About the Name
Dina and her mother Aksara
While training with the Metta Institute, I continued to work at the bedside. My capacity to bear witness to suffering and cultivate a sacred space began to deepen. Once such space developed with "Aksara", a radiant 73 year old full of humor, intelligence and great heart. Turning toward her suffering with recurrent lymphoma, she was the first to notice the shift in my abilities as a caregiver, telling me "You are doing something different than the other nurses. I don't know what it is, but you are different." My immediate thoughts were: I am nobody special. I just show up and pay attention, remaining open to the extraordinary, ordinary sacred moments that can unfold. Our relationship deepened as I assisted in supporting her end-of-life process. When I shared my training with Aksara, she very much wanted to be a part of my work, and I asked her to take on the task offering the work a name. She began to look for Sanskrit words for weaving and service, themes that continued to present themselves in the first gestations of this work, eventually resulting in Aksara's generous gift to this project: Tan Seva: TAN, the root word of tantra , means the weaving of teachings, or the manifestation of weaving, and SEVA, means service. Thank you, Aksara, for bringing a beautiful name to this work.
--Virginia Subia, Founder of Tan Seva Project