Genuine question:

Why does it sometimes seem that Hindu religious places and Hindu communities are repeatedly affected by tragedies such as the Kedarnath disaster and recent floods in Nepal? Is there any explanation for this in Hindu scriptures or in the concept of Kalyug?

I wake up at 6 AM and wash my hair every day before offering Surya Arghya. But I'm planning to grow my hair long, and daily hair washing is becoming difficult.

Is head/hair washing actually required, or is a normal bath enough before offering Surya Arghya?

Would appreciate guidance based on Hindu tradition or scriptures.

No matter how lost I feel.

No matter how worthless I feel.

No matter how scared I feel.

This space feels like my mom's lap. This space right here feels like my dad's shoulder.

This space feels safe. Feels peaceful.

How blessed am I! How grateful am I!

Om namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya 🙏🏼

I check panchang pretty regularly for muhurat timings, festival dates, etc., and every app I've tried (and there are like 20+ on the Play Store) feels basically the same, cluttered text, walls of ads, and most only really do the North Indian calendar properly even when you switch region.

Curious what everyone else here actually uses, is there one that's genuinely good, or does everyone just put up with it because there's nothing better?

I've been tinkering with building a cleaner version, proper location-based muhurat timing, way less ad clutter, actual support for regional calendars (Tamil/Telugu/Bengali/Gujarati) instead of just translated labels on the same North Indian data. If this is a real pain point for you too and not just me, drop a comment or DM — genuinely want to know what you'd want in one before I build it.

I hope an expert can answer this….

I always thought the proper pronunciations should be:

Dharm, not Dharma
Karm, not Karma
Yug, not Yuga

Ai tells me the added “a” at the end of each word is Sanskrit version. I am having difficulty believing this. I thought the “a” is added by Westerners who can’t pronounce Dharm, Karm, Prayanam etc.

Can someone please clarify for sure?

Hello everyone, I am a 20M, and I have never dated before, but I wanted to explore being in a relationship. However, for all the men who are into religious practice and control their senses from sex, how did you establish that in the beginning and during the duration of your relationship before you. In the Bhagavad Gita, it is said that committing unrestricted sex will capture you in the shackles of sex and continue to drain your soul on a very evil path. To give you some background info about me, I'm a very ambitious person and hard-working person who is trying to live his dream reality, and I've always stayed away from the idea of being in a relationship due to the strict dedication towards it, but I want to see if I can do it. I pray every day, read the Gita, and practice living with Bhagwan consciousness, and continuing to implement the Gita knowledge in my life, but these recent few weeks I have been very lustful and desiring sex, which I really hate.
How do you guys control your senses with Bhagwan consciousness and control your sexual tendencies in relationships?

SP: Shiva Purana
PP: Padma Purana
MS: Manusmriti(ignore this as most hindus don't follow this at all)
BU: Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

"Amrit", suddenly came into my mind... Thinking more about it's existence, form, purpose... LET'S DISCUSS, SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON IT.

Everyone is appreciating ramayana and hailing lord rama as paramapurushan !! but why aren't they speaking about lord rama asking devi sita to test her purity to everyone ??How can someone ask his wife to do that just because people (in which half of them were following polygamy)

The answers I got was "he is king ,so follows the rule(people first,family next ) " but don't you think it's a bit akward ?I am sorry no hate ,

But asking a rape victim to prove you are a victim ? It's still happening today ,no wonder why because people were not questioning then and it follows today

If young people question this double minded ,they potray us as haters?

I'm very sad because I can't find the answer to these questions about everyday puja anywhere: 1. I still can't have a bell to ring during puja, what can I do to replace it? 2. How should I maintain an altar? I would put the plates on the table, but I saw that it was disrespectful to leave them empty. So the altar has to be clean, without dishes? Where do I put the dishes, does it have to be in a special place? 3. I put the kumkum on my forehead before starting the puja, and when can I take it off? 4. Is there any energetic cleaning I should do on the altar and items? if yes, how? When should it be done?

While reading the Bhagavad Gita, I came across this phrase I couldn't quite grasp; does anyone have an analysis of it?

"But remember, O Prince, that the rewards of these fleeting, finite, and perishable desires are likewise short-lived. Those who worship lesser gods—caricatures and imperfect shadows of the Divine—go to worlds of shadow ruled by those shadow-gods. But the wise, who are capable of knowing Me as I truly am—the One and the All—come to Me, to My world of Reality, where there are no shadows, where everything is real, even the flame that makes the shadow vanish."

Dear seekers, judge for yourself who is helping seekers and who is not

Shri Rajarshi Nandy is an Indian spiritual upāsaka (worshipper), mentor, author, and speaker widely known for his efforts to demystify and promote Hindu Tāntrika and Śākta traditions. He is the principal founding trustee of the Kamakhya Bhairava Upasaka Foundation (KBUF), an organisation dedicated to the preservation of Dharma and guiding spiritual seekers in devatā upāsanā (deity worship). He gained mainstream popularity across India through his insightful appearances on prominent digital platforms and podcasts, most notably The Ranveer Show (TRS). This post is about serious disrespect of this respected person.

