Sunday Feast

Narrowing the focus and ramping up the pressure.

Finally we got a projector installed at Atma. I can't believe it took me so long to do it. It's actually verging on criminal negligence on my part. I first started using a digital projector to present Krishna Consciousness in 1998. Ten years later, we finally install one.

Dominic, the stage manager of Indradyumna Swami's Polish festival tour, came and put it in.

It took Dominic 30 minutes to do it. If I tried to do it, it would take three hours, and would probably end up broken. I'm not being "humble" - five minutes after Dominic left I tried to adjust the ceiling panel, dropped it, and smashed it.

Ceiling mounting bracket: $99 from Harvey Norman.

10m VGA cable (with gold-plated connectors!) - routed through the ceiling and falling behind a curtain. $44 from Jay Car.

Here's the projector in action. It's not as dark as the camera makes it look in the room. It's not a case of turning the lights off and having people stare at a screen. The lights are on, I talk with the people there and the projector provides supporting visual elements, which I cue with my cellphone.

I was amazed that how the technology is "just works (tm)" for me at the moment. I just plugged my eeePC with Ubuntu on it into the projector and PA, fired up my cellphone with amora on it, and away we went.

The technology should be transparent. It should make the message arrive more clearly and more powerfully, not get in the way of the delivery. Having a projector sitting in the middle of the room with a beam of light cutting the room in half and dividing the audience is ridiculous.

With the projector now in the ceiling I can spend less time setting up each week, and focus more time, attention, and energy into the message.

Here's a video:

s$%# in the post title = "self", btw ;-)

I took some time out while preparing Sunday's presentation to check out this excellent presentation by Dr Candidasa: How to give a presentation (about Krishna consciousness). Highly recommended.

You can also check out my comic book "Communicating for Change: How to give a class" for some pointers.

Mahavan prabhu gave an excellent seminar on the topic of giving class, accompanied by a great handout. His class focused more on generating the content than the presentation side of things, so it's a nice complimentary piece of material. I'll track it down and post it for you also.

Last night's presentation was a blast. The Sunday Feast crowd was the biggest it's been for some time, with a lot of university students. I'd estimate the numbers at around 80 - 100 people.

The technology worked for me perfectly, which is always a really pleasant surprise.

I used:
For visuals: A Nokia E61i cellphone using bluetooth to control an eeePC 901 running Openoffice.org Impress. BenQ 1024x768 projector

For sound: Wireless Shure / Countryman E6 earset mic, line out from eeePC to PA for the sound from the videos.

My eeePC with Ubuntu performed flawlessly, picking up the projector on the external monitor port.

The eeePC is a low cost ultraportable "netbook" made by Asus. It has no moving parts in it except for a fan. It uses solid state memory instead of a hard drive, and has a low power Intel Atom CPU (4w vs 10w for a standard CPU).

I bought the 20GB Linux version from Hong Kong via eBay a couple of weeks before they were available locally in Australia. It came with Xandros installed, but I replaced that with a new version of Ubuntu Linux specially modified for the eeePC.

The advantages of the eeePC are that it is tiny, about the size of a hardback Science of Self Realization, and that it has a four hour battery life.

I don't have an SSR here at work to show you, but I have a hardback Gita. The eeePC is wider, but shallower than the BG.

One disadvantage is that while the eeePC 901's very bright and clear 9" internal laptop panel has a resolution of 1024x600, when I set the projector to 1024x768 the internal screen went to 800x600. What I usually do is set the laptop up facing me so that I can see what's on the screen without having to look around. That way I stay facing the audience the whole time. At Northpoint and other cutting edge churches in the States (and I'm sure here in Australia too) they have large screens on the stage out of the line-of-sight of the audience for the presenter to see what's on the audience's overhead screens.

