The Perfect Birthday Gift from my Two Mothers:
Tales of Love and Grace from Amma’s 2008 Australian Tour
By Ambujam (Lindy Lee)
 Deep in the recesses of my early childhood, swirled an intoxicating dream.
A dream that one day I would sing till my heart soared like an eagle. That music would fill my soul to the point where I would not know where it began and I ended.
Like most stories around Amma, mine finds its roots in a childhood wish. Permit me to add some extra flavour, with a little sprinkle of history.
Music has always been a major part of my life, beginning when I first learnt the electronic organ at age 5. I was so desperate to learn the organ, that my parents agreed to pay for lessons even though my feet couldn’t touch the pedals. Picture a little blonde haired, blue-eyed poppet, feet dangling aimlessly from the organ stool, while chubby fingers stretched beyond their limits playing ‘Ode To Joy’ and ‘Amazing Grace.’
Then in my second last year of high school, I had major reconstructive surgery on my face and needed to strengthen my jaw and restore my speech. Rather than see a therapist, I chose to be classically trained as a singer.
In singing I found my true passion. I could bring emotional depth, light and shade to a song, in a way that I hadn’t been able to with an instrument. In my final year at school I sang at every opportunity. I was invited to sing with professional groups, big bands, choirs, and sang solos in the Melbourne Concert Hall. It appeared I had found my raison d’etre.
But In May 1993, at the age of 18, my happy childhood ended. My beloved father was killed in a car racing accident at Phillip Island Raceway. At his funeral, I sang a beautiful jazz ballad called ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, in front of 500 people. From that point on, my passion for singing was linked with the gut wrenching pain of grief. Needless to say, I stopped singing. In fact, I stopped performing in public altogether.
When I first met Amma in April 2006, I fell deeply in love with her almost instantly. While my ears had no frame of reference for the strange sounding Indian instruments and lyrics, I could feel the desire to sing, starting to stir within my heart again.
Although I didn’t join a satsang after the 2006 tour, I practiced the meditation technique and my mantra at home and listened to bhajan CDs.
It wasn’t until life brought me to my knees in the form of a marriage breakdown, that I joined the Australian Ashram satsang on Guru Purnima in 2007. My main reason for regular attendance was to get a handle on the whole bhajan concept so that I could sing along with Amma when She toured this year. As it happened, my desire to learn bhajans opened me up to a whole new life, to a new family at the Ashram, to a level of friendship, support and love that I have never before experienced.
As Amma’s love, in the form of my supportive satsang family buoyed me, I felt strong enough to start leading bhajans. My singing was transformed and came from a totally different place. A place where there was no fear, no pain from the past, only love and devotion. So much so, that I agreed to sing at one of my closest friends weddings the weekend before Amma arrived in Melbourne. I also asked to lead a bhajan at the Melbourne Devi Bhava program. Due to a heavy pre-tour workload and getting soaked in a sudden downpour while singing at my friend’s wedding, I caught a cold. So I spent the first few days of the tour croaking like a frog.
The very moving song I’d sung at my friend’s wedding was called ‘Watch over Me’ by Bernard Fanning and I had a secret desire to sing it for Amma. I’d shared this dream with one of my beautiful Amma sisters from Adelaide, Tapasvini (Melissa) in January. She told me about a talented guitarist from her satsang who she thought might be willing to accompany me. Before the tour started, I reminded myself to ask Tapasvini to introduce me to the lovely Damien, but my seva responsibilities meant it slipped my mind. As it happened, Amma took care of the introduction on the second day of the tour, and I ended up offering a nice young man and his daughter a lift back to their hotel. Lo and behold, it was Damien the guitarist from Adelaide. I asked him if he was interested in learning the song and performing with me for Amma. He agreed to take the music back to his hotel and have a think about it. While Damien and I practiced the next day, my voice was still too croaky to really do me any justice, so I thought I’d give up on the whole idea. I didn’t want to sing for my beloved Amma if I wasn’t up to scratch.
By Devi Bhava, my voice had improved enough for me to have some control, but only a little. I sang a very husky version of my favourite English bhajan - ‘As a Child Needs a Mother’ with the Ashram satsang group.