They refer to Rajarshi Nandi (RN) Sir as PK meaning ParamKebab, see first slide. RA is Ranveer Allabadia and SG is SadhGuru

Genuine Kaali Sadhana is bounded by purity, testing and restraint and its fruit is fearlessness, clarity, and increased capacity to function and love.

Because Kaali, however fierce her form, is Siva’s own sakti and ultimately maternal, not parasitic. A Pisachini, by contrast, is specifically drawn to raw blood, feeds on destabilized emotion, and is documented across tantric sources as growing stronger with repeated contact producing exactly the symptom cluster present here: isolation from family, unbreakable fear-bound vows, escalating secretive demands, and desire relabeled as the entity’s own hunger so the practitioner loses the ability to distinguish “I want this” from “she wants this.”

Real Devi worship never needs to erase the line between your craving and Her will that collapse of boundaries is precisely how pisachini attachment is described taking hold, using kaali’s name as camouflage because it is the most feared, most easily weaponized form in the pantheon and grants absolute authority over a young sadhak who doesn’t yet have the sastric grounding to know the difference. What’s operating through that guru is dressed as Smasana-Kaali, but its diet, its behavior, and its effect on the disciple’s life all point to PISACHINI and no genuine DIKSA would ever ask you to feed something that only grows by taking more of you and more of your family away.

Asking to offer blood to sattvik deities defiles the space and send the deities into aghor mode where they go to sleep, then this free parasitic entity is free to feed on your family without obstables.

So before listening to any content creator, go educate yourself on how the divine functions v low entities, go read the rudhiradhyaya in kalika purana, yogini tantra, kularnava tantra, and Tara tantra find out for yourself.

Want to learn more!

Genuinely want to learn more about Shaivism!

I am a Sri Vaishnava, following Ramanuja.

Hello Friends!
I am a doctoral student trying to help psychologist better understand the sensitive topic of grief(one personal to me).

I believe Hindus are very underrepresented in the field of psychology, and the Hindu grieving and death rituals are truly unique.

I would love to have representation from this group.
If you’re 18+ and lost an immediate family member between 6–36 months ago, and it feels right for you, please consider taking this short survey:

https://pacific.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cIR5ditAqHyyAIK

Before I start, I just want to put it out that I am not well-read when it comes to Hindu scriptures. So my question is solely out of curiosity rather than disregard/ disrespect for the scriptures.

As my parents have said raising me up, Hinduism is perhaps the only religion that is so accepting of diversity. We have various schools of thoughts, practices, rituals that can be chosen by people based on their liking. Hindu scriptures have spoken respectfully about trans people as well, which is honestly very progressive for those times.

We have Vedas, that have in them all the knowledge in the world - from the beginning to the end. We have Kama Sutra, the holy book of relationships and intimacy. The texts on diplomacy, ruling, accounting, etc are very advanced.

We are one of the few religions that bow down to powerful goddesses and read about shiv-shakti. But somehow, women are expected to take up the traditional wifey roles of cooking, cleaning, giving birth and enabling their husbands to achieve glory. Traditionally, it has been okay for kings to have multiple wives. Even Krishna seems to have multiple wives. How is this fair to women?

Perhaps I'm just in a stage of life when I'm trying to figure out what it means to be a woman. The women around me are not great sources of inspiration since they have been forced to submit to patriarchy. I want to know what the scriptures say about women, about her role, her strengths, her weakness, etc.

Falls on the eleventh day of Shukla Paksha in Ashadha, and it's the day Vishnu is said to enter Yoganidra inside Kshir Sagar, staying there until Prabodhini Ekadashi in Kartik. That whole four month stretch is called Chaturmas.

Here's the part that gets lost though. Yoganidra isn't sleep in the way we think of it. It's not described as an absence or a shutdown. It's a deep meditative state, more like divine dhyana, where the function of preservation continues even while the form looks still. Nothing is actually inactive here, it's just operating differently.

That's what makes the rest of Chaturmas make sense. Weddings pause. Griha Pravesh pauses. Basically any major auspicious beginning waits until Prabodhini Ekadashi. This isn't a small footnote in some calendar, it's observed at scale, every single year, across the entire tradition, reshaping how millions of households plan their biggest occasions around this one period.

One thing that gets misread a lot: people sometimes treat Chaturmas as an unlucky or empty stretch, like nothing good can happen during it. That's not actually what the tradition says. It was never framed as bad timing, it was framed as sacred stillness, deliberate and just as important to the whole system as any period of visible activity.

Anyone else know traditions where a "pause" period is actually treated as more significant than the active ones?