As a Sangha, we held a special memorial meditation in honor of Nydia Rodriguez, a great friend of Sat Yoga, from the old days in Escazu, who recently passed into the light.
This is a loving tribute from Shunyamurti, Mahalakshmi and the Sat Yoga Community, with a video testimonial from Nydia during her time here at the Ashram last year, and a special teaching from Shunyamurti.
Shunyamurti:
Nydia’s life was dedicated to service, to the upliftment of humanity, our morals, ethics and relationship to nature. Her ardent yearning to help save the environment and her many accomplishments in that field led to the creation of organizations to to raise awareness of our sacred duty as stewards of our planetary web of life.
Her dedication to the purification of the soul brought her to Sat Yoga, where she was a student for a number of years. She was a very serious student of spirituality, of the way of living the art of life in a Godly manner. And so she deserves our respect, our honoring, and our assistance now in her ascension to Liberation. If we can offer that in this meditation to help her dissolve what remains of the ego and be absorbed fully into the Supreme Light, then we will have repaid a collective debt that is owed to her for her lifelong service and no doubt of many lifetimes.
Mahalakshmi:
Nydia was an environmental activist and leader who taught us many lessons. She never, ever gave up against all odds.
She was a supporter of many unknown artists whom she had the vision to present to the world through the cultural and environmental festivals that she organized for environmental awareness. Above all, she was a nature lover and an adventurer of life.
Many knew her as “The Mother of Recycling” as her later life was dedicated to educating the Costa Rican population about responsible waste management. Among the many initiatives she undertook in her life, her largest undertaking was beach cleaning; she started one of the largest beach cleaning movements in Latin America, which was then replicated in many other places. She then started cleaning the rivers of the Central Valley, educating the Costa Rican population on the waste that these beautiful waterways were soiled with.
She was a tireless worker, an avid reader, and although her formal studies were in chemistry, she never stopped learning and studying. Her opinion was very highly respected and sometimes feared, because she spoke the truth. She was a go to source for journalists, researchers and consultants when they wanted a reliable opinion on environmental matters.
We started several projects together in tourism and developed a very beautiful friendship which led her to come to Sat Yoga for meditation and satsangs. She came to the Institute in Escazu for more than 5 years. She was very inspired by Shunya’s vision of creating a spiritual community in harmony with nature.
She was an open-hearted and unconditional friend, always there for those who needed her. She would be absolutely overjoyed to know that we were having this memorial in her honor. She was a very spiritual being who had a lot of love to share with everyone. I heard that before leaving this plane, she asked that people be happy after her departure, instead of mourning and being sad, and to celebrate her life and be joyous. And so we are!
I wish for her ascension into the light to be as blissful and as serene and as joyful as possible.
Shunyamurti’s Tribute
In this video, Shunyamurti honors Nydia Rodriguez’s life of service and speaks about the soul’s process of transitioning beyond the body.