San Ramon, California

“What is the one thing in life that you can never do without?” this was the question posed by a senior disciple of Amma as he stood talking casually to a few devotees.” You can live without eyes, you can live without the gift of speech; the deaf, the maimed and the handicapped still survive. The one thing that we can never hope to live without is our breath - the air we take in and release- our very life-breath.”

“But are we even aware of our breath?” he continued. ”So many factors affect our rate of breath - it goes faster when we are agitated, slower when we relax, shallow and deep alternately as we sleep. You see, something happened earlier that made me stop and think how deep within each of us Amma really is. Today morning, just a couple of minutes after I entered Amma’s room, She asked me whether I was running a fever. I was amazed and asked Her how She knew. She replied that She found out by listening to my breath. The breath was mine and I was not even aware that it sounded different, but Amma was very much aware of it!”

Such is Amma, the physician who has a pair of eyes that can see you from the inside out. So many are the stories of Amma's accurate diagnoses, that when Amma asks someone to run some physical tests the advice is taken very seriously. Recently, it happened that an elderly couple, both doctors, and staunch devotees of Amma, were asked to go through some cardiac tests. The husband had some minor breathlessness, but the wife was in perfect health, and both being doctors, one would think that they would be the first ones to catch on to their own health concerns. Not so. After some quickly scheduled tests, the husband was diagnosed with triple arterial blocks, and the wife with almost 98% blockage due to calcium build-up. Nothing short of a miracle could have saved them and that miracle was Amma with Her timely intervention! After some surgery, they are in good health, their faith deep and their gratitude tremendous, to have had the good fortune to live in Amma's protective shadow.

Amma, the super physician, with a resolve as firm as a mountain, diagnoses and cures both the body and the mind of it's diverse afflictions - the physicians but execute the physical process at a gross level. For, beyond all the levels of Amma that we think we know, it is clear that there exist many more that we cannot even begin to comprehend!