My Dell XPS 1530M is great for this - the 15" wide screen is clear and easy to see. With the eeePC's 9" laptop monitor at 800x600 I can't see the whole slide. It's not such a big deal because I can still tell that the slide has changed and which slide we're on, and there are only one or two slides which require me to say something exactly as it appears on the slide. I use words on slides only for verses and short quotes. As one person put it: "when you're presenting you're meant to be doing the talking. If your slides are doing the talking what are you doing - interpretative dance?"

Slides are supportive visuals, to activate the brains of the audience, to reinforce your message, and to make it more memorable. As a side note to this, I had to turn the lights back up again. Well meaning devotees turned them down - after all, don't you watch movies in the dark? However, as I put it to Vrajadhama, who videoed the presentation - "I'm the main show - the slides are the support act".

Anyway, until we have a fixed facility with all this kind of stuff set up in it, we have to set up and break down each week, so I'm going with the portable option. The small "feedback" or monitor screen is the trade off.

My cellphone worked perfectly to control the slide show via the open source amora (A Mobile Remote Assistant). This program runs as a server on a bluetooth capable computer and as a small applet on the phone. The phone scans for available servers and allows you to connect to them and control them remotely via bluetooth. My cellphone, a Nokia e61i, is bigger and more bulky than the small remote control that came with my Dell XPS M1530, but it works with my eeePC, which is the main thing. It kinda looks cool when I "dial up" the projector with my cell phone too.

I had to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to the development stream of 8.10 to get amora to work with my phone. There is some instability with 8.10, but it works for what I need it to. (update: I see a note on the amora front page today explaining the problem with 8.04, aka Hardy Heron)

The main disadvantage with my Dell XPS machine, and the reason I got the eeePC, is the size of the Dell. I use it at work as my primary machine and I use it to play my way through the single player mode of games like Call of Duty 4, Half Life 2, and Medal of Honor Airborne. It rocks out for that, and for building presentations, but it's no good for carrying around.

For the program last night I took my eeePC, my Shure wireless mic kit, my Countryman earset mic, a mrdanga, and a change of clothes. Oh, and my son Prahlad too. Having a small machine is priceless when you have to carry and look after so much gear.

The earset mic worked perfectly as well. In the beginning there was some low level booming, but Vrajadhama adjusted the EQ and it went away. I got the E6 mic because it is very inconspicuous and it is great for speech. We have other headset mics that are fine for singing, but not so good for speech. We have other mics, like the SM58, that are great for speech but are very imposing - you have to either hold them in one hand and stick them in front of your mouth, or else stand in one place behind a mic stand. I prefer to present standing up so the audience can see me, and to move around to keep the energy up. And I like to have as little as possible between me and the audience. Technology should be utilized and it should be transparent - people should focus on the message and not the medium (hey, and that includes the presenter). Just like when you go into a movie - you forget about the delivery mechanism and become engrossed in the story. That's the power of technology when it is correctly used - it can create a powerful immersive experience.

I embedded some videos that I downloaded from youtube using keepvid.com. With Keepvid.com you enter the url of the youtube video and it gives you a link to download a high quality .mp4 version for viewing offline. I used two videos, one a personal testimony by a self-confessed internet addict, and a one minute CBS newsitem on internet addiction. The eeePC played them both flawlessly and the sound to the PA worked fine.

I'm really blown away by the fact that so many pieces of technology all fell together seamlessly and allowed me to present the material with no problems. Last time I presented at the Sunday Feast I was struggling with getting the Dell (which runs Fedora 9) to connect to the projector all through the kirtan. I finally exported my presentation to a pdf file, and rebooted into Vista to get it all to work.

The Dell has an nvidia graphics card, which is great for 3D gaming, but the eeePC has an Intel graphics chipset with an open specification, which is better for open source software support.

Oh, one thing did fail. My iRiver E100 was plugged into the line out on the PA doing a line-in recording. At some point during the presentation it bricked. I thought the battery had run out (which was funny because I just recharged it during the day), but it won't start no matter what I do. I'll take it back to JB HiFi at lunchtime.