Gradually as the tour wore on, I let go of my disappointment at not being able to sing properly for Amma and exchanged it for a desire to write Her a song in the future.
As a regular member of the Ashram satsang, I have often thought it would be wonderful to learn the harmonium (the Indian accordion-style keyboard) and be able to write bhajans. Several months ago I started to ask people about how I might purchase a harmonium, and soon discovered it was actually rather difficult. So I had resigned myself to one day being lucky enough to find a secondhand harmonium, already in Australia.
On the final morning of Amma’s Australian tour in Sydney, I arrived to find a harmonium sitting on the table at Amma’s clothing shop. A sign leaning against it read ‘Amma’s Harmonium for Sale’. Scratched out in thick green texta, I could hardly believe that such an insignificant sign was really telling me that I could own Amma’s harmonium! Jani, the lovely lady responsible for the stall told me that there was a problem with the tour’s luggage being overweight, and Amma had decided to sell Her harmonium to bring the weight down.
I have been blessed with a gorgeous relationship with my Mum, Dianne, where deep trust and love are paramount and few words are needed between us. Mum had come on the entire tour with me and was standing next to me when I saw the harmonium. Seeing how excited I was, Mum simply said ‘Would you like me to buy it for your birthday sweetheart?!’ I nearly jumped through the roof! ‘Yes!’ I shouted - knowing full well that the price tag was so far beyond a normal birthday present, that I could probably forget about getting another gift for the next decade! And as fate would have it, it was my 33rd birthday the following day.
Over the course of the day and evening, the level of grace in being given Amma’s harmonium by my two Mother’s, was gradually revealed to me. Initially I thought it was the harmonium that the Swami’s played on stage next to Amma. But I soon found out that the Swami’s had another harmonium altogether, and that yes, this was Amma’s personal harmonium. The one She plays in Her room when practicing with the Swamis. The one She plays…in Her room...
A couple of friends suggested that I should get the harmonium blessed during my last Darshan. I thought that was a little bit of overkill, afterall how much more blessed can the harmonium get, than being regularly played by the divine Mother?! I figured it was a better idea to have me blessed to use the harmonium instead. So Mum and I joined the Darshan line around 5am at the end of the Sydney Devi Bhava. I lugged the massive case on stage with a little prayer for Amma in hand.
Since I knew that Amma had an early flight out of Sydney and there were still a few weddings to go, I suspected that my Darshan would be extremely fast. I handed my prayer to Gita who handed it to another attendant behind Amma. The attendant read the prayer while I received Darshan. In my hurry to get into Amma’s arms, I’d left the harmonium a little way behind me on stage. As I was being pulled out of Her arms, I heard Gita say, ‘Damien, bring the harmonium here please.’ I hadn’t noticed that my lovely new musician friend Damien was a darshan monitor. He lifted the heavy harmonium up, and held it behind us as Amma finished Mum’s Darshan. Even though it must have taken a great deal of strength to hold it in that position, he did so with such care, devotion and love and without a single wobble.
What followed was one of the most memorable moments of divine love I’ve ever experienced. Amma popped a lolly in my mouth, then did the same for Mum. She handed me a perfect single red rose, followed by an apple. Then she kissed me on both cheeks and showered Mum and I with rose petals. At this point she moved forward and blessed the harmonium with sandal paste and threw more rose petals on it. As Damien gently stood with our precious instrument, Gita told us to pick up the rose petals that were still resting on top of the harmonium. I wondered if each rose petal represented a song that might be written on the harmonium in the future.
As I was flying out of Sydney later that day I started to read Swami Ramakrishnanada’s new book ‘Ultimate Success’. In it, I came across the following quote from Amma which seems fitting to recount here:
‘Our God-given abilities are a treasure that is meant for ourselves as well as for the entire world. This wealth should never be misused and made into a burden for us and for the world. The greatest tragedy in life is not death; the greatest tragedy is to let our great potential, talents and capabilities be underutilized, to allow them to rust while we live. When we use the wealth obtained from nature, it diminishes; but when we use the wealth of our inner gifts, it increases.’
- Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi“May Peace and Happiness Prevail”.
