Sanatan Ashram Ponda and sense of belonging

Once the excitement, or rather the lack of it, surrounding my husband’s visit had died down, I started to settle down to a life of spiritual pursuit at Sanatan Ashram Ponda. Sanatan Sanstha worked out a tight schedule for me. I was involved in many activities, some of them appealed to me, some did not – but I was told to bring bhav in all my activities. Sanatan had a different lingo; we used it as a badge to differentiate ourselves from the hoi-poi. We used it as a badge of honor and it gave us a sense of belongingness.

Sense of belongingness

Why is this sense of belongingness important in human beings? On one hand, we are taught that we should surrender ourselves to God for spiritual pursuits, we can only attain true moksha when we lose our self to God. On the other, we feel the need to belong to a social group. This is generally fulfilled by the family and our social groups, by our professional contacts and the workforce. But, when people like me leave all this behind, we leave all these behind us; we are forced to leave all this behind us. Sanatan Sanstha then fills in the vacuum and we start belonging again to a powerful sanstha. Sanatan asks us to reduce contact with our family and friends. They even ask us not to attend their calls or meet them when they come to visit us at Sanatan Ashram Ponda. Yet, very deviously, they ensure that we transform the attachment to the sanstha.

This becomes dangerous as we are now dependent upon the sanstha for everything and they start controlling not only our thoughts and minds but also our physical needs. They dictate when we should sleep, how much time we should sleep when we should eat and even how much we should eat. They also control the flow of information; we start trusting only the information received from them.

Differentiators at Sanatan Sanstha

The use of lingo at Sanatan Sanstha is also very devious. We are taught a “different language”, the language differentiates us from others. We change our dressing style to match with the occupants of Sanatan Ashram Ponda. I preferred sarees but changed my preferences to dresses so that I could merge with the other occupants. Of course, the money to purchase and stitch these dresses came from my husband. Sanatan did not provide any help, financial or otherwise. We were also advised which colours to select and which type of clothes to wear. All this put a terrible financial burden on my husband, I was aware of it and would feel guilty as well. But, sanstha advised me that such guilty feelings were misplaced as it is the responsibility of my husband to maintain me. He had taken this oath when marrying me in front of Agni.

What about the oath I had given to my husband? Why was Sanatan Sanstha silent on them?

Sanatan had created a vacuum in my life and was slowly transferring the sense of belongingness from the family to itself. I was not conscious of the repercussions. I thought that this was acceptable as others around me had no issues in doing so.