By Kulavati Krishnapriya Devi Dasi
Devaki Devi Dasi offered a five-session seminar titled “The Children Are Our Future.” It was conducted from 29th February to 2nd March 2024 at the Vaishnava Academy (near the Goshala) in Mayapur. The seminar imparted a good understanding of important principles and practices of child-raising within Krishna consciousness, beginning from conception (Garbhadhana Samskara) to teenage.
Devaki Devi Dasi, a disciple of Niranjana Swami and the founder of the Institute for Spiritual Culture, was born in Germany in 1958. She joined ISKCON in Sydney, Australia, in 1985. During her ten years as a grhastha (1989-1999) she helped pioneer the first organized temple in the former Soviet Union. Since 1999, she has been living the life of a renounced traveling preacher, spending five months per year in India and Bangladesh and the other seven months in various countries around Europe, including Eastern Europe, such as Ukraine and Moldova. In recent years, she has been expanding her preaching. Also, she visits Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Devaki said, “In a culture where sense gratification is the overall goal, the children are considered a disturbance and impediment in our pursuits, and thus are always pushed aside. In spiritual culture, however, the kids are the future. I received the inspiration to teach this seminar in Bangladesh – a place where they put the children in the very center of life.”
She added, “Another source of inspiration is my childhood. I don’t have children myself, but I had the most wonderful childhood. My mother was amazing, truly planting the seed of spiritual life in my heart. Even though she was not a practicing devotee, she was a religious and spiritually inclined person. She never worked – she only returned to her professional activities after we kids left home to study. So she served as a mother with heart and soul – applying more spiritual principles in child raising than most devotees do these days.”
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