Keynote Address, Closing Plenary Session
2004 Parliament of World’s Religions.
I realised as I read this quote that I’d started the tour with some superficial questions which I’d had the good fortune for Amma to answer directly. But I hadn’t asked the deeper question which had played on my mind for many years. When my father died, I basically shut down on all the skills and talents I had been given. I steadfastly curled into a ball and decided I would never let myself be vulnerable again. But how that decision seemed to manifest in my life, was that I actually shut down on joy. I stopped racing cars (before Dad died, I’d loved racing MG’s so much that I wanted to race professionally); I stopped singing, I stopped playing music. All of these things in my childhood had given me an abiding sense of passion and joy. I studied media at University, but chose a career on the outskirts, never allowing myself to really shine. Even on the odd occasion where I did allow myself to be creative and won major awards for the documentaries I’d produced or stories I’d written, I would shut down again immediately afterwards. For me, it was a life of stagnation. As Amma said, my talents had become a burden and the fact that I seemed too damaged to utilize them, was a great source of shame for me.
The reality is that being creative and sharing your talents with the world also means you attract criticism if the fruit of those talents doesn’t meet other’s approval. Creative talent and being deeply sensitive often go hand in hand. But by not allowing myself to become who I was born to be, I stopped experiencing the great joy that came into my life through creative expression. Not to mention the joy that others also experienced. My real question to Amma should have been ‘How can I be truly fearless in expressing the talents I’ve been given and fulfill my potential?’
Without my conscious knowledge, Amma had been gently schooling me in how to overcome my deepest fears, through my regular satsang attendance. The answer was so simple and obvious. When I lovingly focused my attention on Amma while I sang, all fear for myself evaporated. In fact, I stopped thinking about myself altogether. I was completely open. I decided this was a great metaphor to apply to the rest of my life.
As a perfect counterpoint to this story, Amma’s Melbourne tour took place at Sandown racetrack. The venue has its own significance in my family. Every year, thousands of people gather for a memorial car racing weekend held in my father’s name, at Sandown. Mum and I usually attend to present trophies on Dad’s behalf. As Amma left the Hall to go to Her room one afternoon, She stopped and watched the race cars on the track. At the time it felt significant, but I wasn’t really sure why.
I’ve done so much work around the issue of my father’s death that I don’t feel much pain anymore. But there was a period in my life where I was so traumatized that I couldn’t even be in the same room with a TV showing car racing. The sound alone would send me into paroxysms of grief. It was a time where my whole world contracted and I could barely leave the house. But there I was standing peacefully at a race track, with my beloved Amma by my side, watching the cars in person - with no emotional reactivity whatsoever. It felt like Amma was acknowledging how far I’d come over the last 15 years.
As I observed Amma watching the race cars, I also remembered that once in the distant past, I too had felt that same sense of wonder.
Amma overwhelms me with Her knowledge of us and what is best for our personal growth. I had a simple dream for a harmonium. To me, it didn’t feel as important as my other superficial wishes. When She gave me Her harmonium, it was more personal and individually special than I could imagine in my wildest dreams. At the time, I got caught on the physical form of the harmonium being the gift.
What Amma really gave me was complete freedom from my painful past and a blessing so profound that I now feel I must fulfill my creative potential. To me, it felt like Krishna had handed me his flute.
It also seems significant that my Mum, Dianne, the one person in my life who has nourished and inspired my creativity since birth, was the generous co-giver of this special birthday present.
Many of us have some inkling of what our divine purpose is in life. Some of us will fulfill that purpose, others will not. There is little doubt in my mind that had I not met my beloved Satguru, I may have gone through life continuing to allow my talents to ‘rust’ and my potential to remain unfulfilled. I have no idea what wonderful things Amma has in store for me. But I can now say that I am no longer afraid to step up and fully engage with them.
As a final footnote to this story, Amma blessed me with a name this tour. It is ‘Ambujam’, an old Southern Indian name meaning Lotus Flower. The significance of the name is that lotuses have their roots in the deep murkiness of the swamp, but despite this are able to transcend the mud and offer a beautifully fragrant blossom to the world.
I have come from a dark place in my life, and I now humbly offer the blossoming flower of my talents at my beloved Amma’s lotus feet.
Om Amriteswaryai Namaha
Ambujam |
