Notes by Aarav Luthra

Today we were going to learn about a word called Dheera. What does Dheera mean? Well it means you admire the ones who are courageous and it means we admire the courageous people.

What is courageous? Well courageous means you never should take the easy way out. What is taking the easy way out? An example is, if you are reading you read the whole book but never remember what it was about. That is taking the easy way out.

Another point Shankarji wanted to talk about was procrastination. What is procrastination? Well it is when you have something to do and you will say I will do it tomorrow. This is what procrastination means.

Activity

Today we were going to play gestures. This game is like Taboo. The teams were boys vs girls. This game is going to teach us not to be nervous or scared to act. In the end it was a tie for the game.

Questions

Question — What do you do if one parent is saying one thing but the other parent is saying a different thing?

Answer — The first thing he said was to get really really clear. If you still think that they are saying different things then pick which is right and help you grow the most.

Raw

To learn about the life of Swami Chinmayananda or Swami Vivekananda or both.

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Notes by Aarya Mishra

Review of the previous class

Shankarji started with a review of the last class, and talked about the virtue: Udaara hridaya. He reminded us that Udaara hridaya meant: We admire the people who are large hearted. He said that people that are large hearted are people who give, and not get.

Lesson / Story

Today’s name of Gurudev was Dheera. Dheera means someone who has courage. Shankarji explained that most people think that courage means facing your fears. If you think about facing your fears a little bit more, you will realize that courage is actually taking the hard way.

To explain what he was saying, Shankarji shared a story of his childhood. When he was little, he would get kumon homework and sometime he would sneak the answers from the answer book to quickly finish his homework. He was taking it the easy way, and not being courageous.

Here are two other examples of taking things the easy way-

1. Lying — Lying means taking the easy way. You become afraid of the consequences if you tell the truth. You lie to your parents, teachers or even yourself.

2: Procrastination — Procrastination is when one keeps putting off what they have to do. It is a type of laziness.

He started another story about Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi was an amazing freedom fighter from India. India was ruled by Britain. Gandhi wanted to free India from Britain. As a protest, Mahatma Gandhi fasted for many days. Gandhiji was also famous because of his peaceful protests. Mahatma Gandhi was courageous.

Practice

For practice, we played a game called gestures. We had to act a word and the team was to guess it. We learnt that we are a bit nervous when it comes to acting but it gets fun when you start doing it.

RAW

We have to learn about the life of Swami Chinmayananda or Swami Vivekananda.