This is the group of the Hispanic Karma Yogis of the International Yoga Festival here in France -some are not hispanic but they love the language and the vibe so they come anyway-.
At 8am, after chanting a song called “La Canción de la Sopa” (see the video below), they serve breakfast to 3000 people every year. There are some yogis who have already come to help in this service for more than a decade. Others have come 4 years in a row and others are completely new to kundalini yoga, so they have come for the first time to help us.
The newcomers mostly do not know what is the goal of doing Karma Yoga – Selfless Service-. So, we consider that this is the best way to learn a little bit about it. We start from the principle that seva -service- is all about what HAS TO BE DONE and not what WE WANT to do. The greatest challenge of serving breakfast -a very spiced potato soup with bananas and oranges on the side- is that we tend to forget that we have an Ego, -who tends to be hungry and angry-, so we get upset very easily and we tend to listen to our negative mind too often with its destructive opinions about everything. Hence, learning the principle of serve with a big smile and with a reverence, as the first thing to be done at no matter what circumstances. And this is our rule number one, to which everybody agreed saying “Yes Sir!”.
This is my 3rd year leading the group with 2 other yogis -who are not always the same people because they find it very hard to lead 70 people every morning. And who wants to do this dirty job!?. Well, US. This time the whole group was congratulated for being able to handle some important situations early in the morning with great dedication and compassion, -heavy rain on tantric day, lack of soup and grumpy participants-, leaving the complaint and their ego on the side.
We encouraged our sevadars -those who practice service in this activity- to focus only on solutions instead of bringing up the problems they would perceive and to always draw a big smile no matter what!.
After serving and having our own breakfast we had a meeting in which we spend more time meditating and sharing a good vibe instead of letting our Ego be a priority -complaining-. The meditations we tried where mainly mantras to focus the mind, something we need to achieve our main goal in serving others without the need of receiving something backwards.
The group realized the greatness of their potential only at the end of our work, 7 days later, when they sat down to give some feedback about their experience. I can only thank the group for trusting the leaders on this journey. We knew there are tons of things to organize better for the next year , but our only aim is to make them understand what’s the aim of serving.
Everybody was happy to have gone through this experience! If you speak Spanish, come join us next year!
Infinite blessings to all of you!
Mona (Hari Karm Kaur)