“I joined Yoga classes finally!!!” said Seema. Her eyes were bright with happiness. “You know what, I joined Zumba classes” said Neelam with a look that challenged all of us to say something. “I have started my own you tube channel” said Kavitha, looking very proud of herself. “I am learning keyboard” said Kiran shyly. And after that all eyes turned on me.

We are five friends who live in a gated community, and one unspoken rule we have in our group is, that we always focus on fun. Our conversations are always superficial, casual and witty. Whenever we meet, we basically transform into those college girls who feel like giggling uncontrollably for each and everything. We all are working women, with kids, elders and family to take care of, some of us are also facing lot of challenges and struggles, which no one discusses in our group. Our group get togethers are strictly for fun and fun only.

“I joined Gita classes” I muttered in the lowest tone ever possible. For a split second there was silence and then there was an outburst of laughter and jokes and ridicule. “So now, what should we call you?

Divya Mataji?” asked Kavitha “Are you going to predict the future? “, “What is going to be your punch dialog?” “Are you really 90 years old? Have you been hiding your age from us?” In this group, to be teased mercilessly means that you are accepted as one of them. So, I happily laughed along and made a couple of self-deprecating comments that was met with glee and laughter.
“Come on Mataji, why don’t you share some of the Gyan with illiterates like us” said Seema with a smirk.

“I just attended few classes” I said, “but in general, it is a dialogue between the Pandava warrior Arjuna, and Lord Krishna. Arjuna is faced with a dilemma whether to fight or not in the Mahabharata war and this dialogue helps him to decide his course of action”

“How does that help you? You are not going to any wars?” asked Seema.

“They say that each of us have a Mahabharat war raging in our lives, and that we are all Arjunas who need this knowledge to make right choices” I replied.

“As if we have any choice in life!” commented Neelam looking as if she was ready for a brawl. Neelam was our most rebellious character.

“We do” I said. “We do have choices in life, even in our everyday life and we can choose either to act impulsively or to act according to what we believe is our duty”

This statement was received with an uproar of jokes and a whole lot of ridicule. It was getting late and we ladies needed to wind up so that we can start the next day early enough to keep everything going at both home and at work. But just was we were saying our ‘Good nights’, I said “I do believe we make lot of choices every day, only that we are not conscious of it”. There was a moment’s silence and then we left it at that and called it a day.
The next day, I was surprised to see an excel sheet in my messaging app from Seema. With column name as Situation Choice 1 Choice 2 Choice 3.

And the whole day, there was a constant trickle of messages teasing Seema about it. Seema is our in-house project manager, right from birthday parties to daily meal menus, she has an excel for everything and she gets teased endlessly for this.
But by evening, the file was moved to a google drive with access to all of us, and then it was all silence.

On day 3, I was curious to see if anyone was even using the excel and, when I peeked into it, I was completely blown off my feet by what I saw. There was a running list with all kinds of entries.

There was an entry by someone who was facing behavior issues from their teenage child. The first choice was to be angry with an approach of “give up and let him face the music, learn his own lesson”. The second choice was to be patient, believe in him and find a way to communicate to him in the way he
understands.
Someone else had a rude customer during their ‘on call support’ at work. One choice was to let the customer get lost behind the set of long winding formal processes and chase unending phone calls, the other was to let him vent and then help him out with the issue despite the rudeness.

Someone was now a caregiver for a dominating elderly person at home. After years of suffering oppression, now was a chance to show them how it feels to be humiliated. But then, the other choice was to keep quiet and just take care of them in the best way.

Someone else had the best opportunity to deal with a jealous neighbor who was in trouble. Their choice was to either let the neighbor face the difficulty and feel satisfied that Karma really works after all, or to be a proper citizen and go out and help them despite the past injustices.

By evening, I got a phone call which then snowballed into a full-fledged video conference, where everyone was talking at the same time and everyone was angry or upset. My friends had all listed their choices, and once the choices were in front of them, they were forced to abandon impulsive emotional responses and had to pick the ones which they thought was the right thing to do. And at the end of the day, they felt like losers, victims, and the proverbial doormats. They felt they were denied juicy chances to get back at the injustice that was happening or happened to them.

That night, I lay in my bed, worried if I had somehow broken up this beautiful group that had grown over the years. I surely did not want this to happen, and I decided to salvage whatever was left and get things back to normal. I had a plan by the time I dozed off.

The next day, I invited everyone for evening tea. I had all their favorite snacks ready, I had a list of fun games we could play, I had selected music that we all love, and I was fully prepared to erase any impression of the previous day from their minds. After setting everything up, I sat back and wondered if any of them would really turn up.

And turn up they did! Every one of them. We had tea, and we moved on to playing games, when suddenly someone said, “I did not know, doing the right thing would be so disturbing, what does your Krishna say for that?”
I really did not like the direction this was taking, but then, a question was a question, and I had to answer that, “Krishna says, if you do your duty, you will get purity of mind” I responded, as shortly as I could.