I have an iPod touch, which is awesome for listening to things, but useless for creating content to share with others. The iPod touch starts in less than a second. The iRiver takes a couple of minutes. I don't have minutes to waste like that, so the iRiver is a fail for a listening device for me. However, while the iPod is great for that, it has no way to do a recording.

I was doing the line-out recording to allow Vrajadhama to make another video / slide show mashup of the presentation. Even without the line-out recording we can still do it - Vraj has the sound recording from the microphone on his camera.

It's taken me a few years of working to assemble this equipment, but these are the tools of the trade for a 21st century presenter.

I'm going to shoot for one presentation like this per week. Next week I'll present at the Saturday night Krishnafest at Atma on "The Three Things that are Necessary and Sufficient for Liberation".

Anyway, enough geeking out on technology and communication. But man, people get really engaged with the message when you put energy into it like this. Spread the word!

Srila Prabhupada explained: "It is said that every muni has a different angle of vision, and unless a muni differs from other munis, he cannot be called a muni in the strict sense of the term."

A muni means a sage. Sometimes this statement is misused to stifle the creative spirit, which is obviously a natural feature of the spirit soul. After all, the individual spirit soul is like a drop of sea water, and Krishna is like the ocean. Since Krishna is the creator of the entire cosmic manifestation, you'd think we'd have a little creativity constitutionally.

The important context to bear in mind is the sentence that comes before that in the Bhagavad-gita purport where it appears (Bg. 2.56): "The word muni means one who can agitate his mind in various ways for mental speculation without coming to a factual conclusion." (my emphasis).

Anyway, this idea of trying to be different for the sake of being different has never been more applicable than in the area of photos of birds and cages, it seems.

I'm preparing my presentation for Sunday. I'm going to use my video gaming example, and I'm going to segue from there to the bird in a cage example (why do one or the other when you can harness the genius of the "and"?). I've had no problem finding photos on flickr for the video gaming stuff (heaps of shots of Warcraft and Second Life), but do you think I can find a good photo of a bird in a cage?

No way. Cat in a bird cage, human in a bird cage, bird on a cage - anything to be different, to be arty, to be anguished and misunderstood. But different from what? The original concept has become so under-represented that it now represents a departure from the norm.

As Srila Prabhupada once characterized it: "Put your clothes on backwards, walk on your hands, whatever you do, be different."*

Here's an idea to be different from everyone else: take a photo of a bird in a cage.

Thanks.

* sorry if that made you think of Kriss Kross - and uh, sorry if you didn't but you just did now. Always remember Krishna!

Re-presenting Srila Prabhupada involves tracking the current culture and keeping it real.

Good preachers present a timeless message in a timely and relevant fashion - mainly by using relevant cultural examples. Witness Jesus' use of stories of fishes and animals, lost coins and greedy farmers - all elements of the daily life of his audience.

Some of Srila Prabhupada's examples are dating and could use some brushing up to keep them, or make them more accessible to the mainstream.

We can make a humble contribution of re-presenting the essential ideas that he presented using contemporary examples and illustrations to help contemporary audiences engage with and understand them.

I'm working on a slide presentation to give next Sunday at the Sunday feast. I've got an updated version of the "Bird in the cage" example that I am going to use.

The "Bird in the Cage" Example

In the Bird in the Cage example an owner keeps a bird in a cage and dutifully shines the cage each day, but neglects to feed the actual bird. In this way an analogy is drawn between maintaining the body but not doing anything for the soul within the body.

No-one I know has a bird in a cage. It's the kind of thing I remember my grandparents having - is it an older generation thing, or just an older person thing?

Another analogy in this same line is the car and the driver. The driver may wash the car and put in petrol, but if he doesn't eat, he's in trouble. This one is closer to my daily experience.

The analogy that I am using, however, is one that is more geared to people of my generation in the culture that I live - it draws an analogy with online gaming. Here are a couple of examples:

• S Korean dies after games session - A South Korean man has died after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks.
• Man dies after 3-day gaming binge - Medics fail to revive 30-year-old man at cyber cafe in Guangzhou, southern China

In the analogy with online gaming we see what happens when a person projects themselves into the world of the sense objects, but neglects the senses (the body). Similarly, when we focus only on the senses we neglect the soul.

