I recently finished a 6 week Devotional program, Bhairavi Sadhana from the Isha Institute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5pdZHozhts)(https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en/yoga-meditation/additional-programs/bhairavi-sadhana). I wrote about it previously. But now that it’s over what conclusions and lessons have I drawn from it?
LOVE
This lesson emerged early in the program and only became stronger. Universal Love is the driving force leading to the evolution and progression of the human being’s experience. By aligning ourselves with that love we find ourselves aligned with the natural movement of things, with the Tao that Lao Tzu wrote of so eloquently. It becomes crystal clear that this is the way that we should be, that unhappiness and conflict arise from within, from inappropriate reactions to the outside world around us.
DEVI / SOURCE / SPIRIT / THE BEYOND / GOD
Sometimes my ego re-asserts itself to remind me that I spent decades defining myself as a person who doesn’t believe in gods or spirituality. A person who finds success by understanding and working within the framework of the physical, intellectual, and scientific worlds governed by logic and rationality. But all of that takes place on a small playing field, and the world of human experience is so much larger.
Through the daily meditations comes experience and a direct knowledge that’s not based on faith, hope, imagination, trust in another person, or logic. It’s a knowledge that arises directly out of the practice, as obvious as the ground you’re standing on. Or more appropriately, it’s as obvious as the air you breathe.
There is something beyond our small bodies, our small minds, our small understanding, beyond our science and technology. It is something more real than any of that. People give it so many names. In this program we focused on Devi, the manifestation of the divine feminine in ancient Indian lore.
Is Devi real? Is Devi God? If I pray to Devi will she help me? These are the wrong questions. Don’t try to bring Devi from her place into your arena of logic and science. She doesn’t live there.
Oh, but she does live, everywhere and nowhere and in each of us and not in our bodies and in every atom in the universe and mostly beyond that.
SADHANA / DILLIGENCE
Wikipedia tells me that sadhana means “methodical discipline, daily spiritual practice to attain desired knowledge or goal”. I’ve been doing daily sadhana for a few years, but this program ramped it up to another level of intensity.
As the program progressed there was a clear and consistent elevation in my energy levels and the intensity of meditation. This manifested as physical sensations of warmth and bliss, as an unwavering consistency in doing the prescribed practices and eating the right foods, in a total lack of worry or care about what anybody else said or thought about what I did, what I wore, what I ate.
It’s so much like exercise. A moderate consistent exercise routine is fantastic and very effective at improving your function and health. Perhaps you’ve had that experience, it’s very attainable for people in reasonably good health. But have you ever thrown yourself 100% into an intense exercise program? Let it become the singular focus of your life, the thing that’s most important every day? Has exercise become something that you could not skip for even one day?
I’ve done that with exercise, spending several years pursuing Ironman triathlon. 3 hour daily workouts, twice as long on the weekends, diets reaching up to 8000 calories, reaching the limits of physical exhaustion. Intense or eccentric were the kindest descriptions friends and family had for my behavior. I quit the best job I’d ever had, what I had spent my career working toward, just to have time to train. “Crazy” was the normal reaction. But they just didn’t know what the experience was like from my point of view. The intensity of exercise proved what I was capable of and expanded my boundaries. My physical capabilities reached their peak. Every physical action, except for the workout sessions, was easy and effortless.
Spiritual sadhana is like that also. A little bit works, more is better. If you devote your entire life to sadhana you can reach states unimaginable to most people who aren’t on the path. I feel so impossibly fortunate to have had just the tiniest taste of that, though it’s difficult to maintain while conducting a life in the ego-based world.