Internship Experience at SAIIER Auroville | Presented by trainees.

A very warm good afternoon, good evening and welcome to this presentation. Uh I'd like to start by thanking you all for coming here, taking out the time to view this. Um we'll start. Uh I wanted to put this quote out there. True knowledge is not attained by thinking, it is what you are, it is what you become. And this is our journey of becoming through this internship at SC. So media host for the evening aka S interns. That's Gia. I'm Dia. This is Eva >> where all students from Ahmedabad University from Gujarat. Um this is a picture of our university. It is an inter it is a university that focuses on interdisciplinary learning and hence interdisiplinary students for the internship as well. We would like to start by giving a brief overview of how the internship was designed. The internship was designed with a five-fold structure. work engagement which meant we were working on projects, research reports, things like that. Exploration which meant inwards and outwards. We attended reading sessions with our mentors GP and Joys. We also had communication and skill building sessions with Ora. Uh physical education was also a part of it where we chose from one sport frisbee, yoga, we also went surfing once. Uh reflection meant looking inwards again. Uh the this comprises of our personal reflections. Uh a few of us made in judges, others had artwork etc. And final synthesis it is what you're seeing today. Uh to record our to record our progress, we were introduced to a few measures. One of them was on a scale of 1 to 10. Each of us in the first week of internship set out with three to four things that we want to improve about ourselves or we want to build a skill etc. And every week we used to check in as a group and rate ourselves on a scale of 1 to 10. And the group the group accountability also helped for the same. The second was weekly reflections. We used to put uh we have a sheet where all of us input data every week. Photos we put photos from the week. One meaningful quote, one insightful moment that made us smile that week. Mountain is what we call difficulty. any moment of difficulty through the week and one beautiful thing could be around could be inwards anything and process observer is something we also learned. Um each of us took turns and became process observer for the week. We used to observe as a third person uh looking at our own selves and the group around and the people around and we have documents of the same. Individual notes and reflections are what we maintain on individual basis from our reading sessions from our reflections etc. I will take you uh through the orientation week, the first week that we were here in Orbit and with a schedule that was very thoughtfully and painstakingly designed by our mentors. So uh right from day one we were introduced to multiple aspects of Oruroville whether it is the philosophical and ideological aspects that Oruroville was built upon to the different places the different community kitchens the different sports activities all to give us uh a taste of what we are going to explore in the six weeks ahead. So it started with a lot of team building exercises, a lot of ice breakers. Um we explored frisbee, we explored yoga, we uh um we met with our mentors joins and deepi and we went to ponder asham which was a collective um meaningful experience for all of us. We uh went to the Savatri Bhavan. We set the few goals that we had for the six weeks ahead. And another collective favorite was visiting Sarna forest. Uh so this was how our orientation week was designed. And uh so week 2 onwards this was the kind of schedule we followed with yoga in the morning 9 to 11 sessions with join zendi. Um Dia and I were doing a project which required going through the Gita. U it was our first person exploration. So we read the Gita in post um session hours and after that we all worked on our individual projects. So Dia and I were mentored by Daven and Shallini for our respective projects. Um Kahini was mentored by Sila and uh Eva was mentored by Orushi and Sahila and we explored Frisbee and another favorite tango. I'm going to take you through the sessions we had. The main point of having these sessions was because all of them less so much on integral education, we would also be integrated into the literature that we have here. So we had uh sessions with Ronnies and Biti twice a week and Olivan once a week. With Ronny's we did a a little bit of everything. We did we read human cycle we read life divine life divine. We had a lecture on Vic symbolism and we also talked about towards the end we talked a lot about economics and artistic economy and with dipy we we read our many cells and we read some sonnetss and we read sabatri there were also some days that we would just have books open and we would not end up reading anything and just having such in-depth discussions which were some of the best parts in my opinion and withan we had a lot of storytelling communication and speech and presenting so Yeah. >> Yeah. So, we did a few like guided explorations with where Dain and Train or like either or like some other people or she also would take us on uh to explore Oruroville. So, we went to Matimand inner chamber just uh this week or last week. Yeah. Then we went to Southern Gardens and Sadna forest and we're planning on visiting the sound garden probably tomorrow. We visited the savas paw and the orurind as I think we