The bird in a cage example carries along with it the idea of imprisonment and lends itself to a follow up discussion of liberation. The online gaming example lends itself to a follow up revolving around the Matrix, or the Krishna's explanation of the relation between the sense objects, the senses, the mind, the intelligence, and the soul.

OK, so the Bird in the Cage example might be a little awkward or cause the audience to reach to grasp it, but it's not incomprehensible to people, so why use another one?

Good illustrations are accurate, relevant and engaging. Examples and illustrations serve at least three purposes:

• 1. To create an analogy that allows the audience to draw a parallel between something they already know and are familiar with and an as yet-unknown truth that is being communicated (accurate)
• 2. To create a bridge between the speaker and the audience, establishing some common knowledge and experience (relevant)
• 3. To add color and interest to the talk and vary the flow, as a means of stimulating and keeping interest and attention (engaging)

The Bird in a Cage example works here for point number one - it's accurate, but it's not so good at two and three, relevancy and engagement, in our environment. Analogies lose their power when you have to explain, or audiences have to grasp for both the point and the analogy. If it's not something within their experience it doesn't establish the bridge, and if it's not sensational then it doesn't stimulate. You don't always want to stimulate, but you have to do it periodically to maintain attention and interest.

Of course you have to be careful that your illustrations don't overshadow the actual idea. The online gaming illustration is potentially an epic one, as you can see from the picture above, and it will be the biggest one in the presentation that I'll give. I'm using it as the overall "engaging factor".

The "Ask Your Mother" Example

There are other examples, however, that are more problematic than the Bird in a Cage one, which is staid but still solid. Take for example this one, which I was reading to Prahlad last night from the Science of Self Realization:

If a boy wants to know who his father is, the simple process is to ask his mother. The mother will then say, "This is your father." This is the way of perfect knowledge.

This is actually a really good analogy, in the right setting. However, while it is great with the right audience, for a contemporary Western audience this example may introduce more problems than it solves.

There are two problems with this: relevancy, and accuracy.

First of all, relevancy. How closely does this map to the experience of the audience? Today the reliability of the mother's authority is not so clear cut. The mother may not give the correct answer, either because she is unwilling, or because she is unable.

Take for example the recent revelation that France's Justice Minister Rachida Dati is pregnant.

She declines to name the father, saying that her private life is "complicated".

We live in a world of infidelity, paternity lawsuits and multiple sexual partners. In France and the UK over 50% of children are born out of wedlock. In the US the figure was 40% in 2005. The analogy is no longer as relevant as it was in a previous social setting.

The example fails on accuracy too, and this is more serious.

Everyone knows today that the "way of perfect knowledge" in ascertaining the paternity of a child is through an impersonal, objective DNA test. "Asking around" is pre-scientific and inaccurate by modern standards.

Since the analogy being drawn here is that the "perfect way of knowing" about God is to approach a personal authority, and the analogy stumbles on this, the main point you are making is similarly compromised when using this illustration.

Your point becomes derailed when someone points out the flaw in the analogy (besides feeling that it does not relate to the actual social situation) - a DNA test is the way, not "asking a person".

Using this example risks giving contemporary audiences an impression of being pre-scientific and primitive, irrelevant to our modern, scientifically advanced reality.

Of course, it might also create a sense in people that we are coming from a different place socially than modern western society (and we should make sure that we are). However, the problem remains - today the way of perfect knowledge in ascertaining paternity is a DNA test, not a personal interview.

Any suggestions for a contemporary refresh of that example?

Sunday Feast - Sitapati style.

Props to Vrajadhama for mixing it up.

Great points from Seth Godin, easy to apply to a Krishna Conscious outreach program - especially if you are free from the layers of constraints and expectations imposed by doing a traditional program in a temple. My comments, based on doing the Hare Krishna Sunday Feast in Brisbane's Govinda's restaurant for two years, inline:

Easily overlooked, but incredibly important: the way you arrange the room where people speak.

