To all the Bhaktas, who are fierce enough to choose the beautiful but challenging journey of surrendering into the all-consuming fire of unconditional love – you hold my deep respect. I admire you!
Awakening through love
Can you imagine loving so hard that it transforms your whole being? To the point of transcending into everlasting oneness with God, the source herself?
Sounds dramatic, I know and it certainly is. But it’s also the most beautiful concept of enlightenment I’ve ever heard about. This path means entering the doors of heaven through feeling. It is poetic, intense & romantic. It’s adventurous. This is Bhakti Yoga.
Since Yoga in the west is mostly seen for its physical exercise, which is part of traditional Hatha Yoga, Bhakti Yoga is not much talked about. Unfortunately. Because as humans, we are experiencing a time in which feminine energy is waking up to help humanity in raising its vibration and evolving to the next level of consciousness. As Bhakti Yoga holds many of the feminine qualities, it can also be seen as the feminine counterpart to the intellectually driven, therefore masculine path of Hatha Yoga.
Who knows true love
Even though all human beings seem to strive towards finding love, only the fewest have experienced it fully and therefore know what love really is or what it feels like to truly love. When taking an honest look at ourselves we’ll soon discover that what we consider to be love is merely an ego-driven desire to BE loved by another.
That’s because in an unawakened state, everything we see, we perceive through the diluting lens of our ego. The ego is always focused on what it wants to get out of a situation. We can love, BUT ONLY if we are at least equally loved in return. AND ONLY if the other person’s love belongs exclusively to us. AND ONLY if they are willing to form a relationship with us which fits our future vision. If we want kids, they have to want kids too. Before we decide to let go of the feeling of loving someone, they have to fit our narrative. Have you ever noticed that as soon as you meet someone that you’re interested in, your ego starts calculating, trying to find out all the possibilities of how that person will fit into your personal future vision?
There are so many conditions we place on love. So many boundaries and restrictions, how could we even see it, if it was right in front of us?
The one thing all masters have agreed upon through the centuries is that love is the highest truth, in fact, the only truth there is! And consequently, the more love we are experiencing the closer our experience will be to the ultimate reality. In other words, the more we focus on being in a state of love, the more likely we will start seeing through the illusion. We’ll awaken through the experience of love. That’s the sweet promise of Bhakti Yoga.
Surrender, taking the spiritual highway
Bhakti might be the simplest in nature, but also the most challenging in practice. Devotion is described as being the quickest way to self-realization, yet the most difficult to realize. But what is the difference between devotion and love? And what makes this path so difficult to follow?
Devotion is the consequence of fully surrendering to the feeling of love. Surrender in this context means surrendering your ego. When you open up to love, against all fear of hurt, your love will become devotion. You’ll become selfless, willing to do anything for the person you love.
True love means ego death and the ego happens to be THE most difficult illusion to overcome for spiritual seekers. When taking the path of knowledge, the ego is the very last thing to overcome, the end boss so to say. Layer after layer, you’ll uncover the nature of reality until the very last realization hits, that there is no separate self, that everything is one and the ego therefore an illusion, nothing more than a story we’re telling ourselves.
In meditation, surrender is the consequence of understanding and the result is an overwhelming feeling of love.
Not so in Bhakti yoga, where, before you’ll get ANYTHING, your ego has to go.
The planet is in desperate need of love!
Ego is our protection shield.. our survival guard. It’s not like it is completely useless. It’s there for a reason. Only that in our very special moment of evolution, we need to overcome the survival mode of everyone fighting for themselves and evolve into living in harmony again. We need to remember that as humans we are a whole, we need to remember our inherent oneness and start working together again. Our selfish ways are not only hurting the planet but ourselves too. We must face the fact that everyone fighting for their own interest brought nothing but destruction and pain and it won’t bring anything more than that if we’ll go on like this.
What would a world look like, where people just unconditionally loved each other?
So in the end, only one question remains:
WHAT WOULD LOVE DO NOW?
Namasté everyone 🙂