had spoke about. So yeah, we went to visit that of Py and yeah and then these were some weekend explorations where um that photos from when we cooked at Mitra uh the host over here then you know the beach and taco night and yeah just uh uh we attended a few sessions at Kapugumi and just cycling around and I think Paradisa was a collector favorite like we all loved going to cinema at night after So yeah, I think these are just some of the things that we ended up doing ourselves and we took ourselves on. >> Hello everyone again. So this presentation has 124 drafts and coincidentally 124 is also the number of countries that contributed to the month. That gives me one point on oral krila but jokes apart I a friend asked me a question yesterday. Can you summarize your journey in of six weeks in one word? And that got me thinking. I tried. It was a tough job, but I think becoming is what briefly summarizes it. Becoming is a word I was I knew before coming here. I tried becoming a better version of myself every day. But becoming inaudible through this internship is another experience. And that is what I'm going to talk about today. I'll start off by telling what I came here expecting. This was I read an internship. I came here expecting a traditional desk job internship. Uh which it did turn out to be a little but that was not just it. Uh maybe a new LinkedIn post because I'm a management student and my heart's been dead for a while. Um research projects, every other internship, physical activity only because I read that in the brochure but I was not excited about it. um fun around Matri because I knew about Orville and the only thing I knew was the Matu Mand but what I found instead was a beautiful community conversations with so many people I can't even count on my fingertips psychopaths reflections reflections everywhere even the cycle paths that we talk about all of us have had moments where we've had aha moments just cycling through looking at the trees and we start looking inwards without realizing we started thinking about our many selves. Um, stillness. Stillness is something I would say I experienced for the first time. Stillness not as in a cliched peaceful inner being, but was still in life for once and I was okay with it. Learnings, a lot of learnings. Um, this is a small collage that I tried to summarize all my feelings through, but it's not enough learnings. These are the learnings from the sessions we had with our mentors. Um, honestly, this is a mentor that sometimes I would wake up thinking I don't want to go to the rhythm sessions with. But when I looked inwards, I realized he was silently challenging a lot of my inner beliefs. He was challenging biases, frameworks that I held but I never realized. I used to think in systems. I still do. I refer to frameworks whenever I have problems in life. But after coming here and attending these sessions, I realized frameworks and robotic way of thinking does not really help in a lot of ways. So now when I think of a problem, I do think of frameworks but I also think of consciousness. I think of my different selves. I think what do I really want? Which part wants this and do I really want this >> and what else could I do about this? So I just don't jump to conclusions. I used to think in terms of efficiency for me work was productive only when there's a tangible output and it was only efficient when there's something I can hold on to that I've made but now I ask whether something that I've done is actually meaningful so I also love and enjoy the process when I'm doing it and I just don't focus on the outputs of it and overall he also studied economics being a management bachelor's administration student business administration I have been studying economics for the past 3 years of my degree But economics here in brief eight two sessions I realize is not just study of markets but also relationships. Economics is not how you interact with markets, you buy and sell but also how you talk to people, how you interact, how you execute that sale. That relationship is also economics sessions with this other mentor. um a lot of learnings from the books we read but these are quotes things paraphrase that have just stood with that have just stayed with me and I'm going to carry back um these are things we've discussed in class and I just like to read one or two of them she said you are not your anger you are what is left after you eliminate after you start eliminating what you are not and what is left is you well I'm still finding who am I but that did give me a little direction And I also love how empowering these sessions were because one thing that was always talked about was making your own choices and realizing that your soul has agency. It knows what it wants. You just need to give it the space. Coming to our third mentor, she is instrumental in how this presentation is turning out today because our first presentation we had a lot of pauses and we got a lot of taps on the table. Um but to summarize uh overthinking, overexlaining, speaking too fast, unnecessary pauses, all of this was me. Now I won't say I am fully there. But I do have clearer structure when I'm speaking. I have higher clarity. I intentionally communicate. I just don't go out there and say whatever I think but I try and process it, frame it in a better way so that somebody understands what I'm saying. Because I've had instances where I've just went on saying but nobody understand what I'm saying. and