Loyalty; The Beauty of Bhakti Yoga

Divinity arrives in many forms.

It arrives in forms of love, protection, self-knowing, sensation, exploration. It arrives in forms of learning from our mistakes and growing into more fulfilled versions of ourselves because of them. It arrives in the forms of birthing creativity and finding presence with simplicity, with the mundane. It arrives in honouring the existence of life itself.

It arrives in darkness, in the moments where we cry so deeply from our wounds over battles that have long been lost, leaving scars in our hearts that feel irreconcilable with anything other than forgiveness for ourselves, and compassion for ourselves, too. It arrives in passing through the shadows and realizing that the softness we carry within brings us back into light, resurrected and whole again.

It arrives honouring that we were whole the entire time, even when it hurt and we lost ourselves.

I have been deeply nurturing wounds. Nurturing, tending to, living in them. Living in wounds that are so powerful they often feel like they might overtake my whole being and leave me crumbling into oblivion.

I have been living deeply with these wounds, and honouring the fears that are arising from them; the fear of being alone, the fear of never falling in love again, the fear of never knowing the fullness of my own light as a human being. The fear of never having children. The fear of living a life I cannot bear to live, in a culture I cannot assimilate to - though I can adapt - the fear of losing everything important and meaningful to my soul.

And I have been continuing, every day, regardless of these deepest sensations.

It is hard when your heart is broken to ever really feel like you've said enough, or like you've expressed your soul completely enough. It's hard when you are living in these same pains, unsaid words, confusions, discomforts, anxieties and this hopelessness, every day, over and over again.

Though these aches are also signs of a love that lived deep and true, for the moments it endured.

When we fall in love, we mean so many things. These words encompass so many feelings for us as people, our experiences are so varied and diverse, it's almost impossible to recognize that each one of them is a different form of the same sentiment.

When I reflect on loves of my past, I see so many incredible moments, so many beautiful hearts. And so many tapestries of connection. I see and feel such an array of things, including gratitude and humbleness, sometimes overwhelm, often tenderness and sadness, often still love. And I feel myself, within all of this light. And my truth, too.

Bhakti, in Sanskrit meaning Devotion, is such a powerful force. It is a potency of faithfulness and heart-centred trust that can only be known through the most pure energies. Devotion, total devotion, is a kind of love that ripens over time, untouched, until the moment of absolute perfection plucks it tenderly from the tree and tastes it with such conscious softness, such presence and awareness, the whole of the universe humbly sighs in awe at this blessing of an experience she witnesses unto herself.

Love, and loyalty, are such things.

And there is also the Bhakti to the self that creates this same potency and power within.

In my own experiences of love and sexuality, I have come to know almost every aspect there is to know. I have known the splendour of an array of lovers, the coexistence of deep love for multiple people simultaneously, and the sweetness, the aching and yearning of love for just one perfect set of arms to call home. I have known orgies and I have known monogamy. And I have also known myself, though there is a part of me that grows in this current stage that is new and welcomed.

Right now, riding the waves of two intensely painful heartbreaks, I am finding myself desiring to reorient my desire back within my self again. And perhaps this was something I should have taken the time to pursue between these two experiences, but the light of the heart calls stronger than the will of the mind. Though, it is unfortunate, it is also a disguised blessing to be here and present with myself. Now, during this time of planetary confusion, to have the space to simply be, remembering what in me is valuable, and what in me is real, truthful, honest, aside from the perceptions and desires of others.

As a highly energetically sensitive, telepathic empath I find myself often carried out of my own soul and into the vibrations of the eddies and flows of others, sometimes thinking they are my own until I realize the tension in my being is unmet with compassion and I have found myself, once again, involved with a contract that was not mine to fill. And in this moment of self-knowing, this ever-lasting moment of it (for what moment isn't this), I am gifted the opportunity to find my centre again. To not be lost. To feel the pain and live through it, cleansed by the fire and the tears until I am recognizable again.

The story of my soul is written in my skin, including the faults and errors in judgement. The deepest desires, the subconscious elation, the heart frequency that gives the most life. And in Bhakti, in total surrender to Devotion to my own light, I have discovered that which I have known for a while; for me, Divine Love is an act for the Soul Mate, and no one else.

This mystery apprehends my heart, and reminds me of the true purpose of enlightenment; to gain bliss within the experience of all things, and to know which things are the things by which to gain bliss. A beautifully paradoxical method of reconciling the nature of the world with the self. The wonderful trickery of this path is that it is only in knowing your own light, may the light of the Divine Partner be revealed. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras explain that in stillness, the soul family arises. The Dharma unfolds with the patterns of the Kundalini, lotuses and flowers blooming in our energy like those on plants when the sun and nourishing soil are just right.

The searching stops the finding.

It is only in surrendering to the divinity of the self that one sees and recognizes where the True Love is. And it is only in this that the True Love finds you.

Bhakti to the self is a righteous act of worship of the whole Cosmos. It is the act of recognizing the deepest reflections of the inner and outer path, of the accumulation of the internal fire and nectar for the potency of grand self-knowing. This self-knowing is the ease of movement intuitively, into the realms that bring blissful freedom and effortless experience.

The transcendence of all suffering occurs in, first, the releasing of all attachment to form and expectation. And two, in honouring that the egoic desires are not that of the true soul's path; what the ego wishes versus what is the right movement of light, are always two different things until they aren't. And this takes the remembering of what it is in childhood that brings us back into our purity.

Bhakti to the self is the allowing for one's own ripening, while also moving in the direction of returning to the primordial state of being. Two seemingly opposing directions, reuniting and meeting in the middle with absolute congruency, somewhere in the ambiguous nature of space-time. When we can feel with our hands as easily as we can feel with our hearts, and vice versa, the stories told by our experiences become something of a miracle; we touch the universe from the place of supreme knowing, and we begin to only touch what, by our love, turns to gold.

Any goal, if we should ever have any, is to retain our childhood purity as we ripen within this experience of the world; any goal, if we should have any, is to return to our most simple and beautiful essence, to release all we carry that blinds us to our most natural inclinations and to rediscover the pleasure of simple understanding.

The human heart is like a crystal, formed slowly with the earth, and is as pure.

Our awakening of this memory brings us back into harmony with all that is, and shows us the truth of all that ever will be.

There is only love.