I like to think that slight discomfort of the human condition comes from the fact that we are living in multiple realities at once, and that these realities don’t harmonise with one another. The realities I am talking about is the physical reality, the mental reality and the emotional reality - three quarrelling sisters that just cant seem to agree on what the world is. There are certainly more realities, but hold your New Age horses as we deal with these most everyday ones for now.

I think everyone with a human heart can relate to the predicament: We may know something is like this, but think otherwise about it, and then feel yet completely differently about it. Like rusty gears slightly out of position, our reality-creating machinery creates a grinding - an un-smoothness in the way we approach life. We could call it ambiguity, or even outright confusion - the kind that tend to create all kinds of troublesome outcomes, as the grinding triggers us into deluded lines of action. And so we honker down our crooked paths.

The recognition I carry from being immersed in ways of understanding the human condition for 13 years is this: of the realities we inhabit, the emotional reality is the most influential one for how we approach the world. Odd, as you would think that in a humanity enchanted by the spell of materialism would give the physical reality the upper hand. But, from glimpsing the cover of our daily press, or scrolling the desolate feeds of the encroaching virtual reality (yet another reality to negotiate) - the realisation is this: the world _is_ by and large what we feel about it. And what we are seeing played out, is what most people involved in soul work have been forced to acknowledge: the emotional reality will run you ragged when left unchecked.

 
The Yogic sciences, known more precisely as Sanatana Dharma - “The Eternal Way”, offer tools to re-align the nuts and bolts of our being. And for our feelings, these ambiguous emissaries of soulful wisdom, the practice is called Bhakti Yoga - the yoga of devotion. The aim: feeling our way towards a new emotional reality.

The Yogis and Yoginis of old understood that to yoke a coherent world, where all gears interlace like greased swan feathers on a quiet lake at dawn, it had to be done on the premise of our emotional nature. There is just too much Shakti locked up in there to chart a course around it. And because any attempt to control our emotions in reality is repression in disguise, the imperative for this form of yoga would be to find a way welcome the whole royal family emotions into the arena. King neurosis with the Queen of anxiety. The prince and princess of shame and guilt, along the kings old mother - depression and the ghost of her deceased husband - king psychosis. These gloomy eyed beings, who in the daylight stand gagged in the corners as your ornamented personality flashes its synthetic smiles, but who at night drift closer, whispering spells of paranoia into your ears, or even pierce your drowsy dreaming with their repressed howls. These beings who strangely enough have received the God-given mandate to crush your state of being under their nervous feet as they stumble through the darkness, blinded by having no particular function assigned to them other then: shut up and be nice.

Bhakti Yoga offers a different kind of orientation all together - one which gives full allowance for emotional rawness, but also one where the practice is able to funnel the energy - Shakti - in the direction of our true becoming. The foundation is the eloquent offering of a different world view - not one built on the notion of separateness, but on deep interconnectedness of all things.

The mandate of this precious devotional practice is simple: all is welcome here. Pearly tears on the cheek. Grey faces heavy with distress. The wildness of shameless laughter. Sadness of the soul and bottomless grief. The rare ripple of ecstacy. These are immense forces within us, and in the process of freeing our selves, their unshackling is not mundane. As the emotions that once was lodged deep in the cave of unconsciousness reaches the mouth as sound what was once poison alchemizes in an instant to nurturance - priced lubrication for our rusty gears. And over time, these are the juices that through practice distill to the highest of them all: Love without condition.

I am not suggesting the Bhakti path is easy, nor comfortable. The awakening of the devotional heart is a real “strap-on-your-hero-shoes”-moment. For it is not a practice designed to make you feel better. But, it will make you better at feeling. And, you will need it, for  by Gods will they come running to the altar of your allowance: all which has been held down - perhaps even for generations. But, slowly slowly, as the sailor clings to the final board of wood from his shipwrecked purpose, the raft of devotion that will carry us on across this the ocean of emotion will spawn from the frothing swirls. Its function: the unbendable willingness to lean into our lives, in realisation of the perfect imperfections of what it means to be human. In recognition of the grand scheme of things playing out between two human hands. To have our voice be a mortar and our emotions a pestle, so we may crush the blockages into the finest flour - worthy of sacrificial bread.

For a humanity on the verge of disaster from emotional repression, I believe that this is where the work lies. It’s time to let loose.

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BHAKTI YOGA

The reclamation of a new emotional reality