The Power of Devotion can change Your Yoga

1. The Power of Devotion can change Your Yoga Practice and Life: Bhakti Yoga

2. The Power of Devotion can change Your Yoga Practice and Life: Bhakti Yoga
The Power of Devotion can change Your Yoga Practice and Life: Bhakti Yoga
Meaning of Bhakti
The term bhakti, derived from the root bhaj (to share), means ‘devotion, love’ and
bhakti –yoga is the ‘yoga of total dedication to the Divine’. Sandilya, the author of
the Bhakti –Sutra, defines bhakti as ‘supreme attachment to the Lord’. He considers
the attainment of ecstasy as secondary phenomenon. According to the Bhagavata –
Purana, Bhakti yoga is compounded of the following stages:
Types of Bhakti
(1) sravana – listening to the names of the Divine
(2) kirtana – chanting, praise songs in honour of God

3. The Power of Devotion can change Your Yoga Practice and Life: Bhakti Yoga
(3) smarana – meditation on God
(4) pada –sevana – ‘service at the feet’ of the Lord
(5) arcana – ‘ritual devotion’
(6) vandana –‘prostration’ before the image of the Lord
(7) dasya – ‘slavish devotion’ to God
(8) sakhya – ‘friendship’- the divine raises the humble devotee to the status of a
friend
(9) atma – nivedana – ‘self –offering’ through which the worshipper enters into the
immortal body of God.
The devotes feels a growing passion for God, and this helps him to break down one
barrier after another between the Divine and himself.

4. The Power of Devotion can change Your Yoga Practice and Life: Bhakti Yoga
This increasing love culminates in the vision of the cosmos penetrated and saturated
by the transcendent Reality. When the Divine and the devotee coalesce into the One,
this is the supreme love or para-bhakti. Narada, in his Sutra, distinguishes between a
primary and a secondary type of devotion. The latter is tinged by persona motives
and ulterior objectives. This can be of three different kinds again, according to the
predominance of one of three gunas (sattva, rajas or tamas). Primary devotion is
unselfish total surrender to God.
Bhakti is traditionally regarded as the easiest way to emancipation. Loving devotion
to the Lord bears fruit easily when it is constant and purposeless. Even Sankara, the
intransigent to liberation.
The true bhakta or devotee ‘sees nothing but love, hears only about love, and

5. The Power of Devotion can change Your Yoga Practice and Life: Bhakti Yoga
Bhakti yoga has been called a
dualistic doctrine par
excellence, but this is not true
for all schools of this yoga.
Though at the outset all
devotes are searching for ‘the
other’, yet the final goal of
some traditions is to merge so
completely with the Divine that
there is complete forgetfulness
of one’s own being: the Lord