Every Hindu temple has a bell.
It’s almost always the first thing you encounter – a small ritual before the rituals begin. A rope, a ring, a sound. For years, I did it without thinking. A polite, almost mechanical motion before stepping into the main hall. But over time, that bell has come to mean something much deeper to me – something that has stayed with me well beyond the temple walls.
I didn’t arrive at this insight all at once. There was no grand epiphany, no single striking visit. It’s a lesson that built itself slowly, gently, insistently – through hundreds of visits, fleeting conversations, moments of stillness, and quiet repetition. The bell became a teacher I hadn’t realized I was studying under. And now, I can’t hear its sound without thinking about what it’s trying to tell me.
It’s easy to see the bell as a formality, a signal that you’ve arrived. But that’s not quite it. It’s not about your presence in the temple. It’s about your presence in the moment. It’s not announcing you to the deity – it’s announcing you to yourself.
I’ve come to think of it as an invitation. Not to pray, but to pause. Not to perform, but to prepare. Not to cross a threshold physically, but mentally. The bell marks that precise shift from noise to quiet, from outside to inside, from distraction to devotion. And the more I noticed it, the more I began to ask – why don’t we have more bells in our lives?
The world doesn’t lack sound.
If anything, we’re surrounded by too much of it – alerts, updates, buzzes, chatter. But the temple bell isn’t just sound. It’s signal. It’s the intentional act of choosing to be present. It doesn’t interrupt – it centers. It doesn’t demand attention—it returns it to where it belongs.
For me, the bell has become a framework – one I’ve started carrying with me into boardrooms, conversations, classrooms, and quiet moments with myself. The reminder that before we begin anything meaningful, we must first arrive.
Not physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Spiritually. Fully.
There have been countless moments when I’ve stepped into meetings distracted, or into family time with half a mind on something else. I’ve said yes when I wasn’t ready, nodded when I wasn’t listening, shown up without showing up. The bell reminds me that presence is not passive – it’s an act of discipline. It’s a decision to quiet the noise, to bring your full self into the space, and to treat what you’re about to do as something that matters.
The beauty of the bell is that its work doesn’t end with the sound. In fact, the real lesson often begins in the silence that follows. That lingering stillness, that echo that slowly fades into the temple’s breath – it’s in that space that something shifts. It’s there, in the after-ring, that clarity often arrives. Not because you were searching for it, but because you finally made space for it.
Leadership, too, benefits from the bell. So does teaching, mentoring, parenting, creating. The best work we do, whether with others or within ourselves, comes not from speed, but from clarity. Not from constant action, but from grounded intention. I’ve learned that without pausing first, without setting a tone, without marking a moment as different from the rest, everything risks blending into noise.
The bell brings ceremony to transition.
It tells you this is not just another task, not just another conversation, not just another moment. This matters. So bring yourself. Completely.
Over the years, I’ve seen how easy it is to slip into autopilot. To approach work as a checklist, relationships as routines, life as a loop. But the bell reminds me that we can always interrupt that. That we can step out of the blur and re-enter with clarity. That we can choose to be here. Now.
And in that way, the bell offers a form of integrity. It aligns who you are with what you are doing. It asks: are you here for the right reasons? Are you bringing the energy this moment deserves? Are you paying attention – not just to what you’re doing, but to how you’re doing it?
It’s not about reverence for the bell itself – it’s about reverence for the moment it creates. And if we’re willing, we can create that moment anywhere. You don’t need a temple. You don’t need the sound. What you need is the habit. The habit of pausing. Of breathing. Of arriving.
I don’t think I’ll ever ring that bell without conscious thought. What started as a ritual has become a mindset. A philosophy. A checkpoint. And more than anything, a reminder. Because when life gets fast – and it always does – I now know there’s a part of me that knows how to slow it down. That knows how to mark the shift. That knows how to listen.
The temple bell speaks to what we often forget: that presence is a practice, and life deserves our full attention.