to take multiple pauses and the learning all these learnings became the lens through which I approached my work. Talking about work, I helped with building a website. Uh we went through a lot of color schemes. These are just the two that we had on the hand by the end of it. But we figured out a color scheme. I helped make a brand guideline for the same brand. And this is a before and after of the website how it looks like. And yeah, the second uh I had been shaping an an initiative which is still under the cloths. Um but I had been brainstorming the names for the same branding and designing options for it. I had make preliminary logos uh basic logos and we also have a preliminary market research going on for the same. So if you're between 18 to 25, I would urge you to scan this and fill the form to help us with the survey. But that yeah that is a market research that we have going on. And then the third thing is yoggonomics which was something I discovered after coming here. Um it was also something that was challenged in my own ways of thinking because economics we started by thinking what if economics wasn't just about wealth creation but also about evolution of consciousness and for the same we are exploring money and wealth through the lens of consciousness and yogic perspectives rather than just commerce and trade. So if you look at an iceberg, the tip of the iceberg is money, income, markets and GDP. Whereas if you go further uh uh below the water, it also involves values, consciousness, purpose, stewardship and a satic approach. Now this is a way of looking at money economies that we're exploring and we're coming up with a one pager or a short paper that you all can read more about and yeah some lessons teach you new ideas and others quietly change the way you see the world and that is where comes my favorite part. So as Ria explained both of us went through Bhagadita endings and exploration and this has been very instrumental in all the in internal shaping and shifting that I talk about. I also am working on a first person research report for the sales which is also under the works but it'll be out soon. But here is a small highlight of the shift I observed in the 18 chapters. Um just to explain how we went about with it. uh our mentor had recordings of all the 18 chapters and we heard each chapter every day and he also has reflection prompts based on each chapter. So we used to listen to the chapter, reflect, journal and then talk in a collective group of four and share insights. So the internal shifts that I'm talking about are roughly divided into eight as of now. Identity my sense of self has changed has changed. Um I started the journey by asking who am I? The first line I journaled was who am I? And I ended it by realizing that I am not one person or one thing. There are layers too which is also something we explored through our sessions and the bug session. I realized there are parts of me that are me that I would like to keep and there are parts that I don't like and are not me and I will get rid of them when I leave from here. Validation. I used to think I'm not a people pleaser but turns out I did like the external validation and I did tie my sense of self or my work to feedback that I received from others. So that is a shift that I'm real that I'm looking at. Action was 2.47. >> You should not tie yourself to the results and outcomes. I have started enjoying the process. So I was less anxious about this presentation because I loved working on this entire presentation rather than just presenting it here today. Self-awareness is something as a whole that I looked at through all the 18 chapters. um self-awareness increased through the entire journey. I started looking more inwards rather than just outwards control in terms of things around and factors you can't control. I also have this line in the first initial chapters where I've written I fear uncertainty. I cannot I have trouble dealing with uncertainty sometimes and the last journaling I had was I love uncertainty. I thrive in thrilling situations where I don't know what's happening to me and I would like to experience more of it. So I think I'm letting my letting I'm learning to let go and lose control and let the flow of the nature and universe take over. Relationships in general with friends, family, and my own self. I'm getting more compassionate. Faith. I always had a sense of faith in the universe and things around me. I felt like I'm carried. I'm taken care of. But that just strengthened over all these 18 factors. Earlier there were times where I used to question if if God is there or if why is something wrong happening to me? What did I do? But faith is something that is friendly. Even if something wrong is happening, it's just happening for the best for the plot. >> Inquiry. Inquiry inwards which also connects with self-awareness in a way. But inquiry through prompts and external help. um inquiry through questions, inquiry in words. I am a curious person. I ask a lot of questions to a lot of people around me. But all those questions I also started asking my own self and inquiring in words. So yeah, I began the journey by asking who am I? And I ended it by recognizing that there are layers of me that are me and layers that are not. And yeah, work was only one part of the internship and the rest of Orwell became a classroom in its own life. We were we were reflecting in every place. Oh, individual limitation. I forgot to talk