ABOUT GEETA GIRL

OUR OBJECTIVE

Learn exactly how to use the Bhagavad Geeta’s advice to handle challenges.

Many times, people find Hindu texts and the commentaries on them, complicated to read, and even more difficult to apply in life. Our objective at Geeta Girl is to simplify Lord Krishna’s advice in the Bhagavad Geeta and learn exactly how and when to use this advice in order to handle our challenges with greater wisdom and success. We will discuss everyday issues, how to apply the Geeta’s advice, and what the changes in outcome will be.

We all go through our lives trying to be the best we can but sometimes we don’t really know how exactly we should or should not behave. We’re just winging it. In the Bhagavad Geeta, Lord Krishna lays out exact guidelines as to how we should behave for maximum benefits to our lives. He also outlines what not to do (I was shocked at how much of what I do on a daily basis is on this no-no list. Eeek!!) as these actions are destructive to us and the people around us. Who knew??

Geeta Girl’s objective is to clearly explain the brilliant concepts in the Geeta to make them easily understandable, relatable and applicable.

SHARMILA’S TEACHING JOURNEY

How my teaching has evolved to focus on the behavioral changes needed to improve our lives

I want to be absolutely clear here; I have no authority other than the fact that I’ve been teaching Hindu philosophy for almost 20 years now. Initially, the focus was to teach my two children Hinduism as I learnt it from my parents. I researched classes for my kids but could not find a regular class with a committed schedule. So I decided to do it myself and since I was going to teach my kids, I invited my friends to bring along their kids to a weekly class. What started as a group of 6 kids (including my own) grew into 22 children. I taught this group for 11 consecutive years in Long Island where I lived at the time, until most of them had graduated high school and were leaving home to go to college. I continued teaching for 7 years at a summer camp in Upstate New York run by Sadhu Vaswani, becoming the head teacher there in charge of creating the curriculum for 150 kids, training other teachers and teaching most of the students myself. I currently teach Chinmaya Bal Vihar classes to high schoolers in New York City where I now live. The parents of my students liked what their kids were coming home from Bal Vihar with, and asked me to start an adult class so as requested, I started a Geeta Class for adults and that has now grown to over 30 students in the class.

As I traveled down the path of teaching and researched deeper into the great Hindu epics, prayers, various Forms of God, scriptures, and The Bhagavad Geeta, I realized that all my students, from the youngest 4 year old to the oldest in their 70’s, no one has time to waste; they all want to know, “How is this going to make my life better?”  So my teaching has evolved to focus on the behavioural changes needed to improve our lives. Concrete changes which yield significant results. As I teach, I learn. I learn from my research and I learn from my students; I learn from the insights, opinions and conversations between myself and my students. Someone told me once that the teacher and student do a dance together of question and answer, dialogue and discussion, and it is through this dance that true knowledge is discovered and learnt. I love dancing with my students!

WHY GEETA GIRL?

The Geeta gives us specific instructions on how to behave and act well to become stronger and healthier and live a better life, liberated from our suffering. We are on this journey of evolution together.

Shaila Rao, who is one of my adult students, approached me after a Geeta Class and said, “We’ve got to get this information out there! People need to know this.” And this simple thought lead to the idea of a podcast and the birth of Geeta Girl which Shaila and I are creating together.

The Bhagavad Geeta is a conversation between Lord Krishna (God) and Arjun, His friend and disciple. Arjun asks profound questions and Krishna answers these questions. The entire book is a discussion about “Karma Yoga”; how to improve, evolve, and become empowered through your daily actions as you go about your life. Whether it’s your behavior, your thoughts and mindset, or your speech - all of these are ways to act and through acting more skillfully, we can evolve and become wiser, stronger, and better at everything we do. We eat well, exercise well, sleep well to become stronger and healthier and live a better life. Similarly, The Geeta gives us specific instructions on how to behave and act well to become stronger and healthier and live a better life, liberated from our suffering. You and I are on this journey of evolution together. As Krishna says, progress comes gradually, “through practice, without frustration ” [Ch6 V35,36].

Through the Geeta Girl podcast, I hope that we can all clarify and apply the effective tools in the Bhagavad Geeta to improve our actions and our ability to discern exactly how to behave in any scenario. And thus we can act skillfully and optimize the outcome in the difficult situations we all inevitably find ourselves in.