My Mahashivaratri Prayer!

For your enjoyment I have created a video of me performing a short Shiva puja for Mahashivratri.

For the rest of the day I will be fasting and then this evening singing bhajans until 11:00 pm at a friend’s house. Hopefully the roads will be better by then. I was going to go to the temple this morning for a puja but there is a lot of snow and ice and our roads haven’t been plowed!

UPDATE: There has been a lot of snow here (though nothing like Boston to the north of us). Though I dug my car out of ice and snow and went for bhajan singing with my Sathya Sai Baba group, I missed the email that said it had been canceled for the weather! But when I arrived at my friend’s house and no one else was there he was very gracious and hospitable!

I got home at nine instead of eleven as I had planned.

The temple twenty minutes from us has a live feed on Youtube of the event there. I’m sad that I didn’t go to that. Maybe next year.

I spent the rest of the vigil at my home altar with a wonderful CD that I picked up in India at Giri Trading company. It’s called Shiva Puja and it goes through a Shivratri puja step by step with instructions in English. All the mantras sounds so much better coming from them! I need to just play the CD and follow along.

I also downloaded the music from mahashivratri.org so that also helped keep me awake. Even so, I did not make it as late as I had originally hoped. 

Last year I made it to 2:00 am and this year I passed that mark (plus I didn’t nap at all during the day). So I’m not a perfect devotee yet but I think I’m making progress. I shouldn’t give myself excuses but 19 hours awake is pretty good, right? Though I did a lot of worship I wish I had done more. Surpassing my length of time awake and increasing my time spent absorbed in worship are goals for next year.

It’s actually not at all clear how long one should be staying awake. All the online resources I found say “all night” but no definition of that is given. Is it until dawn? Twenty-four hours of being awake? I don’t know how to measure! Things in my live feed seemed to be wrapping up around 2:30 a.m. so maybe I wasn’t so bad getting to 3:00.

Doing this worship over night is kind of great because you break through the routine of regular life. And there’s not obligations in the middle of the night. It’s almost approaches what it’s like to be at an Ashram and really literally have nothing to do but pray. 

Okay, I’m starting to ramble. This is hour 19 of being awake and very little food (though Brad stayed up with me a little past midnight so he could make me a small dinner!)

Right. I am off to bed!