AHYMSINMEETING IN Almost one year after the creation of AHYMSIN, time had come to take stock of the experiences so far, and to see what is needed to make AHYMSIN the vital hub in our sangha, our spiritual family, that we meant it to be at its birth. With this purpose in mind, the Executive Committee of AHYMSIN and some resource persons - 24 people in all - met in from January 24 to though 27. During an intense three and a half day workshop, we looked at our mission (which Swami Rama gave to Swami Veda) and explored the place and the added value of AHYMSIN in what we called “the Swami Veda complex of organizations”; we analyzed the organizational and financial structures as well as our great wealth in human resources; and we came to an ambitious work plan for the next six months, which should allow us to transcend from a historically grown, household style managed set of structures to an organization that is fully in the service of our mission and our sangha, that is capable of reaching out to and supporting its membership and of overcoming a certain disconnect that has been felt by many of us; that is based on and functions according to spiritual principles; and that is fully transparent, efficient and effective. In order to give us guidance in our activities, we defined the mission roughly as follows:
As to the place of (the Executive Committee of) AHYMSIN in the “Swami Veda complex of organizations”, we realized that we are there to take the burden off Swami Veda of running certain parts of the “SVB complex”, and of (the more administrative) part of the contacts with the affiliate organizations. Among other things, Swami Veda asked us to look into is a certain disconnect that exists between different levels of our sangha. In the course of our meeting, we came to the conclusion that this disconnect is at least partly due to the fact that the organizational structures of the “Swami Veda family organizations” (notably at headquarter level) are not adapted to the current scale of activities and responsibilities. Hence a work plan and a rough outline to review and redefine the organizational structure and the financial management system at head quarter level were decided on. Working groups were established and (ambitious) deadlines set.
In our work, we were guided by Swami Veda both through his inspirational words at the kick-off and through our daily meditations together. The rest of the time, he let us work but his presence was felt. Much was done, but more remains to be done and in a few months from now, you will hear from the Executive committee again. As Swami Veda, using the metaphor of an airplane, said at our closing session: “We have not taken off yet, but the engines are running”. We are all decided to make this engine fly, and with the Guru’s grace, it will!
