As Acharya Shunya continues teaching Bhakti yoga, I keep thinking how my heart expands with divine joy with every teaching. Through these teachings, I am beginning to find an abode in my heart space. Easing myself into this safe and peaceful territory gives me so much contentment.
There is a beautiful term in Sanskrit called ‘hridayam’ which can be defined as our spiritual heart. Defining the heart beyond its physical functions and imagining it as the resting place for the soul is so soothing.
When I began studying Vedic wisdom years ago, I was too excited and intellectually over-stimulated because of finding this incredible wealth of knowledge. In this initial stage of exposure to Vedic wisdom, my intellect absorbed the knowledge with extreme vigor and energy. With an abiding enthusiasm, the knowledge permeated to every cell of my being.
However, as years went by, the intellectual understanding and accumulation of knowledge fell short of delivering the spiritual deepening I was waiting for. Actually, this accumulation of knowledge led to an unrealistic expectation that I should progress more in my spiritual path. When I sadly realized that I converted this amazing, priceless wisdom into an academic achievement task, I sat down and took a long, deep breath. This realization also coincided with an unfortunate phase in my life, where everything was falling apart on several fronts of my life.
Suddenly, I was standing in the middle of a battleground like Arjuna in Bhagavad Gita with no choice but to receive the teachings and implement them amidst this turmoil. I was forced to depart from my comfort zone, leave all that learning behind and decide what to do with what I have accumulated so far. This shift in my perspective was a joyful beginning of the second phase of my journey. In this second stage, the intellectual understanding of shastra was replaced with an emotional knowingness.
In this phase, my perception descended from my mind to my heart space. The timely teachings of Bhakti from Acharya Shunya strengthened my heart based understanding and brought it to a new level. The intellectual learning of the past several years unfolded into a firm emotional conviction. Now, these teachings not only appeal to my mind but deeply agree with my heart. I hear them once, grasp it intellectually and then let it dissipate and descend to my heart. It is as if I have been transformed into a strange creature who has receptors in the heart to make sense of the world. My senses which go out to the world and my mind that works incessantly to create the story of my life have truly calmed down.
As Bhakti continues to soften my heart, purify my emotions, this ‘hridayam’ becomes the breeding ground for an emotion based, moment to moment realization of the true nature of things. This soft spot of the heart receives the knowledge without if’s and but’s and the emotion beautifully blossoms into an unwavering conviction.
Even though I can see that a solely academic understanding of Atman and Brahman did not take me so far, I definitely needed all those years of listening and intellect based study to develop a faith and see that this knowledge actually helps us in so many practical ways.
Many years of hearing the shastra humbled me. My ego weakened and learned to occasionally take the back seat. I progressed from my knee jerk reactions to mindful, discerned and curated behaviors. Through ups and downs of life, instead of kicking, screaming, resenting, I retreated back and observed the happenings.
This relief from fear, anger and resentment of samsara was actually Bhakti in a nutshell. When constant argument with life faded away, a feeling of devotion to something deeper emerged. As a person who has never been religious or ritualistic, this was the most soothing feeling of all. That soft spot of Bhakti and surrender was where the religions previously have failed to provide me an answer.
After all this revelation in my heart space, I glided joyfully like a shooting star in the night sky. This letting of a free fall finally brought peace to my heart. The years of struggling, questioning and denial vanished in an instant.
As Acharya Shunya beautifully mentioned in her Bhakti teachings, the mind can forget but the heart always remembers. This gives me so much relief and an opportunity to let go of things because I do know that even though I may not reach Moksha in this lifetime, the wisdom is safely kept in my heart. When my mind forgets at death, the heart will remember…
Ozlem Tokman
Ozlem is an author of children’s books. She has lived and worked in Beijing, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul in the past twenty years of her life. She is currently living in Chengdu, China with her family.
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