The venue owner (hotel/convention center) wants something easy. Your boss wants something cheap. You want something tried and true so you don't get blamed. The end result? Mediocrity. Boring sameness. What a wasted opportunity.

In the scheme of things, a great room at a conference is a bargain. Spending what it takes to make it work has a huge payoff. That said, here are some thoughts:

"What does this remind me of?"

That's the subliminal question that people ask themselves as soon as they walk into a room. If it reminds us of a high school cafeteria, we know how to act. If it's a bunch of round tables set for a chicken dinner, we know how to act. And if there are row upon row of hotel-type chairs in straight lines, we know how to sit and act glazed.

If it's a place where we're used to saying 'no', we're likely to say no. If it's a place where we're used to good news or important news or just paying attention, we'll do that.

You can use this Pavlovian reaction to your advantage, or you can be a victim of it. A non-traditional arrangement can make people sit up and take notice. A rock concert feel is going to raise the energy level of even the skeptics. A circle with no tables makes people feel naked. These are tools, and you get to choose.

If you have to serve lunch, serve lunch. Big round tables, lots of talking. Then have people stand up and go hear the speaker. In a different room, with a different setting, one that works. No one ever heard a speech that changed their lives when sitting around a round table having just eaten a lousy lunch. Mixing the settings serves no purpose, wastes time in the long run and saves very little money.

Do you see that this is just more marketing? You tell a story with where you put the chairs.

When we started doing the Sunday Feast everyone was sitting on the floor. There were some chairs along the back wall, and guests would grab these as quickly as possible, and leave the others to sit uncomfortably on the floor. The first thing we did was put out chairs for the guests to sit on. The whole goal of yoga asanas is to help the yogi to sit down comfortably - "asana". Once they can do this they move on to the more advanced stages of spiritual practice. If they can't sit comfortably they cannot do anything further. Asanas are useful for sitting comfortably. Giving people a chair does it too...

If you could do one thing, make one choice, it should be this: make the room too small. Standing room only. People hanging into the hall. Watch what happens to your energy level.

If you're speaking TO people as opposed to encouraging a wide ranging discourse, put the stage along the narrow wall of the room. (in a 30 by 80 room, that means the 30 side). Making the room narrow and long is far better than wide, because it puts the audience in the plane of the speaker.

After a year we reoriented the room in this way, when we got a stage to allow people sitting in chairs to see devotees sitting on "the floor" doing kirtan. The stage fit nicely when the room was set up longways. We also found that it helped people to focus more. With the room set up wide way there are too many distracting things in people's field of view.

This also makes it far easier for the audience to see the speaker and the slides/screens at the same time. This is critical. I can't tell you how many times I've watched people stare at the screen and avoid the speaker, or find themselves bouncing back and forth.

iMag: That's the projection of the speaker on the screen. This is pretty expensive, but for groups over 500, it's almost mandatory in our 1984esque world. If you want to get far more bang for your buck, hire a second cameraman, with a hand held camera. When you switch from one view to the other, you add enormous action to the event.

We did this one evening when H.H. Ramai Swami gave class. It allows people further back to see him easily. We just plugged a video camera into the video projector that we used for visuals and words during bhajans. It has a great effect. I saw the two camera setup at Buckhead Church in Atlanta, and it is effective. It was like being in a rock video.

Screens: Big screens are a lot more reasonable than they used to be. Get the absolute biggest and brightest you can afford. Bigger! Big screens, near the speaker. Really close to the speaker. That's a big help for the audience and for your energy.

VGA cables: Have more than one. Switchers are cheap. Nothing worse than having speakers stumbling around swapping laptops. And put the cables and the laptops up front, not in back to be controlled by a tech guy who doesn't care quite as much as you (or the speaker) does.

