Confessions of an American Sikh

Confessions of an American Sikh PDF Author: Gursant Singh
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
ISBN: 9781481172752
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Arriving in India to get his teeth fixed, Gursant Singh decides he needs a Punjabi wife and becomes embroiled with Dadaji, Amritsar's notorious marriage broker. When their search for the perfect bride gets them both thrown into Amritsar's Central Jail, Gursant has to look deep within himself and question everything he has been taught about the Sikh path - Sikhi. Gursant's encounters with crooked lawyers, corrupt cops and the enigmatic Indian legal system lead him from the radiant spirituality of Amritsar's Golden Temple, through labyrinthine back streets, chaotic lawyers' offices and the Amritsar Police station to the tranquility of an isolated yoga ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. On the way, we meet an exotic cast of characters. Some venal and manipulating, others compassionate and generous; all of whom bring to life the contradictions, idiosyncrasies and excitement of 21st Century India. Gursant chronicles his adventures in a fast-moving, warts-and-all style to give the reader a searingly honest picture of his own spiritual loss of innocence. It was during my time in the Amritsar Central Jail that I thought of writing this book. As soon as I had Internet access, I began to research what it might take to create a written record of my experiences. In effect, this book was created as it happened and certainly before I knew how it would finish. My hope was that I could help others to learn from my experiences; not only those in India, but also those within the 3HO spiritual organization to which I devoted thirty years of my life. India can be fun, entertaining and spiritually inspiring; at the same time it can be harsh and unforgiving, especially if you fall foul of the law, as I did. The spiritual path of the seeker can provide endless inspiration and satisfaction. But, like India, it can bring you face to face with your deepest fears and weaknesses. It is my fervent hope that others will learn from my mistakes and perhaps deepen their own spiritual experience by reading about what I had to go through. Thus this book is the story of my spiritual coming of age; my loss of innocence, if you will. I wish to offer my deepest gratitude to Akal Purkh, Waheguru, the Creator and Sustainer of the incredible universe in which we live. Let me also give thanks to Guru Nanak Sahib and his nine illustrious human successors. It is the grace of Guru Nanak that brought me to his teachings and it was his kindness that enabled me to find the true path of Sikhi. Finally I humbly offer obeisance to Siri Guru Granth Sahib, the word of God and living Guru for all Sikhs. Gursant Singh

Confessions of an American Sikh

Confessions of an American Sikh PDF Author: Gursant Singh
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
ISBN: 9781481172752
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book Here

Book Description
Arriving in India to get his teeth fixed, Gursant Singh decides he needs a Punjabi wife and becomes embroiled with Dadaji, Amritsar's notorious marriage broker. When their search for the perfect bride gets them both thrown into Amritsar's Central Jail, Gursant has to look deep within himself and question everything he has been taught about the Sikh path - Sikhi. Gursant's encounters with crooked lawyers, corrupt cops and the enigmatic Indian legal system lead him from the radiant spirituality of Amritsar's Golden Temple, through labyrinthine back streets, chaotic lawyers' offices and the Amritsar Police station to the tranquility of an isolated yoga ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. On the way, we meet an exotic cast of characters. Some venal and manipulating, others compassionate and generous; all of whom bring to life the contradictions, idiosyncrasies and excitement of 21st Century India. Gursant chronicles his adventures in a fast-moving, warts-and-all style to give the reader a searingly honest picture of his own spiritual loss of innocence. It was during my time in the Amritsar Central Jail that I thought of writing this book. As soon as I had Internet access, I began to research what it might take to create a written record of my experiences. In effect, this book was created as it happened and certainly before I knew how it would finish. My hope was that I could help others to learn from my experiences; not only those in India, but also those within the 3HO spiritual organization to which I devoted thirty years of my life. India can be fun, entertaining and spiritually inspiring; at the same time it can be harsh and unforgiving, especially if you fall foul of the law, as I did. The spiritual path of the seeker can provide endless inspiration and satisfaction. But, like India, it can bring you face to face with your deepest fears and weaknesses. It is my fervent hope that others will learn from my mistakes and perhaps deepen their own spiritual experience by reading about what I had to go through. Thus this book is the story of my spiritual coming of age; my loss of innocence, if you will. I wish to offer my deepest gratitude to Akal Purkh, Waheguru, the Creator and Sustainer of the incredible universe in which we live. Let me also give thanks to Guru Nanak Sahib and his nine illustrious human successors. It is the grace of Guru Nanak that brought me to his teachings and it was his kindness that enabled me to find the true path of Sikhi. Finally I humbly offer obeisance to Siri Guru Granth Sahib, the word of God and living Guru for all Sikhs. Gursant Singh