about physical education because I looked at it as an individual limitation. I tried yoga for the first week. I went being very enthusiastic but I could not wake up the next week. I was questioning if I lost motivation. I don't know. We tried frisbee. It was very fun. But then we stopped going after a few sessions. Surfing did once. I backed out by the end of it. But it does deserve a second chance. So I will explore it again. Cycling, we said cycling is an exercise that we're doing but they're all recycles so they don't come. >> So physical education I have put it under an individual limitation which is something I have left to ponder for later. So my key my key takeaways from this entire internship is this entire presentation. But if you want me to summarize it, I have a renewed definition of meaningful work. I don't only look at outputs and productivity in a way I used to. I also look at work in the process of it. So if I'm working and it's meaningful, it counts. It's productive. Economics, I did talk about it, but yeah, I have a new definition of economics and we're also exploring that through yoga. Myself and compassion and community. Myself, the entire Bhagwat Gita chapter of my life is a renewed definition of myself and I'm discovering new parts every day. And I have I am trying to be more compassionate towards others but also more importantly the nature and all the greens around community. I had heard of communal living. I experienced it at a few places with my friends. But realizing the true essence and meaning of a community and the power a community holds is what taught me and the place I lived at Mitra. It was a community turned to family is what I like to call it. So yeah. Thank you. >> [applause] >> Uh I'm going to be talking about my six weeks in Orville. First uh little bit about me. >> I am a psych major. It wasn't always decided for me that I wanted to study psych. I wanted to do something really cool and like graphic design or media. But after studying psychology for two years in school, it really drew me in. especially having a really amazing professor and it's such a grounding and such an amazing subject to learn. You learn a lot about yourself and the people around you. It's also very incredibly humbling subject in the sense that I remember once I was studying for my exam and you have this one line and I'm like oh that's definitely not something I do and immediate next and people are very ignorant of this behavior in themselves. Okay. Oh, so there are many aspects to the subject and in terms of education, there's so much in a way that it connects to education in the sense that you'll be sitting in a class and you'll have your teachers telling you that, oh, you are the next leading generation and at the time when you're so young, it seems like so big and such nonsense because you're like, oh. And then you see it from the other side and you look at it and you're like education plays such an important role especially when you have a really good teacher when they shape your minds and they really lead you into the right direction which brings me to the work I did. So I worked on two research projects. First one was how uh the research question was how did organ education support the development of different parts of the being for students between the graduating batches of 1999 and 2000. My mentor for that was Orurushi. In this research, she had taken interviewees of students within these graduating batches and I had to clean the transcripts and find common themes within them. Uh and in the second research I talked uh the main question that I had to work on was how did the participants choose self-directed paths? Why did they choose to stay in Oruroville or come back to Orville? So if you see both of these in the research one we're talking about how did their oral environment help them to move outside and be who they are outside whereas in the second we had to talk about how they chose self-directed parts after being in Oruroville and going to education system. So I got to view two very opposite opinions and it was very knowledgeable for me to learn this because when you when I was reading the literature review for the first research because we interviewed such an early batch there were things that they mentioned that uh they did not like about their particular education versus when we uh interviewed them later on. You could see such a stark difference in the sense where they were like oh I love having being able to do this. I love being able to have uh art and physical education as part of my curriculum. Another thing that I really noticed when I was doing my research and going around was that how your education isn't really institutionalized in the sense that when people talk about education, they don't necessarily talk about classrooms. They talk about the outside a lot. So um so in the second research we are in the process of doing a thematic analysis and it is uh the analysis be done within the integral education framework. Uh in addition to all that I also did a lot of work for the integral education practitioners gathering or IEP. Uh I helped a lot with the event uh management and direction. I also this is the first time I really photographed and videoraphed an event. So it was really huge for me because I remember going a lot and taking photos of everything and then having to uh deal with the fact that my card was full. So then I had to really learn to take very um intentional photographs