1763: Let Go But Don't Give Up | Bhakti, Business and the Art of Surrender
Wisdom of the Sages
David Ramella
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
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Summary
After twenty years of living in an ashram, Divya Alter opened a restaurant — and her spiritual practice tested new ways and taken to a whole new level. Divya — Ayurvedic chef, Sanskrit scholar, and founder of New York City's beloved Divya's Kitchen — discovered that separating her spiritual life from her business life created nothing but internal war. The moment she saw the restaurant as her devotional service, everything shifted. Raghunath and Kaustubha sit with Divya for a conversation about what a decade of serving prasadam in the most competitive restaurant city in the world teaches you about surrender, letting go, and trusting Krishna with the outcome. The Srimad Bhagavatam then raises a question that stops everything: who exactly is this cowherd boy? Add Krishna to anything and everything becomes auspicious. Even, it turns out, an alien abduction.
Help Support Divya's Kitchen: https://gofund.me/81358219c
Srimad Bhagavatam 10.28.1-7
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I came into the business after 20 plus years of intense Bhakti practice, you know, living as a monk in India and other countries and just practicing, studying two hours a day and chanting a lot and all that. |
| 0:20.8 | And I was very comfortable in my Bhakti practice. |
| 0:24.7 | I was very uncomfortable in my business practice. |
| 0:27.8 | And the case years, I kind of separated the business from my service. |
| 0:37.4 | It was like my spiritual life. I had my spiritual business from my service. |
| 0:39.4 | It was like my spiritual life. |
| 0:41.5 | I had my spiritual life and my business. |
| 0:45.0 | And this created a lot of internal stress for me. |
| 0:49.8 | It was always like something fighting in me. And then with the help of my teachers and guides, |
| 0:54.0 | I was able to see the dichotomy and I was able to kind of integrate the two and see the business as my service. |
| 1:03.3 | The business is my path to spiritual enlightenment. |
| 1:07.8 | And when I did that, all of a sudden, everything shifted for me personally. |
| 1:14.4 | And then the real lessons started flowing. |
| 1:19.4 | I was open to receive so many different lessons. |
| 1:23.2 | So that was the first lesson to integrate, to see the business as part of my spiritual path, |
| 1:30.3 | as something that contributes to my spiritual growth and a lot of purification of the heart, |
| 1:36.6 | for sure. |
| 1:38.2 | Yeah. |
| 1:39.1 | So it's not, we can, we can experience this in the holy places where I lived for several years in India. |
| 1:47.0 | We can experience this in an ashram where I lived for many years. |
| 1:51.0 | But we can also experience this in our day-to-day life. |
| 1:55.0 | You know, we can experience this with our children, with our spouses, with the business. |
... |
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