WE FACED IT, now DEFINTELY HOPING TO MAKE IT…

Take a beautiful sunny Friday morning on 9th July in good old Brisbane and of course energized with our beloved Gopalji’s contagious energy, throw in some enthusiastic teenagers (Yeah right!) in Varsha Ben’s welcoming home, and pile on an abundance of Gurudev’s love and blessings… you have the perfect recipe for an amazing inspirational workshop.

Being our first teenage workshop, we were a bit nervous about how popular it would be, we had a small group of 12 teens that we needed to motivate, they definitely had a lot of insight to offer on how they wanted to face their challenges, fight their obstacles and make their dreams and goals come alive.

Gopalji aptly started off by showing us a wonderful video about different famous personalities from India who managed to achieve extraordinary things, in spite of minimal resources and various hardships that they faced at a very early stage in their life, this enabled us to believe that we could do the same if we put our mind to it. A number of things that we learnt through listening to Gopalji and discussing was that

• Hard work leads to success,
• Grief can be motivational,
• There is no real excuse for our failures ; especially when we are blessed with the resources
• You need a higher vision to achieve your goals

It was the perfect beginning to get us all thinking about what exactly we wanted to achieve, so following the video and discussion through a series of small exercises, Gopalji helped strategically break down our large, bizarre desires into specific goals that we could see ourselves achieving with continuous effort. The biggest thing we learnt was that in order to achieve great success, we need a higher but clear idea of what we want to do. The more clarity you have with your visions, the easier it is to make things happen.

We also reviewed what were the obstacles that we had and we had to write it down in acheiving this higher goal.

We then watched a super video about the first blind man who climbed Mt Everest; Mr. Erik Weihenmayer that left us all in awe. Seeing someone achieve something that grand with such great limitations, left all the Brisbane Teen CHYKS in the ideal state of mind to think about facing our obstacles and geared up for making all our dreams happen! Our obstacles were nothing. We just need to put our mind to it.

Concluding with a wonderfully satisfying lunch served up by the lovely sevaks, we all promised to keep in touch and are definitely looking forward to the next workshop.

Hari OM and thanks to everyone who helped make that Friday happen, especially our extremely adored Gopalji.