and not just of every pretty thing I see. That is me at you think I'm having fun on the tree. It's the opposite. I got stuck up there for 10 minutes. Yeah. So all of these work, all of my research work carried on into my sessions. When I was doing the literature review, we learned a lot about the physical, vital, and the mental. And we also came across that in sessions with Johnny reading completely different books. And that really made me think about how here everything is done so intentionally and everything has this underlying connection or thread to it. And in sessions with Oyan again we spoke on communication. We practice speech. So if you heard me say anys and in the speech today it's because she hasn't done her job right. >> We also had uh sessions with Aryani. It turned into an encounter. We met her at city and then she wanted to come and have a session with us on movement. It was really an enriching experience because she had us all like walk weirdly and fall on the ground and we were like, "Oh, I don't want to do this. I don't want to hurt myself." She's like, "We all take so much pride in standing upright in our body and walking, but none of us ever know how to fall down correctly or we don't have the amount of respect we have for our feet and our body like we have for like other aspects of physical aspects like duty." So, that is something new we learned in terms of physical activity. So, we started with Frisi. I played quite a lot of frisbee in my university as well, but after a while it got a little tiring. So, we started skipping out on sessions. Then we did have a lot of cycling. Um, even though it was an ecycle. I promise I shut off the horse when I was cycling inside Orville. And I learned a lot of different cycle paths and roots. And through that, you really realize how well connected and how much of a circle Orville really is. People keep saying it's a circle. You never realize until you like end up somewhere and then open out from somewhere else and you're like, I was here 5 minutes ago. And then we did tango. I have learned classical dance for almost 15 years of my life. So trying to learn a different form was a little difficult in the beginning because it's two completely different things. But we have great mentors. We had Muna and we had Aravan teach us some really nice moves which we did um every night after our session we would go back to our hostel and we would show everyone how what step we learned. And this is something weekend exploration which I like to call postcards from Orville because I'll be taking so many pictures and memories back from this um these entire six weeks and weekends. I won't go into detail with all of these because we've already covered them. Certain challenges that I faced was because I was working with two different projects. I felt like I did not have enough time to work with both the projects. Um I was not I was very um I was not I did not feel very connected to the second half of the project that I was doing because it was so rushed. I did definitely enjoy the content of both the projects but I feel like it was again too rushed. There was uh no clear start and end projects but um and this was evident when we were working with our event management. Sometimes we would go like so fully in into preparing that we would not realize the other work that we had to do. And yeah I wish we had a lot more feedback circles. We had that at the beginning but we sort of didn't have that towards the end cuz that would have really helped as well. In terms of things I am taking back with me obviously I have my recommendation letter. Devon this this is a prompt for you. Please please include this. Yeah. Other than that I have a loads of happiness that I'm taking back with me and the very intentional and simple kind. I really liked waking up not to the sound of cars honking and just birds and having so much beauty around me. I had the teachings of Shri Orurubinda and the mother to look forward to every morning and the way they describe the consciousness and unity and the soul. It was really beautiful to read and the idea of living intentionally and also I'm taking back with me my red shoes. They were squeaky clean when I came here and now I have red mud attached to all of them. So that is a nice memory that I'll be taking back with me. >> Thank you. >> I had I had another challenge I wanted to mention but uh luckily I won't have to spend a lot of time going into that because she will be presenting next. Kini the floor is yours. [laughter] Hello, I'm Kadini who did me and yeah so this I mean when I started showing these this presentation to a few people around here they like wow it looks like a movie um it was not intentional but yeah yeah this is the person behind the camera since um a few like two three weeks here I've been working on using my camera my DSabic one more um and I've been enjoying Okay. So, yeah. So, this is me. I am uh yeah, I love documenting moving, collecting visual notes and being filled with questions and I guess that's what led me for research over here. Otherwise, back in Ahmedabad, I am a social and political science student. I am going to be entering my fourth year back then. Yes. So, I will be covering a little bit of what everybody else has covered through their presentation, but it's going to be a little bit for my lens. These are some of the just the notes that I had while I was attending sessions with Nikki and Sean who's over here and every