Things don't work just by Imagination

In 2006, like every year, Yashendu and I went to a few new places. The people who organized those programs were only partly people whom I knew from the previous years. Several others had only got in touch with me by email after seeing my website or getting to know about me or my brother Yashendu from a third person. You never really know what awaits you when you go to an unknown person like that – and although we always try to find out via email contact before, we definitely had a surprise with some organizers in 2006. For example with the one I want to tell you about today.

It was a woman whose email I found in my inbox one day. She had heard about me from a friend of a friend who had been to some of our programs in Germany. After having read a bit on our website, she wrote to me to invite Yashendu and me to her place. We were always open for such invitations and thus told her which workshops, meditations and sessions we could offer. A lively email exchange followed.

We agreed on a date for the program while Yashendu and I were still in India. She soon sent the agenda of the activities and we liked it. There was a mixture of everything we did and what she wrote sounded nice – according to her, there was a lot of need and demand for such workshops in her area. In one of her next emails, she explained her ideas for promoting the program – and we were delighted.

She had hinted something like this before and now she elaborated that she was in touch with a lot of journalists, some of them working for very well-known TV-channels, radio stations and newspapers. She said she was confident about getting a short clip, a small advertisement of our program into one of Germany’s main TV channels. I had been on TV many times before and in different countries and I knew about the positive effect such coverage can have on a program. I was thus happy about her efforts and encouraged her to offer them to do some filming also during the time we were going to be there.

This is how we came to this woman’s home with great hopes for a good program. Yashendu and I had been busy for the weeks before the program in her place, so we had not been in touch a lot. We had sent our arrival tickets though and she came to pick us up. In the car, on the drive from the train station home, we talked and Yashendu and I started feeling a bit funny: she told how the people in her area needed spirituality but were not actually ready for it yet!

She went on to say that she had sent a message to all the TV channels and radio stations she had claimed to know people in but nobody had even bothered to reply! I asked about her contact at one of Germany’s main TV channels and she answered that she knew everything about this man and had even found out his home number but he had never answered her attempts to contact him!

To say it short, she had not done any advertisement at all. It had all been just her imagination, there were no journalists and there were also no participants – where should they come from when nobody knew about it?

At first, it was a shock. Obviously, we had expected to be working full on during that week. Then however, we realized that this was something that we just had to accept as it was – there was nothing we could do about it now. And that was the best thing we could do. We finally had a nice week in her home, with her family and even with a meditation evening for which she called all of her friends.

Sometimes, things go differently than planned.