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Welcome to a new, weekly series of videos and blog posts by Radiance Coaching. It is called ‘How to say‘. This very first blog post and video of this series is an attempt to explain the idea behind creating this series.

In the last few decades, there has been a lot of interest generated in the western part of the world about various spiritual traditions and philosophies of the cultures from the east. Typically, the ancient spiritual knowledge from China, Tibet and India has captured the fancy of thousands of researchers, thinkers and philosophers from the US, the UK, various European countries etc. Many of them have visited China, Tibet and India multiple times, even stayed for a while in these countries in effort to really understand the core of these ancient cultures and spiritual traditions. This knowledge has been imparted to others in the west via English and other languages of the west. The ancient knowledge in India has been recorded, preserved and handed down from one generation to another in the ancient language Sanskrit.

Sanskrit is a foreign language for those from the western part of the world. Therefore, not surprisingly, Sanskrit words have not been very easy to pronounce for the scholars from the west. They have made their best effort to say the Sanskrit words over the years. As the popularity of Indian spiritual knowledge increased in the west, more and more people read books and listened to speeches explaining this spiritual tradition. However, reading a particular word doesn’t help us in knowing how to say it!

I have read and listened to many such works of various spiritual masters of the west that included many Sanskrit words. I have also had discussions with many friends and colleagues from English-speaking countries, on myriad of spiritual and philosophical topics. I realised through these experiences that most of them probably never came across any resource that taught them how to say words like ‘Chakra’ ‘Prana’ ‘Dharma’ etc. correctly! I though, I am from India and I know Sanskrit. Why not make use of the fantastic medium, YouTube, to teach those interested, how to say certain Sanskrit words that are commonly used in the west? So I did!

I hope you will find these videos and blog posts helpful. If you have any requests for Sanskrit words you’d like to know how to pronounce, please leave a comment below the video on YouTube or write on our Facebook page.