“Purity of mind is the last thing I would want, when I am in trouble or pain” came the blunt reply from Neelam.

“Then Krishna asks us to do it for His sake, out of our love for Him” I tried another direction. This was met with lot of eye rolling and booing.

“I don’t follow Hinduism, what do I do then?” asked Kavitha.

“Every religion or philosophy supports this concept, if you take stoicism for example, they talk about becoming virtuous, becoming the best version of humankind. I am sure Jesus is not against anyone doing their duty” I pleaded.

“I do not believe in God,” said Neelam. There was a shocked silence. I had no answer to this. I was feeling uncomfortable and was looking for something to say when Kavitha spoke up.

She said, “Hey guys, why don’t we play a game? As we have seen yesterday, the unappealing choice seems to be the right one. But we are all unhappy with the way the world would see us for making those choices. Our colleagues may think of us as weak; our relatives may take us to be fools; others may simply walk over us. But are we not tired of doing things for the sake of others? If the world would ill treat us for doing the right thing, let it! But we can reward ourselves for it. Let’s give ourselves one point for each of the unappealing but right choice that we make, let us collect points and celebrate the winner who made the greatest number of unappealing choices for the week!!!” This must have seemed like a novel thing to do, so it was met with a huge welcome and then everyone was back to their silly selves, and the friendly banter resumed and continued for the rest of the evening.

I was not sure, I really understood what was happening, but I was relieved that everyone was happy again, and there was no discomfort anymore. This group has always been our “happy place”, so, I was willing to go with the flow.

The next week was a whirlwind of messages. The game was on! The ladies were posting the choices they were making, and the ones who made the right choice, even though it was unappealing, got points. There were times when we made the wrong, impulsive choice, but we knew that the game would go on, and we would have ample opportunities to make the right choice the next day. By end of the week, there were winners, losers, handmade gifts and a whole lot of teasing for sure.

I was expecting the fervor to die down any time, but three weeks went easily by, and the game was on in its full form still. We did have our regular chats, we did have fun, but we realized our happiness had a wholeness to it. We had a sense of peace that was coming from within us. We were somehow quieter, and more confident than ever before. We still had our struggles to face, but there was dignity to our actions and reactions. We were no longer sleepwalking through life; we were fully conscious of the choices we were making every waking moment. No one in this group now feels that they don’t have choices in life. In the last few weeks, we have realized that no matter how tough our situation may be, we really do have a choice, and that is the key to our growth. To grow out of impulsive actions into a world of awareness and diligent living.

Finally, it was a month since we had our first discussion, and I logged in for the next online MGML class.
As the participants logged in one by one, I was surprised to see Seema in the participant box next to me.
I was surprised would be a mild way to put it. I now had a hunch, so I scrolled through the remaining
participants and was pleasantly shocked to see all my friends in there!!!

I realized that this was a starting point in a long spiritual journey, and I was lucky to have my friends accompany me in this path. I also felt grateful for the wonderful knowledge that is readily available to everyone, at any point in time, that they make up their mind to look for it. I felt incredibly grateful for the great teachers who gently and patiently guided us in the right path irrespective of our innumerable follies. I realized that instead of being battered by the huge waves of life experiences, Gita teaches us to ride them instead and use them to propel us into the skies of peace and joy.

My humble pranams to the Guru and the Almighty, and I pray for the knowledge and courage to keep going in this path, making the right choice every minute of the way.

-  vidyalakshmi govindarajan

Just like the best commentary on the Bhagavad Gita is the Gita itself, the best way to understand Swami Chinmayananda’s outlook towards women is to look at his actions and words. Swami Chinmayananda’s contribution to women empowerment lies in how he re‑framed womanhood as a spiritual identity rather than a catalogue of gender‑based duties.

In a letter from 1966, Swami Chinmayananda writes to a female devotee “Be just yourself. You are neither a wife, nor a mother, nor an artist, nor a woman, not even a devotee; you are just His creature in the presence of the Holy Creator. Let the peace of the evening envelope and swallow you up. Let the music of the setting sun joyously pervade your within. Let the beams of effulgent fragrance, sweet in the taste of its colors, embrace to whisper you the Supreme Self who functions behind all sense-organs.”

Swami Chinmayananda, a proponent of following swami-dharma, asked women to introspect and follow their dharma. To a doctor who was also a wife he wrote, “Your problem is a typical example of fundamental mistake multiplying into a chain of mistakes. The ‘Dr.’ in you should not have married: the ‘wife’ in you should not have been a doctor! The duties of a ‘wife’ must necessarily collide into the duties of the ‘Dr.’ something like the married Mahatma!!

“Now you must decide: are you essentially the wife and Mother ---or merely the Doctor? Accept the important role as your duty and the other as an added chance for ‘Seva’ as a wife who is also a good songster! Wife-hood the essential duty, to the music in her an added charm in her domestic life!