Music: Every time you introduce a speaker, play loud and inspiring pop music. Not for long, but enough to cue people to remember the way they feel at the Oscars and stuff. After all, those memes are there waiting for you to leverage them.

We've used this, especially with our "Hare Krishna Network". With this format we do the program as a "live-to-air" talk show, complete with theme music, voice from the sky introduction for the host, and ad breaks. You will be amazed at how you can guide a group of people through an evening by using their existing cultural frameworks.

Marching bands: Yes, they're cheap. No, people don't like them particularly. I've seen this done a number of times, and people are more amazed and aghast than impressed.

Aisles: Watch a room fill up. People always sit on the aisle, don't they? Don't do rows of 40 or 50 chairs with no aisle. Have lots of aisles. Every ten chairs or so. Why not? Makes it faster to get in and to get out, and doesn't hurt your density so much.

We started putting aisles in between the chairs because of this reality of seating dynamics. No-one wants to sit in the middle, and when they do, it's hard to get in and out.

Lights: Make it dark in the audience. Make it light on stage. This works every time. Practice the lighting in advance, even for a smaller group.

Q&A: For large groups, don't do Q&A. It sucks all the energy out of the room and stilts the end, "Well, if there are no more questions..." Instead, solicit questions from key people in advance, write them on index cards and have someone raring and ready to go with a microphone and a finite list of questions, bang, bang, bang. It's not a press conference, it's a speech.

Sunday Feast questioning sessions can be more than a complete waste of time, they can be a massive let down and counterproductive. If you give a powerful, polished presentation, the last thing you want to do is give the last word to someone who is going to present something contrary to your point, confusing the audience and potentially overwriting your whole carefully prepared message in the mind of the audience. There are professional Sunday Feast questioners who come along every week just to do exactly this. Better to arrange the program overall so that people can ask questions of devotees personally afterwards. Those who sincerely want to ask, can, and those who want a platform to address the whole crowd can go do their own program.

Small groups: Even groups of two--don't go along with a lousy setting just because that's what is offered to you. Why would you pitch yourself or your project in a noisy restaurant, seated on a banquette, with one person on your left and two on your right? Don't do it.

If you are using a laptop for a small group, get one with a big screen. Get a simple USB remote. Don't use live web access if at all possible. And make sure that the right person sees the screen (and you) at the same time. If you can't do these things, don't use the laptop.

If you're willing to travel to meet with someone, put in the extra effort to do it in a setting that works. Befriend the admin, befriend the maitre d, even from 1,000 miles away. Both you and the person you're meeting with benefit when you create a room that works.

Earlier this year I visited New Panihati dham in Atlanta, Georgia, USA for the Sunday Feast. This devotee, H.G. Balabhadra Prabhu ACBSP, was giving the Sunday Feast lecture. In this 2 minute excerpt you get a sense of his personal charisma, and he gives his realization about some of the fundamentals of Krishna Consciousness.

Balabhadra Prabhu was clearly dear to the devotees in that community and generated a cohesive family mood around him. We spoke afterwards and he expressed interest in the Loft style of Krishna conscious outreach, and shared his desire to reach out to the people of Atlanta through his initiative Vedic Outreach of Metropolitan Atlanta.

Giving class is also kirtan. Here is a 5 page comic book that I wrote last year about giving a class or presentation on Krishna Consciousness. Of course, the principles are universal, so you can use them for whatever you do.

You can download a pdf version here: "Communicating for Change"

There is no substitute for experience, and don't be afraid to give the same class over and over again, in different settings, refining it further and further.

Here's the intro section of the book (click on the comic strips for larger versions):

Communicating for Change

These are a few points about giving classes and presentations that I have picked up. By learning about these you can gain a framework of reference that you can use to evaluate and categorize your experience of your own classes and the classes of others, and hopefully can use to improve your game. There is nothing worse than not having the conceptual vocabulary to describe or evaluate your performance. This leads to a feeling of hopelessness, fear of giving class, and difficulty in improving.

I hope this is of some use to you.

