2025-04-20
• weeknotes • 643 words
My weeknotes for the week 2025-04-07 to 2025-04-13, where I was at the Bhativedanta Manor.
This week, I was at the Bhaktivedanta Manor or the Hare Krishna temple in Watford. I was doing the Be A Monk week-long challenge they have.
I found out about this last year, when I was in town and I saw one of the monks who I stopped and talked with. He gave me a book, Sri Isopanishad which I read the first few chapters of. I didn't actually realise that the temple was the Hare Krishna temple until I arrived and found out about it.
We had quite a varied set of things we did through the days, and I'm not going to go into detail about exact times, but I'll just list a few of the things we did.
The morning service there, called masala arti, were great fun. They started at 04.30, and consisted of basically 45 minutes of singing and dancing, then some time to oneself to (generally) meditate (though I did some other things, like went for walks with people etc. during this time) and then the second part of the morning service from 07.00. That goes for 45 minutes, and features the enchanting Govindam adi purusham tam aham bhajami song, wherein the deities are observed and obeisances given to Prabhupada. It ends with "Prabhupada, Prabhupada, jaya jaya Prabhupada!" and bouncing up and down. Great fun.
Then, there was always a talk on a verse from the Srimad Bhagavatam, questions, and... Prasadam!
We had prasadam, which is food (as an offering to Krishna) three times a day. 08.30 for breakfast, which was generally porridge and a few other things, plus either some tea or some spiced milk.
At, I think it was 13.00, we had lunch. It was generally a massive meal with all sorts of different things depending on the day.
For dinner, the consistent part was a cup of hot milk. It varied again depending on the day: pizza, curries, pancakes one of the days, etc.
But: the prasadam was always delicious!
The meals were lacto-vegetarian, but I ate the milk / cheese despite usually eating vegan for the reason below...
We spent some time in the goshala, and even did some work there mucking out the cows. The cows are incredibly well tended for. The thing that really does it for me, and makes me happy to drink the milk, is that the male calves don't suffer the usual fate of male cattle (either: death by blunt force trauma, or, kept chained up in darkness for six weeks to produce veal, or for the lucky few kept as bloodstock). Instead, all cattle are kept alive for their entire natural lifespan (even after the cows stop producing milk) and the males are used as draft oxen. One ox, Nrsingha, was 21 years old. The cows are hand milked and naturally fertilised.
There is a farm on there where they grow food for the cows and restaurant. We spend an afternoon there planting out beets.
The soil quality is amazing, sort of a sandy loam. Clearly incredibly fertile from all the manure. A joy to handle.
We went to the Soho temple, that is very small and cute and honestly lovely. We did some meditation there that was very pleasant.
On the Wednesday (iirc) we went to give food to the homeless. On the Saturday, we did Harinam as well.
We did some yoga, some ju jitsu, some philosophy classes. A lot of kirtan.
It was... really, really good. The most important thing that I didn't put above is the people. Everybody is absolutely lovely. I can't overstate it. The people made the week thoroughly pleasant, and I feel like there were some pretty good bonds struck up over the course of the week. (Most) everybody got on well.
I really want to go back there, mainly to work on the farm, and do the morning services again.