“Similarly--- I feel that you are essentially the wife and the Mother. Your M.D. and the experiences are no doubt your added charm. “Practice medicine and serve the society wherever your husband is. Serve him and your son -----I feel these are the main duties of the wife and the mother in you. The Dr. must play the 3rd place to the main part, the mother to the 2nd and then wife. This is for the ordinary woman. If you feel that the Dr. in you had married-and begot the child and so Dr. is the main: wife and motherhood secondary, then what you are now doing is right. But the real ‘Dharmo-meter’ is your own ‘person’. Are you happy-undisturbed by the regrets-pangs?”

This practical sensitivity is undergirded by a deeper, radically non‑dual intuition. Where many gurus idealised women as mothers or devotees, Swami Chinmayananda invited them to be teachers, leaders, and even sannyasinis. From the early 50’s, Swaminis like Saradapriyananda and others have taken on prominent roles in Vedanta teaching, rural‑reform and mission‑building that were often in contemporary organisations tightly reserved for men. Currently close to 41% of Chinmaya Mission Swamins (spiritual teachers) are women.

At the broader institutional level, he formally honoured mothers as the bearers of spiritual culture. At the inauguration of the first Devi Group in Chennai, in 1958, he said, “Salutations to Mothers! I need not mention how happy I am that a Devi section of Chinmaya Mission is being inaugurated on this sacred day. Indeed, women have been, and even today are, the real custodians of our country’s spiritual culture. The fall of our cultural standard is a true measure of the growing ignorance in the mothers of our society.” This is not a sentiment, but a public declaration of spiritual authority resting with women, and it is reinforced by the structure of Devi Groups, women‑only satsangs.

Taking this vision forward is CORD, Chinmaya Organisation for Rural Development, operating in Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and USA. It is rooted in the belief that people, especially women, are active partners in development, and not just recipients of aid. This women empowerment-based approach over a project-based approach, makes CORD uniquely successful and socially impactful.

Thus, in contrast with many traditional lineages that kept women largely in the background, Swami Chinmayananda’s vision was that women be anchors of dharma inside the family and leaders of dharma outside it, equally at home in scriptural study, sannyasa, and organised service. His contribution to women empowerment is a triple‑pronged legacy: a non‑dual self‑understanding, a gender‑inclusive teaching–leadership culture, and an institutional architecture that entrusts women with the transmission of spiritual and social values.   

Hari Om!

Cauvery Bhalla

Chennai, 1958 – imagine a room full of women gathered for their first Devi Group. This was at a time when India's women's movement was still focussed on legislative rights (Hindu Code Bill debates, property rights, education & a lot more we didn't have access to). This was a historic moment, albeit a quiet move.

One can only imagine the lengths of struggle Pujya Gurudev would have faced in that era to bring this august gathering in place. The bureaucracy and the opposition he would have had to battle to bring this together. Societal and cultural debates that he would have to deal with. Women’s access to study of scriptures was restricted and considered unnecessary. Against these odds, Gurudev did something completely radical by opening the doors for women to go a step beyond just studying. He gave them a platform to lead.

Gurudev’s reasoning was philosophical. We are aware that as Vedantins and sadhakas, we have studied in almost every scripture, including Upanishads and other shastras, that Atman is beyond everything; including gender. In such a case, the question that we need to ask is how Liberation would be exclusive to a few and would leave out women. The Knowledge, the path to Liberation has to be inclusive and hence accessible to women too. Isn't it? Hence for Gurudev, this wasn't a social decision. But one that was rooted in our shastras. Etched deep in the pages of Vedas. And one that had stood the test of time.

Thus, going beyond just philosophy. He walked the talk. He built institutions. The Devi Groups collectively came together to create a strong generation of Sevikas. These women eventually went on to lead Balavihar sessions, conduct satsangs and shape communities that would eventually be the Chinmaya Mission we know today. They worked with Gurudev to spread the knowledge of the Gita, the Upanishads, Prakarana Granthas and all that we read, listen and contemplate upon today.

When Sandeepany Sadhanalaya opened its doors in 1963, women trained alongside men. Again at a time when this would have raised several eyebrows. But Gurudev powered on in his signature style. Not only this, CORD, his vision for rural development, placed women at the heart of community transformation.

To quote Gurudev, “You are the mother, the model, the guru.” This isn't a compliment for women, these words were spoken to give women both responsibility and recognition. Not to be taken lightly. And we, as women, should never forget them. Not only this International Women’s day but everyday as women these words should echo in all that we do. In our Sadhana, in our Tapas, in our daily study of Vedas and in our Karma.

To explore these timeless teachings more deeply, you are warmly invited to enroll for the upcoming Chinmaya International Conference in May. To know more click here.  

Hari Om!

Shaili Arjani