BB Govinda Swami

ISKCON gurus and Swamis

Bhakti Bhringa Govinda Swami is a disciple of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and a preacher, monk and initiating guru of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. His life is one of active service and preaching as can be seen even from this concise list of his activities which he personaly described:

May/June 1971 Joined ISKCON at the ISKCON Temple in Buffalo, New York
Received initial training in cooking from Tejiyas das and Gunagrahi Maharaja
Accepted initiation in October 1971
September 1972 moved to ISKCON temple in Toronto Canada
Served as sankirtan devotee, pujari, cook
Visited India first time for the Gaura Purnima festival in 1976
Autumn 1976 til May 1977 helped establish and served in the Govinda’s
Vegetarian Restaurant in Toronto, Canada
June 1977 moved to India
July 1977 til April 1979 served in Vrindavan as cook and pujari at the samadhi of Srila Prabhupada.
April 1979 til April 1980 served in Athens, Greece
May 1980 til November 1982 served in Israel. Established another ISKCON vegetarian restaurant.
November 1982 til August 1983 served in Villa Vrindavan, Florence, Italy.
September 1983 til April 1984 served as temple president Krishna Balaram
Mandir, Vrindavan
May 1984 til September 1984 served in Manchester, England
September 1984 til June 1985 served in the Gurukula at New Mayapur, France
June 1985 til September 1986 served as coordinator of Deity and cooking standards in the Southern European region.
October/November 1986 visited Vrindavan
December/Jan 1987 stayed in Antwerp, Belgium
Feb til May 1987 preached in SA and Mauritius with HH IDS
June 1987 returned to Vrindavan
Jan 1988 took responsibility as coordinator of ISKCON’s camp in the upcoming 1989 Maha Kumbha Mela
December 1989 established Food for Life in Vrindavan
Served with Food For Life and as a kitchen coordinator and cook in ISKCON Vrindavan.
1992 visited CIS for the Gauranga Bhajan Band program
1995 began focusing on Central Asia
1997 moved my base from Vrindavan to Kazakhstan

In 1999 BB Govinda Swami established a rural spiritual coomunity near Almaty, Kazakhstan, and spent many years developing it into a beautiful project with the temple complex, living facilities for spiritual practitioners,
bio-farm, apple gardens and a herd of cows.
This project, Sri Vrindavan Dham, is famous for hosting many festvals of the Holy Name that attract guests from all over Central Asia, Russia, Ukrainia and other countries. In the middle 2000s the peaceful development turned into the fight for human rights as the Government decided to take away the land owned by the community. BB Govinda Swami struggled hard to protect the rights of people to practice pure and healthy life-style on their own land.
Although he never stopped his world-wide preaching tours, BB Govinda Swami has greatly increased his travelling activities after 2005. He is well-known for his music presentations of mantra-meditation, which he does in many attractive ways. Traditional Bengali kirtan style is combined with the original jazz tunes and the sounds of saxophone, flute, guitar and violin. Recently he has performed a number of times with the symphony orchestra.

Chanting the names of God is his life and soul, as well as taking care of devotees, spiritual practitioners, and giving the taste for self-realization to other people.
Web site: http://govindaswami.com

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