She takes thousands of people, day after day, to her motherly lap, wiping their tears, giving them her wise and loving guidance, and offering solace. The people who come are from all walks of life, all socioeconomic strata and all religious backgrounds - the homeless and the wealthy; the professional and the day laborer; those who are sick or disabled and professional athletes; Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and people of no particular religion. Rare as it is to find a person full of unconditional love, it is rarer still to find one who expresses this love in the language natural to every human being: a mother's embrace. Amma receives each one as her very own child with equal love and vision. The story is often told, and has been captured on tape, of Amma receiving a leper with pus-infected wounds covering his body, of her compassionate embrace and kissing of a person whose stench caused others to faint.

How many people has Amma embraced? That's the question a scorekeeper asks, but not one Amma can answer, for she has never kept track. If there is a person nearby, Amma will embrace them. If there are hundreds, she will hug them all. If there are thousands, even tens of thousands, she will not leave until she has hugged all who seek her embrace. Not occasionally, but frequently, Amma embraces people from ten in the morning until four or five in the afternoon, without a break, and then returns three hours later to embrace others, one after another, for literally the rest of the night. It is not at all unusual for Amma to move from her chair only after the sun has risen the next morning. Twelve-, sixteen-, even twenty-hour "darshan" sessions (literally, "meeting") are not infrequent.

In India, where Amma receives her children both at home in her ashram and as she travels throughout the country, crowds sometimes fill stadiums. When this diminutive woman walks out onto the stage, turns towards the waiting crowd, raises her arms above her head to acknowledge the divinity in each person there, and then prostrates, touching her head to the floor in humility, offering herself to them all-your heart stops: will she really hug twenty, thirty, forty thousand people before she leaves? Yes. And she will listen to them, advise them, stroke their cheeks, wipe their tears, laugh with them.be the Mother to each one. How she can do this for each person in sometimes less than a few seconds (this is what such crowds necessitate) is inexplicable. But that it touches people is clear, for year after year they come back to taste again those few seconds. w In the West, the crowds are somewhat smaller; there might be only two or three thousand at a program. Amma could finish in a few hours and take some much-needed rest. But she does not, for thoughts of her own body's needs are far from her mind; she sees only the opportunity to spend more time with each of her children, and that is what she does. Instead of embracing at the grueling pace of one person each few seconds, she can more slowly and gently draw a whole family to her lap, rub the mother's back, playfully pull the ears of the father in mock scolding, lift their baby high and bring it close and bite its chin, laughing and playing. She mothers all of them. Instead of finishing by midnight or one in the morning, she fills the hours with all the love she can put into them, and once again is likely to leave the hall after sunrise.