Tag: bhakti

Here are five steps to an amazing life. At every step, your life will get noticeably better. Put together, you’ll be experiencing perfection. This is not something made up, but the cumulative wisdom of thousands of years of the yoga tradition, now confirmed by modern science.

Step#1: Self-observation

The first step is to look inside. Before you can make any changes to how you’re living and what your mind is doing, you have to become a witness to your own self. What are you thinking, what’s your focus, what are you feeling? Track your mind’s movements and get in touch with not only your emotions but what’s behind them. Keep track of your motivations and desires and see what their outcomes are.

Take time to examine your consciousness. Silence is key for this. Focus not on external things or your endless to-do list, but just on yourself. Get to know yourself deeply.

Step#2: Self-responsibility

Once you’re looking inside, now you can start taking control of what’s going on. This is when you take the helm and direct your life to where you want it. You assume FULL responsibility for your well-being. No more victimhood. You put aside any idea that your happiness depends on anything or anyone else. You and you alone call the shots when it comes to how you’re feeling and the quality of your life.

You can read more about this in my earlier blog on the topic.

Step#3: Mindfulness

Now that you’re trying to command your mind, the first thing you need to do is to bring it to the here and now, which is a basic definition of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the portal for all higher states of consciousness. Being in the here and now is the solution to just about every form of suffering you impose on yourself.

As your mind drifts to the past, you experience melancholy and lamentation. When your mind jumps to the future, in the false hopes of future happiness, you experience anxiety, fear, and frustration. True joy begins in the now.

You can read more about this in my earlier blog on the topic.

Step#4: Dharma

Being in the here and now allows you to bring your full attention to your task at hand. This raises a key question: what should I do? This is where the concept of dharma comes in.

Dharma means your duty and essence. What’s the best you can do right now? What’s the purest expression of the best of you at this very moment?

Dharma means prioritizing your true nature and learning to balance out your different demands and responsibilities properly. It’s about being guided by values, not external goals. It’s about living your purpose.

This is one of the key components of The 3T Path. This video will help you understand the concept a little better.

Step#5: Bhakti

Lastly, and most importantly, you need transcendence. You need love. Bhakti means transcendental love and devotion. Once you’re in the here and now, living the best of you, now you can make that your spiritual practice, by connecting it all in love of God. Love is the highest expression of the soul. You know this because you’ve experienced how love makes feel great.

But love requires an object. You have to love someone. And you can only love someone to the extent they are “loveable”. That’s why, though we can all agree that love is the highest state of mind, we end up not experiencing it enough. Not many people are so loveable.

Even if you don’t understand or accept the concept of God, at least you can see the logic here. God is defined as infinitely loveable. As such, you can love Him and Her infinitely, which naturally gives you access to an infinitely high state of consciousness and bliss. As an added bonus, God, being transcendent, is always with you, so you can experience this loving connection anywhere, at any time.

Conclusion

So, there you have it: 5 steps to an amazing life. The first four will make your life flow with grace and enthusiasm. The last will take you beyond the constraints of material life, to an ocean of bliss.

In the book, The 3T Path (https://3tpath.com/books/) you can see in detail all these points, the techniques necessary to make them happen and how this can transform your life.

Watch my video on this topic here.

Look what they’re saying about The 3T Path book: “A life-saver!” – Ivan Llobet

 

There are two things that really matter in life, which deserve your focus, because they’ll bring you the best of what life has to offer. I’m talking about dharma and bhakti. Understand what they are, and why they are important.

Dharma is a rich concept, and the word has many meanings, but my focus will be on dharma as that which needs to be done – essence and duty. Duty can be imposed; essence cannot. Dharma is thus that duty born of who you truly are, of your nature. It’s not an external or social imposition. It’s what you need to do at any given moment to be the best person you can be. It’s doing the right thing at the right time. Being dharmic is more than just doing good or avoiding hurtful or violent behavior, though that is certainly included in the concept, and it can’t be boiled down to a list of don’ts or things to be avoided. Dharma is fluid and alive and sensitive to different aspects of your life. Major changes to your dharma can occur from one second to the next. One way to understand dharma is to rephrase the classic line: “Don’t ask what the world can do for you, but ask what you can do for the world.”

There is immediate satisfaction in doing your dharma, because it means living your essence. When our actions are aligned with our dharma, we’re living life in its full potential, and this brings a deep sense of satisfaction. The passage of time in a life lived in dharma brings an unshakable sense of satisfaction, a profound feeling of having lived our purpose and of having done our best.

The final objective in yoga is love of God, divine love. Love is the purest and highest expression of the eternal individual self, the soul. And to love God the perfection of the ability to love. Yoga means “connection” and nothing creates a stronger and more beautiful connection than love. Connecting with God in love is called bhakti-yoga, or just bhakti. It’s not surprising that Krishna says in the Bhagavad-gita that, of all kinds of yogis, those who connect to Him in bhakti are the highest. Chapter after chapter, Krishna emphasizes that bhakti is the topmost and essential ingredient to achieve spiritual perfection, and that without it, it’s simply not possible to do so. The sage Patanjali also describes in the Yoga Sutras that “the perfection of the perfection of yoga” is achieved by “iswara pranidhana”, which means dedicating oneself to God.

Bhakti is love and to love is to live life to its perfection, for nothing is better than love. Life is the symptom of the soul and the perfection of the soul is to love. Loving God, the infinitely lovable, means to achieve the supreme perfection of existence. It’s the flux of life at its highest.

Thus, dharma and bhakti are what really matter in life. These two bring profound feelings of satisfaction and joy as we live them and accumulate over time to give a supreme sense of well-being.  Everything else comes and goes, but these two provide long-lasting effects.

Sensory, superficial pleasures don’t last at all. That nice dinner you had, that cool movie, fun holiday, buying a new car, getting a promotion at work… none of these last. We can hardly remember them. Their pleasurable effects are ephemeral, and all too quickly fade away. To live life chasing these fleeting sensations of happiness which are gone in the blink of an eye is like trying fill a sieve with fine sand.

And, from the more esoteric aspect of revealed knowledge found in the sacred texts of yoga, we find that it’s precisely bhakti and dharma that we take with us beyond the grave. Bhakti is never lost, Krishna explains in the Bhagavad-gita, and dharma determines your next incarnation, if you haven’t yet practiced bhakti enough to become liberated from the cycle of birth and death.

So, be wise, and experience for yourself how good it is to invest in dharma and bhakti, at every moment of the day. In my new book, “The 3T Path – Self-improvement and Self-realization in Yoga”, I explain in detail the concepts of dharma and bhakti and how you can put them in practice in your life. You can find the book here: https://3tpath.com/books/.

Check out my video about this topic here.

Check out what they are saying about my new book: “I absolutely enjoyed this book by Giridhari Das. Enlightenment and Transformation: a good read!” – Jengel