Su-Yin
07-20-2005, 09:53 PM
Amma
She is Amma, known as "the hugging saint," and she lives in India but travels the world, offering hugs to blissed-out yoga teachers, massage therapists, families with small children … The tiny babies she clutches to her cheek with special tenderness. People think her embrace offers a healing power. They suggest she is so full of the loving spirit that you might - with her perfume filling your nostrils and her hot breath chanting mantras in your ear - see something less like a basement hotel ballroom and more like God. Some people weep and some say they feel a great peace.
AdvertisementAdvertisement
And if not, the hug is at least free.
Amma, 51, whose nickname means mother and whose full name is Mata Amritanandamayi, grew up poor in a fishing village, a low-caste woman destined for a humble domestic life who instead became a revered figure all over the world.
She is a humanitarian who has built a hospital in India and thousands of houses for the poor. At present, her assistants say, she is working on homes for survivors of the December 26 tsunami. She spends so many of her days sitting in a low chair, receiving hordes of supplicants on their knees, that she discusses blueprints for charitable homes and gives an interview through a translator while people's heads are pressed to her shoulder.
Amma has been known to offer hug after hug for more than 20 hours straight, her followers say. Her spokesman says that once, in southern India, he watched her give hugs to 45,000 people in one stretch.
Asked how much she sleeps, Amma shrugs and says in Malayalam: "I never think about it." Asked again, she says, "One hour." (A female assistant adds softly: "Sometimes two.")
One follower at Crystal City describes Amma's embrace as "true contentment"; another calls it "bliss … absolutely pure love". They hand her apples or pears or flowers as they fall into her arms. Some say that afterwards they feel peaceful. Some say they wake up in the middle of the night "feeling a presence". One woman says Amma's hug healed her leg pain. One man says Amma solved his digestive problems.
link (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/mother-of-absolute-bliss/2005/07/20/1121539033218.html)
She is Amma, known as "the hugging saint," and she lives in India but travels the world, offering hugs to blissed-out yoga teachers, massage therapists, families with small children … The tiny babies she clutches to her cheek with special tenderness. People think her embrace offers a healing power. They suggest she is so full of the loving spirit that you might - with her perfume filling your nostrils and her hot breath chanting mantras in your ear - see something less like a basement hotel ballroom and more like God. Some people weep and some say they feel a great peace.
AdvertisementAdvertisement
And if not, the hug is at least free.
Amma, 51, whose nickname means mother and whose full name is Mata Amritanandamayi, grew up poor in a fishing village, a low-caste woman destined for a humble domestic life who instead became a revered figure all over the world.
She is a humanitarian who has built a hospital in India and thousands of houses for the poor. At present, her assistants say, she is working on homes for survivors of the December 26 tsunami. She spends so many of her days sitting in a low chair, receiving hordes of supplicants on their knees, that she discusses blueprints for charitable homes and gives an interview through a translator while people's heads are pressed to her shoulder.
Amma has been known to offer hug after hug for more than 20 hours straight, her followers say. Her spokesman says that once, in southern India, he watched her give hugs to 45,000 people in one stretch.
Asked how much she sleeps, Amma shrugs and says in Malayalam: "I never think about it." Asked again, she says, "One hour." (A female assistant adds softly: "Sometimes two.")
One follower at Crystal City describes Amma's embrace as "true contentment"; another calls it "bliss … absolutely pure love". They hand her apples or pears or flowers as they fall into her arms. Some say that afterwards they feel peaceful. Some say they wake up in the middle of the night "feeling a presence". One woman says Amma's hug healed her leg pain. One man says Amma solved his digestive problems.
link (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/mother-of-absolute-bliss/2005/07/20/1121539033218.html)