Under the Yoga Mat

Under the Yoga Mat PDF Author: Els Coenen
Publisher: Izzard Ink
ISBN: 9464752149
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Let’s face and share the pain. This groundbreaking exposé, Under the Yoga Mat, lifts the veil on the underexposed dark side of the history of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga and his revered 3HO Healthy, Happy, Holy community. This is the first book presenting the multifaceted character and extent of the wrongdoings and the tactics used by 3HO leadership to keep the horrific abuse hidden for five decades. This meticulously researched non-fiction work delves deep into the disturbing tragedies that unfolded when Harbhajan, a 39-year-old Sikh-born Indian customs officer, arrived in Los Angeles in 1968, posing as a master of Kundalini Yoga. Through a thoughtful selection of testimonies, historical records, and expert insights, this work unravels the captivating rise of Yogi Bhajan, as disillusioned American youth eagerly embraced him as the Eastern guru they believed they needed. As his following grew rapidly, he wove a narrative of destiny, proclaiming that his devotees were predestined to guide humanity in the transition from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age. Yet, behind the facade of spiritual enlightenment, Bhajan cunningly manipulated, controlled, exploited, and abused his followers and their children. He was involved in drug and arms smuggling and fraudulent businesses. Throughout his reign, Yogi Bhajan hobnobbed with the powerful, including encounters with presidents, popes, and the Dalai Lama. The governors of California and New Mexico became his confidants, unaware of the web of deception he spun. Under his leadership, billion-dollar enterprises like Yogi Tea and Akal Security flourished. Such was the influence of this enigmatic figure that upon his passing in 2004, the American Congress honored him with a two-page resolution, while New Mexico inaugurated the “Yogi Bhajan Memorial Highway.” However, it wasn’t until the early 2020s, when a former leader of the 3HO community came forward with her testimony, that the truth began to emerge from decades of silence. Under the Yoga Mat reveals the harrowing experiences of hundreds of ex-3HO members, shedding light on the isolation, neglect, hunger, and abuse they endured in schools in India from a tender age. Shockingly, it is estimated that Yogi Bhajan sexually abused approximately 100 women, justifying his actions with the chilling statement, “Rape is always invited.” At the heart of this extraordinary book lie the stories of these courageous 3HO survivors. Coenen’s masterful narrative not only exposes the crimes themselves but also explores why a culture of silence persisted for so long, engendering fear and obedience among the followers. As the shadows of the past give way to the truth, their accounts serve as a rallying cry for justice and healing. With its compelling blend of investigative research, personal testimonies, and historical context, Under the Yoga Mat challenges our perception of spiritual leaders, champions the resilience of survivors, and sparks a critical conversation about power, manipulation, and the darker side of spiritual movements.

Under the Yoga Mat - Google edition

Under the Yoga Mat - Google edition PDF Author: Els Coenen
Publisher: Els Coenen
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Let’s face and share the pain. Under the Yoga Mat lifts the veil on the underexposed dark side of the history of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga and his revered 3HO Healthy, Happy, Holy community. This is the first book presenting the multifaceted character and extent of the wrongdoings and the tactics used by its leadership to keep horrific abuse hidden for five decades. This meticulously researched non-fiction work delves deep into the tragedies that unfolded when Harbhajan, a 39-year-old Sikh-born Indian customs officer, arrived in Los Angeles in 1968, posing as a master of Kundalini Yoga. Through a thoughtful selection of testimonies, historical records, and expert insights, this work unravels the rise of Yogi Bhajan, as disillusioned American youth embraced him as the Eastern guru, they believed they needed. As his following grew rapidly, he proclaimed that his devotees were predestined to guide humanity in the transition from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age. Yet, behind the facade of spiritual enlightenment, Bhajan cunningly manipulated, controlled, exploited, and abused his followers and their children. He was involved in drug and arms smuggling and fraudulent businesses. Under the Yoga Mat challenges our perception of spiritual leaders, champions the resilience of survivors, and sparks a critical conversation about power, manipulation, and the darker side of spiritual movements.

Confessions In A Crown Vic

Confessions In A Crown Vic PDF Author: Peter Lagomarsino
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1479746649
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 547

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Book Description
“Confessions in a Crown Vic” is the story of professional displacement during the Great Recession, an Architect as Cab driver, while seeking Architecture work. It interviews Paolo Soleri the visionary Urban design architect, and the traffic engineer, Louis Lagomarsino, for Phoenix’s highways, and the author’s passengers’ marginalization for their lack of a car. It’s a journey through an Architect’s life, beginning with schooling, travels, design, internship, and practices in many genres of clientele from private to public projects for the U.S.P.S., U.S.A.F., and the U.S.A.C.O.E. It takes us through different cities and urban configurations. But most of all it takes us through history’s cycles of political change, the semantics of their origins, the delivery of designs, and the affects of expansion and colonialist attitudes in America. It’s a critique of Urban Sprawl, and the irrationality of relying on housing starts to determine a healthy economy. It examines Keynesian versus Classical economics, comparing them with the events of the last “American” century. He illuminates the American Dream’s unsustainable promise to even its poorest citizens, considering whether we can still re-materialize that dream out of its current mythological existence. Is this dream for everyone? Can we grow a culture based on the automobile and a limited fossil fuel economy? It challenges this dream’s configuration, while placing a heavy burden of responsibility for our economic demise on its mythical component, the greed that drove it, and the Sprawl that has burdened it. www.confessionsinacrownvicbook.com

Bullying of Sikh American Children

Bullying of Sikh American Children PDF Author: Karanveer Singh Pannu
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781519420138
Category : Bullying in schools
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The intent of this book is to introduce the reader to the unique challenges Sikh American children face in their daily lives, both in and out of the school environment. In particular, children in the Sikh American community have been the targets of severe bullying. It is critical to empower students, educators, families and communities with information and tools necessary to prevent bullying of Sikh American children. The suggested solutions are not just for Sikh American children but universally applicable to all children.

