Michael Jai Grant
1 min readSep 24, 2021

We were in India and given an honored opportunity to do ‘seva’ (selfless-work-for-a-higher-purpose) at a temple by arising at 4:30am to clean its floors. It allowed us to be in the sacred chamber of the ascended swami, where no one was allowed to go. When we were finished, the man who arranged for it asked for a donation and we were sweaty and tired and thinking, “we just spent three hours scrubbing your stone floors!” We didn’t bring any money with us to do the task and he found us later in another part of town to collect. He seemed exceedingly pissed off when we explained we circled back earlier and put some money in the temple’s donation box. It was an ugly scene, but a store owner said we did the right thing and the guy was a con-artist. Ultimately, though we may have been Tom Sawyered, the act of scrubbing those floors on our hands and knees in a remote temple in India was somehow purifying, meditative, and it remains a happy memory I’ll never forget!

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