To understand where you are, it often helps to reflect on the journey you’ve taken to get there.
For the last 25 years, Amma’s volunteers around the world have maintained websites introducing Amma’s life, teachings, and work, as well as ways to get involved locally with other devotees, from satsang (group practice) to seva (service) opportunities. Each of these websites have an appropriate focus on information most relevant to people living in a specific region, country, or continent. However, this has meant that there was no single Amma website designed first and foremost to serve a global audience.
We took steps in that direction with the launch of the original embracingtheworld.org in 2008, and with the complete overhaul of embracingtheworld.org’s design and content in honor of Amma’s 60th birthday in 2013. Both these websites were part of an effort to share with the world at least a glimpse of what Amma had been able to accomplish, of how many lives she had touched, and of how many people she had inspired to donate their time and energy to make a difference in the lives of those less fortunate. However, with an exclusive focus on Amma’s humanitarian initiatives, embracingtheworld.org only told part of the story.
In 2018, in honor of Amma’s 65th birthday, the Amrita Office of Communications was formed, and as part of their mission to offer a central portal for news about every aspect of Amma’s activities, initiatives and institutions – both humanitarian and spiritual – amritaworld.org was born. For the last 5 years, this website has been the first stop for anyone looking for the latest news about Amma’s ever-expanding mission. But with its primary focus on news, this website, too, told only part of the story.
Early in the pandemic, at the behest of Amma, Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri brought all these web teams – from the regional websites around the world, from embracingtheworld.org, and from amritaworld.org – together to sit down and map out a plan to create a website designed to be a central destination anyone in the world could visit to learn about Amma and get a comprehensive view of her life, teachings, and initiatives, along with access to the latest news and a pathway to find the group or center nearest to them.
Amma’s volunteers offered this new website, nearly four years in the making, to Amma in honor of her 70th birthday. We did so with humility, and with the knowledge that the whole story of Amma’s impact on the world may never be told – a piece of that story lives in the heart of each of the millions who have been transformed by Amma’s love. But know that this is our best effort to share Amma as she is – a humanitarian leader, a visionary, and a spiritual teacher who has seen the Infinite, and is ready to share a glimpse of it with anyone who asks.
