Om Swami is an Indian spiritual leader and best-selling author. He is best known for his work in the fields of spirituality and meditation. He is the founder of the popular meditation app Black Lotus App. Additionally, he has a writing portal called “os.me” where he shares his knowledge through blogging. In his book A Million Thoughts, Swami shares his personal meditation experiences and insights accumulated over an impressive duration of over 15,000 hours.
Wiki/Biography
Om Swami was born Amit Sharma on Friday, November 30, 1979, in Punjab, India (age 43; as of 2022). He later moved to Australia and obtained a Bachelor of Commerce from Western Sydney University. In 2002, he studied for an MBA degree at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Om Swami Childhood Photos
appearance
Height (approximately): 5′8″
Hair color: Bald
Eye color: black
family
He was born into a middle-class Brahmin family.
Parents and siblings
There is not much information about his parents. He has a sister and a brother named Rajan Sharma.
An old family photo of Om Swami
wife and children
He is unmarried.
Profession
Business
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2000, Om Swami founded a software company in Australia with his brother Rajan Sharma and a friend named David. Over the next six years, his business expanded to five countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and India. His IT company brought him huge wealth, making him a millionaire at the age of 25. In 2007, he moved back to India, where he acquired a healthcare company. However, he left the company in 2010 and decided to follow a spiritual path.
Renunciation and the spiritual journey
On March 15, 2010, Swami made a conscious decision to give up his material possessions and embark on a spiritual journey. He first went to Kashgar and received initiation into the monastic life from a Naga saint in a small village about eighty kilometers away from Varanasi. He stayed there for four and a half months before traveling to the Himalayas, where he spent the next thirteen months in complete isolation and devoted himself to deep meditation. During this intense period, Swami meditated for up to 22 hours a day, which included 10 consecutive hours of stretching. In 2011, he established an ashram called “Sri Badrika Ashram” in Oochghat district of Salamun in Himachal Pradesh.
Om Swami in his ashram
publication
His first book, If the Truth Be Told: A Monk’s Memoirs, was published by HarperCollins in December 2014. According to Financial Express (India), the book ranks sixth among the top ten non-fiction books in the country.
Cover of the book “Telling the Truth: Memoirs of a Monk”
His novel “The Last Strategy” was translated into French as “La vie est un jeu d’échecs”. This French translation won the 2019 French Cronos Literary Prize. Some of his other notable books include A Handful of Love: Wisdom and Humor from the Monk’s Bowl (2015), Kundalini: An Untold Story (2016), The Ancient Science of Mantras (2017) , “Hidden Secrets”, “The Power of Gayatri Mantra” (2019) and “Life’s Big Questions” (2020).
Facts/Trivia
- Om Swami was inclined towards spirituality from his childhood. He began reading Vedic and astrological texts at the age of seven, and by his teenage years he became a professional astrologer.
- While in school, he worked as a part-time editor for a business weekly. However, he later quit the job and decided to further his studies in Australia.
- He revealed in an interview that he once provided employees with double wages compared to other companies. Speaking about this in an interview, he said:
If the market price is $75,000, I would give them $1,50,000. Never in my career have I asked any team member to fill out a timesheet or come to work at a specific time. A bond of mutual trust and understanding is enough. “
- After he concluded thirteen months of intense meditation, many researchers and scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology studied the effects of his rigorous spiritual practice (tapasya), and their findings were published in a 2019 research paper.
- He is not active on any social media except YouTube. In 2013, he created his own YouTube channel called ‘Om Swami’ where he posts spiritual videos. As of 2023, his YouTube channel has more than 258,000 subscribers.
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education