Absolute Involvement

In the following, Sadhguru speaks about the level of attention to detail that his mother used to pay in their childhood…

Sadhguru: When we were children my mother was a fulltime housewife. She did everything in the house herself, from stitching drapes to pillow cases to bed sheets to embroidery. If we traveled somewhere and if we had to sleep, she would say, “How can children sleep on an empty pillow case?” Right there, she would pull out her needle and thread and make a little parrot or a flower in two minutes. I remember those green parrots so well because I would fall asleep looking at them. Just that concern: “An uncared for, machine-made, from-the-shop pillow, how can children sleep on that?” made such a difference in our lives. I can’t imagine how life would have been if there wasn’t one person so dedicated to our wellbeing. It was not like a very active loving relationship. You couldn’t think of life without her, it was just there, all the time.

Sadhguru: My mother was, for those days, pretty reasonably educated. She went about her whole life, from morning to night, in such an organized way. Even in the ashram, I keep telling them this example. If she sat down and wrote what groceries she needs for the next month, that was all. No one would have to run to the shop and buy anything for her in between. She would calculate all this mentally – looking at everything that was there in the house, how many guests she was expecting, and then would see how much more she needs for the next month. It was just so organized.

There was such a level of involvement in these simple things. In the morning she would be up at 6 o’clock. All of us would leave the house by 7.30 – breakfast, breakfast, breakfast. After all of us are packed off, she would go for her bath, do her pooja and finish her cooking. My father always came back on the dot at 12:30. When he comes, she would always be ready, fully dressed with flowers in her hair. Even when she had fallen very sick and she could barely walk because her legs and face were swollen, she would still somehow walk to the garden, pluck one little jasmine flower and keep it.