time I would be in these sessions, I would be like filled with curiosity and just um just I'll be scribbling down everything. So yeah, so I was hoping to collect a lot of answers that I already had before coming here, but I instead I left with better questions and somehow that felt more valuable. Yeah. So prior to coming here, I recognized the world around me being in such extreme forms of existence in the religious and political fabric of our country and that left me really disheartened in the sense that how people um it just left me with a bitter taste of how religions are and what they make people do. Uh Deep in one of those sessions mentioned that Orurave begins where religions end and that is such a beautiful thought to have. So because of how I would see the world outside, it left me in a lot of angst and critique for the whole world perpetually. But I think after I came here, I discovered that there's so much depth and beauty in things if you just have the eye for it. Jean in one of the sessions that we were attending was talking about this thing that struck me quite deeply was that to be able to manifest beauty is the aim of life. [clears throat] And I think that's so simple to not just understand but also execute. Um in some of the weekly sessions I would find myself being filled to the brim with my curiosity of how people see themselves, how people discuss and comprehend the ideas about consciousness, divinity, time, identity and basically questions that don't have neat answers. But these notebooks just became like less about taking notes and more about keeping up with my curiosity. which is why you would see my pages filled with half for thoughts and like arrows connecting ideas and just questions scribbled everywhere. Um yeah and yeah so the however like the most valuable thing I take with me over here is how people see themselves beyond the limitations of emotions that consume them. Deept and Oran both talked about how you need to manifest sakshi bha or the witness observer mind and that practice has left me with thinking what my sense of identity carries. Observing people talk with so much depth here gave me a fascinating comprehension of how much knowledge they receive in the education over here and how they build themselves up with how much they consume and absorb in a place like Orville. So uh I think yeah my next slide is just going to be about how my research was conducted and what my processes were. Um growing up in Andabad which just like these digit conventional forms of schooling made me take some time made me like made me wait and made me just very patient to find out what education is and to find out that education is very different from learning and that learning is tied to one's growth and it's not a means to an end which is what we're taught like we're always being taught that education is something that you receive and uh in school to get to college and the college the education that you receive in college is to get have a job. So I think I unlearned that a lot and on the other hand seeing how people receive education over here and approach their their work left me in in wonder and envy about how people how students are sought to have [clears throat] appreciation for the finer things in life. This research that I worked on with my mentor Soma um uh follows a similar line of wanting to find out how people cultivate a sense of not looking at education as a means to an end but people who looked at education and learning as a lifelong process and who truly are in sync with the systems of integral education here. So we started with not having a proper research question and I the research is still ongoing. just in our data um analysis aspect part of our research and yeah so we just had one criteria to choose people who we wanted to interview and that was people who grew up here who went through oral education and people who did not choose to go for higher education but continued their journey in Orville. So some of the findings that we had over here were like these people saw Oruroville as um not a comfortable place but they always saw it as a challenging place and that's what I think left them which just it made them keep coming back to this place and believe in the existence of this place. Um all of them somehow in their journeys recognized some flaws in their education as well and all of them somewhere got called to teaching themsel to to teaching themselves and just uh and they believed in the service to their community. Um all of them also mentioned the importance of sports and physical education in their interviews and how much those aspects changed and impacted their lives. Um uh something else that we also explored was IEPG that Eva talked about a little bit was um I think I just learned how to handle uh event management per se like assistant in event management but it was nice to see how events are created here with so much care and sensitivity towards people who are attending them and there's a yeah I think so once mentioned that there's a sense of beauty when uh events are created and formed in organ. So I think that's was that was what I appreciate the most. Um coming to physical education. So yeah I we started with Frisbee that we left halfway between because we were too busy. Yeah. Then I think yeah then we went to tango on Monday nights. Um then yes cycling around was always a fun. I would find myself I think um it's I found that there there's so much of freedom in