Notes for healing

  The Power of Prayer and Harinam Hare Krishna, dear devotees. Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada! Recently, devotees asked me to share the story of my near-death experience and the mercy of Lord Jagannath. So, with Their blessings, I will now try to briefly describe this experience, hoping that it may help someone just as it helped me. It happened in January 2020 while we were living here in Mayapur. Let me clarify that I was perfectly healthy and had no plans of dying anytime soon. In fact, during that time, there was a devotee in the Mayapur hospital whom I volunteered to take care of. I thought I could serve her and gain some experience in how to face death properly, experience that might be useful for me in twenty or thirty years. I had no idea that on my scheduled day of duty, I would find myself unconscious in the adjacent room, needing the Holy Name myself. But as it turned out, death can come quite unexpectedly, even when we are in good...

In the chapter of the Krishna Book titled "Prayers by the Demigods for Lord Krishna in the Womb," Srila Prabhupada cautions against the tendency to relate to God in a somewhat impersonal way. We understand that Krishna, as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, has both personal and impersonal aspects — He is simultaneously one with everything and different from everything. It is easy to see and appreciate the power and energy of Krishna in the world around us, but sometimes not so easy to see or understand Krishna as a person. Who is He? What does He do? The call of the soul, the dharma of life, is to reawaken our relationship with the person Krishna. Prabhupada says we have to have some "feeling for the Personality of Godhead" and to become "affectionately attached" to the Lord. How do we do that? How do we awaken those feelings? A good place to start is to ask ourselves: what do we love about Krishna? Maybe it is His flute playing, or His dancing with th...