If people can't relate to what you're talking about – you don't have communication. Communication starts with what you have in common. You need to reach out and start from common ground to take people to unfamiliar ground. Throw most people in the deep end and they'll sink pretty fast. So you need to be sensitive to your audience.

So begin with audience in mind. Remember that they are the reason you are speaking. You are speaking for their benefit. Of course, from the absolute perspective you are speaking for your own benefit also, but speaking for their benefit is for your benefit. So think long and hard about them. Pray for them. Pray to be able to speak to their needs.

Here are some terms and concepts about classes and presentations that will help you.

No one called me out on this, but one observation that could be made about my recent Sunday Feast experience in Melbourne is that I had the "X-factor" benefit. Since I was new and unknown to most people there they were expectant. "New"-ness does this - it creates a space of opportunity where people wait expectantly, giving you the benefit of the doubt and a window of entry to make a change.

So in addition to the local brahmacari crew headed by stalwarts such as Uddhava and Adam, I also had that on my side. You can use "new" to create momentum. Every time you do something new you generate excitement and momentum.

• To create momentum, harness the power of "new".

Someone might say: "Well, you might not be able to have the same effect if you were there all the time." Probably true. However, you can still find ways to do something new. And once you create momentum, you harness another practice to sustain that momentum:

• To sustain momentum, harness the power of "continual improvement".

Here are some examples:

When we moved from our old premises at the Loft in Elizabeth St, next to Govindas, to our new flash digs on Albert St we changed our name from "The Loft" to "Atma Yoga".

Atma Yoga is a more powerful brand. It stands for something in the mind of the public - as Aniruddha prabhu pointed out two years ago: "Yoga" is the ultimate truth brand. In that sense it nicely lines up what we're all about with what public preconception and perception.

Starting with "A" is primal, like Krishna's instructions in the Bhagavad-gita (asocyan anvasocas tvam) - and it puts us early in the alphabetical listings. "Atma" is short, punchy, easy to remember and easy to pronounce.

The "newness" of the Atma Yoga identity created buzz and a sense of progress. New is always fresh and exciting.

Here's our first flyer, with the original logo:

In order to continue to build on that momentum we've engaged in a process of continual improvement over the past year. Check out our new website with the new logo.

The latest piece in this process are our new t-shirts. There is a Melbourne connection here again, because our Melbourne-based friend Ram Kumar, who stayed with us in Brisbane for 5 months, organized these shirts to be printed in India.

These t-shirts contain our new logo, and our slogan: "Be the change"

Last Friday night was "Atma Bling night" with guests and staff blinging out on the new t-shirts. Here are some photos. I apologize for the quality - I'm a lousy photographer, but you get the idea:

Mike straps on his apron and gets ready for serious serving action.

Zoe is directing, Anu is starring.

Ryan teaches Tai Chi on Sundays, Zoe teaches Vinyasa classes.

Campak Gaura is famous for her cooking. However, she taught the yoga class tonight - Acyuta Bhava and Bhakti are responsible for this lasagne.

Here Ryan points out the old logo on Prem Yogi's old school Atma t-shirt.

There are actually two different t-shirt designs, and here you see only the over-the-top one. There is another, more subdued one with a small logo on it, like Prem Yogi's older one.

These t-shirts implement another principle, in addition to the principle of continual improvement - the principle that "Organizational Identity fosters Organizational Integrity".

If there was one thing we learnt from Nuremberg (the rallies, not the trials) - that was it. If there was one thing that we learnt from the trials, it was that you can't hide behind the orders of the spiritual master - you are responsible for what you do, so think long and hard about it before you do it, and don't blame anyone else.

Anyway, back to the Sunday Feast application - the principles are all there. Do something new, then relentlessly improve it. Simple really.

The next thing that I'll speak about on this topic is the reason why it's hard to keep improving the Sunday Feast program in this way over time - lack of results. And my realization is that this comes from "Strategic Irrelevance of the Sunday Feast". That's the next post.

btw, I've created a new "Sunday Feast" category for these posts.