Bhakti Yoga: Keep Practicing Until Your Knee-jerk Reaction is LOVE
What is the practical end result of sustained sound-based yoga?
Sustained, embodied LOVE.
The great masters have always said that there is nothing wrong with the world. The only problem is with our perception. When we are pure, we see everything and everyone as pure.
That state is not far-fetched, it’s tantalizingly close!
I could beat around the bush, but in truth, the methods of sound-based yoga as we teach them in the Heart of Sound training bring us swiftly to the empowerment of that choice. And that is the real reason we developed the training.
We want you to live in love.
With consistent practice, we discover with delight that the underlying mind-state becomes harmonized and even our knee-jerk reactions to crazy-bad situations are suffused with love!
You may be thinking, “I’ve been chanting for 20 years, why am I not ‘there’ already?”
If you’re already on the sound path, you probably know that there are some common obstacles to full integration:
1. Dull, rote chanting without full feeling.
2. Regular discrepancies between thoughts and words and actions.
3. Mechanical hindrances to experiencing the full resonance, such as postural tension.
4. Mushy pronunciation that misses the special nerve centers that Sanskrit was designed to activate. (It’s impossible to fully feel the full potential of the bliss of chanting if you’re not hitting the right spot. You can imagine it and aspire to it, but when the mechanics are just right, the full sensory bliss experience takes care of itself.)
5. More “doing” than deep listening and presence.
6. And if you think about it, you can probably name many more obstacles!
When we pay close attention to these and other subtle (and not-so-subtle) obstacles, we can refine our practice and our natural essence shines through more easily.
Then, we can truly be of service to our communities!
We can shine like a person in love (with love itself, not just a temporary person/place/thing)!
With LOVE,
Anandra
