(Gurus)

They said she would go into samadhi in the middle of cooking. The food would burn. She wouldn’t notice. She was somewhere else entirely — somewhere blissful and vast — while her body stood at the stove.

Anandamayi Ma — the Bliss-Permeated Mother — was a woman of no formal education who became one of the most recognized saints of the 20th century. Yogananda wrote about her. Indira Gandhi sat at her feet. Great scholars found themselves speechless in her presence.

She described herself simply: “I am what I always was and always will be.”

What I love about Ma is that she never claimed to be a teacher. She said: I am doing what the Father in me makes me do. Her body was the instrument. The Divine played it.

She fasted for extraordinary lengths of time and showed no weakness. She smiled through experiences that would have broken ordinary people. When asked about it, she would sometimes laugh — this extraordinary, free laugh that people said was unlike any sound they’d heard before.

Her teaching was not in texts. It was in transmission — in what happened to you when you were near her.

But she did leave us with this: everything in this world is a form of the Divine. Everything without exception. If you truly see this — if you hold this not as philosophy but as living experience — the whole world becomes sacred.

Your kitchen becomes a temple. Your daily work becomes worship. The faces of strangers become the face of God wearing different masks.

This is not metaphor. This is something you can practice right now, today, in your ordinary life.

Look at whoever is in front of you and silently say: this too is the Divine in form. See what happens to the quality of your interaction. See what happens to your own heart.