Hindu and Sikh Faiths in America

Hindu and Sikh Faiths in America PDF Author: Gail M. Harley
Publisher: Facts on File
ISBN: 9780816049875
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Looks at the history and the impact on culture, society, and politics of Hindus and Sikhs in the United States.

We Too Sing America

We Too Sing America PDF Author: Deepa Iyer
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 162097326X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
"Powerful...Iyer catalogues the toll that various forms of discrimination have taken and highlights the inspiring ways activists are fighting back. [She] is an ideal chronicler of this experience." —The Washington Post The nationally renowned racial justice advocate's illumination of the ongoing persecution of a range of American minorities In the lead-up to the recent presidential election, Donald Trump called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, surveillance against mosques, and a database for all Muslims living in the country, tapping into anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hysteria to a degree little seen since the targeting of South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh people in the wake of 9/11. In the American Book Award–winning We Too Sing America, nationally renowned activist Deepa Iyer shows that this is the latest in a series of recent racial flash points, from the 2012 massacre at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, to the violent opposition to the Islamic Center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and to the Park 51 Community Center in Lower Manhattan. Iyer asks whether hate crimes should be considered domestic terrorism and explores the role of the state in perpetuating racism through detentions, national registration programs, police profiling, and constant surveillance. Reframing the discussion of race in America, she “reaches into the complexities of the many cultures that make up South Asia” (Publishers Weekly) and provides ideas from the front lines of post-9/11 America.

The Subtle Body

The Subtle Body PDF Author: Stefanie Syman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429933070
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
In The Subtle Body, Stefanie Syman tells the surprising story of yoga's transformation from a centuries-old spiritual discipline to a multibillion-dollar American industry. Yoga's history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emerson's New England, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was fashionable among the leisure class. And yet when Americans first learned about yoga, what they learned was that it was a dangerous, alien practice that would corrupt body and soul. A century later, you can find yoga in gyms, malls, and even hospitals, and the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism. How did it happen? It did so, Stefanie Syman explains, through a succession of charismatic yoga teachers, who risked charges of charlatanism as they promoted yoga in America, and through generations of yoga students, who were deemed unbalanced or even insane for their efforts. The Subtle Body tells the stories of these people, including Henry David Thoreau, Pierre A. Bernard, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, Sally Kempton, and Indra Devi. From New England, the book moves to New York City and its new suburbs between the wars, to colonial India, to postwar Los Angeles, to Haight-Ashbury in its heyday, and back to New York City post-9/11. In vivid chapters, it takes in celebrities from Gloria Swanson and George Harrison to Christy Turlington and Madonna. And it offers a fresh view of American society, showing how a seemingly arcane and foreign practice is as deeply rooted here as baseball or ballet. This epic account of yoga's rise is absorbing and often inspiring—a major contribution to our understanding of our society.

Newspaper Confessions

Newspaper Confessions PDF Author: Julie Golia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197527809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
What can century-old advice columns tell us about the Internet today? This book reveals the little-known history of advice columns in American newspapers and the virtual communities they created among their readers. Imagine a community of people who had never met writing into a media outlet, day after day, to reveal intimate details about their lives, anxieties, and hopes. The original "virtual communities" were born not on the Internet in chat rooms but a century earlier in one of America's most ubiquitous news features: the advice column. Newspaper Confessions is the first history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans' relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous, yet strikingly public, forum. Early advice columns are essential--and overlooked--precursors to today's digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other. By charting the economic and cultural motivations behind the rise of this influential genre, Julie Golia offers a nuanced analysis of the advice given by a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status quo of the day. She offers lively, surprising, and poignant case studies, demonstrating how columnists and everyday newspaper readers transformed advice columns into active and participatory virtual communities of confession, advice, debate, and empathy.

God's Dog: Memories, Confessions, Dreams & Revelations of a Modern Mystic

God's Dog: Memories, Confessions, Dreams & Revelations of a Modern Mystic PDF Author: William Schindler
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1329901134
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This is the extraordinary true tale of a middle-class, gay American's path to encounters with the Great Mystery that is God/dess/Self. The way to the Great Unknown was intricately intertwined with his humanity with all its foibles, and with human relationships. Therefore this story has to include those relationships, revealing ultimately how a one's personal identity and relationships become vehicles for enlightenment. This inspiring account of struggle, travel to exotic lands, suffering, and transcendence holds out hope for anyone who has ever felt outcaste, broken, or unworthy, demonstrating for our modern times that enlightenment lies within reach of us all.