiving. A general attitude of kindness is helpful in preparing oneself toward compassion. It is the compassionate one who displays all around equanimity with an expression of gratitude.

The spirit of compassionate serving is deemed as a highly evolved spiritual quality rooted in the feelings of gratitude. Children exhibit gratitude which develops as they mature, and this development is considered to be vital in their upbringing. In the Sanskrit tradition of holistic schooling, elements of nature are also worshipped due to the ideal behind thanksgiving – recognizing what is behind the bounties that sustain us – recognition of grace of God that precedes the reciprocal altruism of thanksgiving and sharing with others.

Ayurveda broadly advises to inculcate the recognition of grace and expression of gratitude, because it claims that more grateful people may be healthier. Developing spiritual values related to the experience of gratitude is said to encourage the adoption of healthier habits and bring about healthfulness.

We are grateful for knowing you and for your honouring us with the giving that sustains us. Let us welcome the season of gratitude despite all challenges on the material plane and seek a spiritual solution to all problems with a calm mind, harnessing our intellectual faculties, and recognizing grace.