Retreat in the Heart of Darjeeling

  When you arrive in India, you are greeted in the New Delhi Airport by a wall of gigantic hands positioned as mudras.  We are probably most familiar seeing mudras used by meditators for directing the flow of energy.

In the West, we are accustomed to being relatively private about matters of personal faith and metaphysics–or at least so it seems to me.

But in India, symbols of faith are everywhere from the airport to the dashboard of the taxi cab or the lobby of a lawyer.  Everyone has on display something that denotes a religion, a guru, a deity, a sect, or a message of belief.  And these symbols are by-and-large respected by the equally diverse population of the world’s largest democracy.

Perhaps  the mystical display of giant hands at the airport is born out of the culture that greets one another with the  word, “Namaste,” or loosely, “The divine in me honors the divine in you.”  Something good has got to come out of that and the mudras that send blessings our way.