An Extended Hiatus

It’s been 5-months since I sent my last blog post. I was not planning for such a long hiatus from this but moving my family to Costa Rica from the US during a pandemic has been quite all-consuming and at times a little crippling. 

Thank you to those of you who have checked in with me to see how I’ve been doing or written just to inquire what happened. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. And to those of you who have encouraged me to write again. Thank you!

I’ll focus this post on giving you an update on what has been happening the last few months. Then next week I’ll continue with sending out my weekly insights. 

My family and I moved to Nosara, Costa Rica in December of last year where Siva Ashram is located. For those of you who do not know, Siva Ashram is a 33-acre Hindu spiritual sanctuary and botanical gardens that we are creating here in Costa Rica. You can read more about it here: SivaAshram.org

We’ve developed lots of the grounds in the last three months taking advantage of the dry season. We’ve created a man-made pond to take advantage of a low-lying area of the property that accumulates much water during the rainy season. The pond will also serve to navigate water during the heavy rains and prevent erosion and damage to the land. 

We’ve cleared a lot of invasive trees that have grown as a by-product of the land being left abandoned after it was clear cut for raising cattle. We will be planting hundreds of plants and trees in the grounds in the coming months to fill the areas we’ve cleared. Our fruit trees are doing really well. We have a little over 40 different types of fruit trees. Recently we’ve enjoyed Star Apple, Star Fruit, Soursop, Mangosteen, Surinam Cherry, Mangoes (lots of them), over 15 types of citrus, Miracle fruit and more. 

Our goal in the next 8-months is to complete the Balinese entrance gateway for the garden and the first of the seven gardens which is dedicated to the Hindu deity Ganesha. If there are any landscape architects and/or architects that would like to remotely volunteer their time and expertise we would gladly welcome and appreciate the help. Any artists that would like to volunteer and help us with a few sketches would be greatly appreciated as well. If you’re interested please email info[at]sivaashram.org

On other fronts, early this year I signed a book contract with Portfolio, a division of Penguin Random House, for my first book. It’s scheduled to come out in the third quarter of 2022. Yes, that is not a typo, it’s 2022. 

I also launched a new course at the beginning of the year called “The Energy Alchemist, Part 1”. It’s all about learning to manage our energy, especially with people. In it I address the challenging issue of managing energy with people who are energy vampires. How do we navigate those relationships be they with friends, work colleagues, relatives, family members or more. We’ve also rebuilt our website from the ground up (www.dandapani.org) and we’ve celebrated 100,000 downloads of our free app (App Store | Play Store) since launching 19 months ago.

Since I’m getting back to posting regularly on my blog, I’d love to hear from you if there are any specific topics that you would like me to touch on. 

Thank you for your patience over the last few months!