the world of meditation as well. You know meditation is not just when you're sitting in a room in silence but it can happen everywhere and that I think uh when I'm cycling it happens to me all the time or you keep thinking and cycling around aimlessly. >> Yes. Um things have changed about my experience back my roommate per se but other than that I think just um the first two weeks we did like weekly check-ins uh with our mentors but I think I would like a little bit I would have liked every Friday if we could have just sat and just um expressed what our week look like and I think my main thing Yeah. Huh. My main takeaways are um think these are not exactly takeaways. They are observations and learnings and everything. So first of them is people have so much wisdom here and I always find myself observing and soaking in their knowledge so much here. But despite people with filled to the brim with wisdom, they are always subjecting themselves to such nent stages of their growth and change. And I think it's so commendable to see. Um there's so much of abundance of goodness here as well. Um and it finds a lot of meaning in the work that people express themselves with. Um then yeah I think ah one thing that oh yeah through my interviews as well when I talked to people over here I could I could sense that there was frustration and rejection with the current state of Orurugville and where it is heading. Um but the but despite that there's so much of hope and aspiration in people to carry forward and make this city a place where it can fulfill its potential. Um I also think one thing that I learned over here is whenever I would see these spiritual gurus in like um the rest of the parts of the India I would be thinking they're so far away from the existence and lived reality of people but I felt like Shri Orurabindo over here he um I think he's so learned and he's so realistic in his way of expressing and just um yeah I think is writing about very real things. So I think I learned that spiritual gurus can also be like yeah very knowledgeable and ultimately I think I would want to say I found my love for cycling here and that make me really wisful about the next time that I come here because I really don't want to forget the cycle paths I discovered while aimlessly rolling around. I don't want to forget the roads I chose and discovered within me and within >> one surprise for you. >> So I've been working on making a video for um Mitra people. So I'm presenting that. [music] not recently. Right. I am Gia. I uh am a visual and performing arts student and why I chose this is finds an answer in the Bhagat Gita because it corresponded with my Swabhava and Swarma. Uh I'll start with talking about how the reading sessions have shaped me. These reading sessions were we were extremely lucky to have the reading sessions with joy and deep because a lot of visitors and guests that we've seen and interns we've seen uh in Oruraveville they visit the places here they do the different activities here but none of them get the opportunity to delve very deep into the works of mother and Shri Orurabindo and if it wasn't for Deepi and Joy's we wouldn't have been able to understand the complex and rigorous and the rich literature of Shri Orurbindo. So I'm filled with gratitude. I don't have words to express it so far but uh with Deepi we explored the Vantic framework which became very instrumental in my understanding of the Bhagat Gita from the sevenfold world to the chakras to Sajitananda everything in a way informed my readings of the Bhagat Gita which was my central project throughout internships uh with joy. We learned about the human cycle and the evolution of human intellect in a psychological sense through how the societies developed psychologically and intellectually which was a refreshing take because in schools we generally learn about the biological evolution of humankind. But here we got to understand the different stages that human indirect has developed. How human beings make meaning, how they understand themselves, how they associate themselves to something higher than them. some of the readings um some of the very uh interesting excerpts from the readings that we did were u Shri Orurabindo's descriptions of subjectivism that we read with joins and it is essentially what Swata and Sava mean for me. I can read uh one excerpt. Subjectivism proceeds from within and regards everything from the point of view of of a containing and developing self-consciousness. The law here is within ourselves. I think this is the perfect definition of Swadharma that I explored later in Gita. uh in my through my own readings I tried to read a bit of the life divine myself and what I found very interesting was and what we also discussed how Shri Orurabindo tries to take opposites and put them together in a complimentary way. So his descriptions about how matter and spirit are essentially two sides of the same coin and uh how if you reject material you are uh sorry if you're if you just believe in the material physical world you're bound to reject the spirit and if you just focus on the spirit you're bound to reject the material world as maya but if you integrate both of them then you can truly develop the um adic sense of being and also what uh Deepi uh um uh encouraged us to understand is how different philosophers have often created these dualities between the world and nirvana between maya and liberation but how Shri Orurabindo's integrate how