A Breath of Fresh Life | Youth Retreat 2025

A new seeker’s experience of SRM’s Youth Retreat 2025

When I was in college, I read a book called ‘The Art of Loving’ by Erich Fromm. The book introduced a unique idea to me – ‘Love, not a narrowed down feeling but an orientation of the character, isn’t something that’s just felt but something that is practiced.’ Love, like any other skill, needs to be learned and consciously exercised until its inherent nature is realised. After attending the Sufi evening of Youth Retreat 2025 with Sri Guru, I was reminded of this reading experience because it was only now that I truly understood what it meant.

Everything in life requires a teacher, even the tasks considered ordinary, like talking and eating, then how did I expect to understand, much less practice and even less realise Love, without a guide? Without a teacher, even if I try to grasp it on my own, I would be left struggling with wrong techniques and approaches that will show no results and only cause deviation.

But I am jumping ahead to my favourite part of the Retreat. I will slow down and start from the very beginning. Because there are many roles that Sri Guru plays throughout the 4 days – a teacher and a guide, of course, but also so much more.

From the first session, ‘Play and Pause’, it was clear to me that Sri Guru is both an innovator and a friend. An innovator of the highest order, because Sri Guru innovates ways to teach the most important learning of human life to people like me, who have limited scope of understanding. She takes wisdom that seems abstract to the ordinary mind and moulds it into familiar shapes. I also call Sri Guru a friend, because the care that she puts into each analogy and story, her small jokes and her insightful examples, even though all filled with infinite knowledge and wealth, still seem like the words of a close friend telling you a secret.

The words of the first session stayed with me throughout the night like a favourite conversation that is hard to forget. And yes, it was a conversation, not a lecture, because as Sri Guru talked, she somehow heard the questions that were rising in mind. A simple example being when Sri Guru was explaining the importance of journaling in ‘me-time’. I wanted to ask her the way of organising my thoughts while writing in my journal. But before the question could fully form, I already had my answer.

But the words truly settled into my memory permanently after the morning meditation session on day two. Because Sri Guru is also a facilitator. She makes the process of experiencing the words easy. Meditating with her made me feel the words. And once you feel something, truly feel it, then you can never forget it.

Session 2 was ‘Zoom In, Zoom Out’, and this time the noun that came to my mind at the end was – evaluator, a kind evaluator. Sri Guru assessed us on our perspective, but the evaluation wasn’t about judgements, there are none when you sit in front of her, but about knowing. Knowing myself. I wish every evaluation could reap the same effects. Once we had all evaluated our current standing, Sri Guru simply told us the actions we had to take according to the range of our final score. Sri Guru is an evaluator who tells you your current standing and then holds your hand and leads you to a better place.

I can come back to my opening now, the Sufi evening. The problem is that the night is beyond words, but I will try to provide a hint of a suggestion of what the evening meant to me.

I was living, at least in the general sense of the word. I was given a life and was breathing, my body was functioning. But my ‘live’ was filled with a sharp, straight, egotistic and blinding ‘I’. But that night, Sri Guru, like a master craftsman took my ‘I’ and bent it, rounded and smoothened it till the ‘I’ was an ‘O’ and the ‘Live’ had turned into ‘Love’. I felt something beyond me and that is the closest I can come to expressing it. I barely talked that night.
In the third session, ‘Fast Forward’, Sri Guru was a time traveller who encouraged us to travel alongside her. Anxiety of the future is a problem for me, always has been, but I will be thinking of my future self in a completely new way now because of this session. I will try now, in every sad situation, to think of my future joy and peace and feel it in the present. I have spent too many years borrowing stress from the future, not realising there were better things to borrow.

‘Will it matter in five years?’ No.

That evening, during the ‘Expressions’ session, Sri Guru was a motivator. Expressing your thoughts in front of an audience is a daunting task for most of us, self-doubt is a constant companion. Of course, without even saying a thing, Sri Guru knew the fear that was being felt in the room. And before the activities could start, she assured not only the first expresser but also every seeker in the room. She gently asked us to share whatever our thoughts were, no matter how half-formed or ten-feet restricted they might be. It was once again a confirmation that there was no judgement of where we stood in the now, only an encouragement to move forward on the right path.

The final day arrived and as we were ‘Going Beyond’ in the last session, my brain and soul both had calmed down a lot. While listening to Sri Guru talk about the magical dimension, I was breathing slower and smiling more. It was after this session that a thought crossed my mind – there is a reason that the term Guru doesn’t have a perfect translation in any language. A Guru is a teacher, yes, but they are also all of the nouns I used above and many more.
Sri Guru had told me during a meeting that she likes to see herself from different perspectives, but after all these words I have only a simple way of describing her – she is Sri Guru.

Sri Guru had promised at the very beginning of the first session that we won’t regret the four days spent at the retreat; and she kept her word. After years of knowing about the theory of love, I can now finally take my first steps with the practical approach. I will make mistakes and fumble, yes, but now that I know the ‘how’ that Sri Guru has taught me, I will stay conscious of correcting my course.

Thank you, Sri Guru.