After more than 24 hours of flying from Pune, India, “Didi” Krishna Kumari is still full of energy as she talks about her upcoming trip to St. Thomas Friday, the first leg of a journey that spans the Caribbean and Europe to spread the messages of hope and spirituality ingrained from the teachings of her mentor Jashan Pahlajrai Vaswani, better known simply as “Dada.”
While this is her first trip to the territory, she hopes to pick up where Dada left off, building relationships in a community that he came to love and think of as a second home. Kumari will be speaking publicly at 7 p.m. on Friday night at the Mark C. Marin Center at Antilles School in a workshop that is free to the public and offers insight into the “Habits for Happiness” and better living.
“Anything that you do with love should give you satisfaction,” she said during a phone interview Wednesday. “Whether you’re working in an office or staying at home, you do it with love because that’s what gives you contentment. But today, we don’t work for love — we work for results or to please people. If we don’t get enough likes on our posts, it’s not worth the effort — but we have to change that mindset. We have to do things for ourselves because that is what brings joy.”
If you ask her, that philosophy was ingrained from an early age. Growing up, her parents and grandparents were followers of Sadhu Vaswani, an East Indian spiritual leader who spoke about women’s empowerment and high-quality education at a time when India was still struggling for independence and women were confined to the kitchen.
“I was born with that instinct. It was ingrained in me from the work that my family did and, eventually, the work that I did,” she said as she prepared to head to St. Thomas. Her own work with the Sadhu Vaswani mission started at the age of three, and now Kumari is in charge of carrying the legacy of the humanitarian organization forward globally.
Heading to the territory, Kumari hopes to offer more insight into joyful living that can apply to everyone, whether they’re spiritual or not.
“One simple tip is learning to live in the moment,” said Kumari, who said when asked about her daily routine that she prefers to go where life takes her. “We are constantly either thinking of the past, constantly reliving hurts that have been caused to us or being afraid of the future. We must be in the here and now.”
Everyone is in search of happiness, she added.
“For most of us, it is our eternal quest. We look for power, for authority — but when we get that, we want something else. When we are continually searching for something, we forget that it’s already right there, within us,” said Kumari.