Shri Orurabindo integrates everything into life and how divinity is brought to the earth and it's not in esoteric like outward outlandish concept. It's right here everywhere. Uh sessions with Oruran. There were quite a few favorite exercises that I got to explore with Oruravan. One of them being one question a day. This was my favorite because I realized that even to come to a question is a big quest in itself. And a lot of times we don't know what we want to explore what uh where our quest heads. So just coming to a question in itself was a very uh deep and introspective process and answer is another journey in itself. But just coming to a questions just putting down things that I want to explore was in itself a very um beautiful journey. The other thing was that uh she asked us to draw how we would describe ourselves to these different categories of people. And uh drawing this helped me uh express something which was more than how I would describe myself in words. And I realized how much drawing can help you intuitively give a form to things that are not captured [clears throat] in words. So that was one of my favorite exercises. Uh writing character sketches uh with writing character sketches was uh interesting because it helped me rediscover my love for writing and also how much writing is a skill that you have to constantly shape and u sharpen and I had sort of gone a bit rusty on that and Oran helped me rediscover and rekindle that passion and communication as for all of us she helped us recognize the uh [laughter] the gaps in our communication, the lack of clarity in our thoughts and encouraged us to speak spontaneously with clarity with engagement and with substance. Uh so this is another activ 1 to 10 but I applied it for my physical activity and I made a sort of a report card for myself. So I mainly indulged in two uh two physical activities here. One was yoga and one was tango. I wrote about what worked for me, what didn't work for me and what was challenging and how much I rate my commitment. And that's me and Eva doing tango. And I realized through the process of learning tango how much uh and with Aryan's session as one of us mentioned earlier how much our being is about being present in a body and being contained in the body in a sense to feel to feel the body as a container and um in relation to the space also. So that sort of somatic sense of my body, my being being somewhere was something that got reinforced in both of those sessions. Uh the Bhagat Gita sessions. This is something that uh Deepi mentioned in our last class that Krishna is your higher self. Talking to Arjuna which is your evolving self and it sort of captures my whole experience of the Bhagat Gita is to come to this understanding that you are Krishna. You are one with divinity and you are divinity. And one of the lines that really actually made me cry during the Bhagat Gita sessions was that I am Arjuna among the pands that I am you. So why do you have to fear anything that was I everyone remembers in that I had a cry session after that. Uh this drawing is uh is by one of the participants of Vidya Mander's Bhagat Gita sessions and this encapsulates also what my takeaway from the Bhagat Gita was. To me this represents the Vishwa rupa that we uh read about in the 11th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita because it it sort of represents the becoming of Krishna into the whole universe that he reveals uh in front of the in front of Arjuna and in a sense that it also looks like a cell. So to this to me represented that every cell has this whole universe inside of it. That every finite has an infinite and the presence of divinity is there in everything whether matter or spirit which relates again to life divine. So everything is so interconnected which you'll get to see also in something that I've made here. Uh coming to my research project briefly. I worked with uh Dain on this research project where we uh collected responses from the Bhagat Gita participants, the session participants like me who have gone through these 18 chapters uh facilitated by Din and I mainly focused on capturing their experiences, how the Bhagavad Gita during the sessions have shaped their experience and perspectives and their lives. And I used an online form and allowed them to um express themselves in written visual audio format. And the output is this booklet that I created which you can pick up after we are done. This is a booklet which cap captures the testimonials of the participants of these sessions and they describe beautifully how uh the Bhagavar Gita sessions have transformed them and how they try to integrate the Bhagavar Gita in their lives and how much Vidya has helped this journey. Uh I I will not go deeply into this but there's this one uh artist that I visited uh he's an ecosulurer here. He works he worked at wellpaper and I saw his installation and the way that he used waste and the way that he collected materials from nature itself sparked an idea for me and uh the material idea for me for my own installation. Uh it is an installation that I've built through uh my journey here and it is there in the balcony for you all to see. Once I'm done, you can have a look and sit there. I would recommend that you sit in front of it for a few minutes to have the experience that I wanted to create. And this is the concept note that is also there. So you can read it here. You can move to that space. Yeah, that's my presentation. Thank