In May 1987 Shri Mataji visited Australia. For the Sahaja Yogis, the height of Her visit was a weekend programme in the Snowy Mountains, in the town of Thredbo. Everyone had gone to a great deal of trouble to have a flower to give to Shri Mataji when She arrived on Saturday night. This was not easily done, as florists are few and far between in the Snowy Mountains, but we’d all managed somehow. We all had our flowers ready, but Mother made Her way straight to Her room without taking them. When Shri Mataji came from Her room, She went directly to the meeting hall and spoke to us for quite some time, after which we had a musical programme. Then Mother spoke to us again. By this time, most of us had been holding our flowers for three or four hours and were giving up hope.
‘I see that you have some flowers for Me,’ Shri Mataji sweetly said, just before leaving. ‘Would you like to give them to Me now?’ So, torn between the horror of offering these dead flowers and the longing to give something to Mother, no matter what, we gratefully and humbly gave the dead blooms to Shri Mataji. They were hanging down and completely finished. They were completely dead: not just slightly dead, but utterly dead. Shri Mataji went back to Her room. After a little while, She asked for the box of flowers to be brought in.
‘Bring them into the bathroom,’ She said. ‘We’re going to have a miracle. You’ll see, it will be a miracle. Fill the bath with very warm water. Fill it just as if I were going to have a bath.’ As the water was running, Mother was putting Her hand into the bath, vibrating the whole thing.
‘Now put all the flowers into the bath,’ She said. ‘Make sure all the stems are down in the water.’ When all the flowers were in the bath, Mother said: ‘See, they’re already looking better.’ And they were. ‘You wait,’ She continued, ‘and see in the morning. We’ll use these flowers for the puja.’ Next morning all the flowers were fresh and blooming.
After Shri Mataji has stayed in a place, the auspicious thing is to leave Her room exactly as it is for nine days after Her departure. This was done after Mother’s departure from Australia in 1987. Every day, the ladies would just go in and check the room and each day there would be an indentation of the quilt on the same side of the bed as Mother had slept in. Each day they would shake the quilt and smooth it out, and each day the indentation would be there again, as though She were still sleeping there throughout those nine days.
Matthew Fogarty