I am Tarahridaya and I was ordained on 23rd January 2005. I live in Pune (Maharashtra) India, with my two children. My son is 24 and my daughter is 21. My son is doing a job and my daughter has recently finished her graduation. My husband is also an order member, call Abhayaraja, we married 28 years ago. We both are working for the Triratna Buddhist movement. At present I am working in the women's ordination process training team.

Generally I am away from my home two to three weeks, sometimes one week every month, for retreats or visits to different Buddhist centers, but in this last year we had to be at home. We could not go out and had to stay fully at our small apartment all the time. Sometimes it was a bit difficult to be there all the time, without any personal space, but later we got used to it and started online meetings, retreats and talks.

This was the first time that I did lots of online dhamma teaching, which we have never done in our life. We also listened to lots of dhamma talks online. Though it's not as effective as when we do retreats in retreat Centers, and sometimes it was difficult, because none of our team members have any technical knowledge and only very few of us could do a little bit or try to do it, but we did not have enough resources like laptops and good quality headphones. Somehow we are still managing well but being on mobile phones most of the time has not been very healthy, I have started to have headaches sometimes. But it had been a great opportunity to learn many different things e.g. without going out we can still lead a national retreat or give a worldwide talk. I did give talks for two different centers in USA, which I could never think of doing before this pandemic.

In this very strange time of the pandemic in the last year, I spent my days doing meditation, then cooking for all for of us and doing other household tasks, while I am at home, I do some study and watch some television. I also have phone communications with at least one to three people, (mostly mitras training for ordination and sometimes order members). This is a short introduction to me.

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