Stormy day on Kauai, complete with lightening and thunder enough to send the cats into their safe places and to take down the electricity for thirty minutes. The river is running chocolate brown from all the rain runoff upstream.

Iraivan stand peacefully amid all the tempest, like the Self within, untouched by experiences, whether good, bad or neutral.

We take you to Kadavul temple for a special little surprise. Sadhaka Nandinatha work up early (and when a monk who usually gets up at 4:30am wakes up early, you know it’s early) to spend nearly two hours decorating our Mighty Ganesha. While showing his artistry, we give you words of wisdom from Gurudeva’s Spiritual Toolbox, a chapter he calls:

Can’t control the kids?

It is so simple, be patient and caring

There is an old saying: “If you can’t beat them,
join them,î and this is wise in certain respects.
We are thinking of the young adults who will not follow the traditional family patterns of their well-raised Hindu parents. Admittedly, they can be made
to fear their parents and be forced to obey for a time.
Th e problem with such an approach is that it usually
ends up with the sons or daughters losing respect for
them and leaving home as soon as they are able. Often
parents take the authoritarian approach, not realizing
there are alternatives, well-proven techniques of
a more positive discipline. In actual practice, it is more
useful to work with children little by little as they grow
and mature.

My advice to parents has always been to stay close
to their children, but at the same time give them some
space to grow and mature in today’s world. Today’s
world is not all that bad. But children must be taught
how to live in it–what to be wary of, whom to trust,
whom to befriend and marry, how to proceed in business,
social life, education, career upscaling, religious
life and on into the raising of their own family. So, keep
the communication lines open.

True, today’s world has its challenges, its temptations
and definite drawbacks, but it is today’s world and
the world of tomorrow. We can’t ignore that fact. So,
be wise and pass your deeply profound Hindu culture
and wisdom along to the children so they can make
proper decisions for themselves. This is what they will
do anyway, make their own decisions, so they might as
well be trained early on how to do it right. Who better
to teach them this than their own parents? Aum Nama Sivaya!