Hari om everyone,
Here's the synopsis from this week's class.
We started the class with a few minutes of meditation. In our chanting segment, we learned 6 verses from 'geetaa dhyaanam' and verses 39 - 52 from 'BG chapter 2'.
In our review segment, we continued with the Mahaabhaarata and quickly heard the stories of
- the lacquer palace;
- PaaNDavas disguise;
- Draupadi's swayamvara and marriage to 5 brothers;
- splitting of the kingdom between PaanNDavas and Kauravas;
- the game of dice;
- disrobing of Draupadi;
- PaaNDavas ordained to go on 13 yrs of Vanavaasam (dwelling in the forest) and 1 yr of ajnaatavaasam (life in incognito);
- return of the PaaNDavas;
- Duryodhana's refusal to return the kingdom to the PaaNDavas as per terms;
- the battle becomes inevitable;
- Duryodhana and Arjuna's appeal to Krishna to fight on their side;
- Krishna's terms - Me without weapons on one side and my entire army for the other;
- Arjuna's choice to have Krishna on his side (Duryodhana thrilled to get a large army);
- Shalya's army tricked into fighting for Duryodhana;
- battlefield set;
- Arjuna asks Krishna to take his chariot to the middle of the battleground;
- Arjuna shudders at the sight of the armies and especially his Grandsire, teachers, near and dear ones on the enemy's side;
- he throws away his bow and arrow and wants to resign from fighting the war
- he starts to justify his distraught behavior
This is the beginning of the 1st chapter of Bhagavadgeeta. Lamenting of Arjuna is the content of the 1st chapter; we will discuss it more in detail.
But then, how is this relevant to us? Can we draw any parallels to ourselves with his behavior? What's in it for us to learn about Arjuna's sorrow?!!
To address this, in our interactive segment, we asked questions like -
- In what mood do they come back from school every day?
- How often do they come back upset or irritated?
- How do they handle it and on whom do they show their bad mood?
- Do they justify their actions to themselves in their heads? Is it right?
- How can they take accountability and improve?
- What is the one thing they are going to work on improving this week?
We are so happy to see their honest answers and how logically they think through when questioned!!
We ended up stretching our class an extra 15 minutes as we were talking about valuing the immense knowledge we have been blessed with! To establish the greatness and vastness of the knowledge our ancestors left us with, we watched this short video about Nalanda University, which is called the Harvard of India!
After that, we left them with this thought -
