In her book, Pranada Comtois, devoted practitioner and teacher of the bhakti yoga tradition, takes her reader on an educational and self-reflective journey through the subtleties of bhakti yoga philosophy and practice.
Tamil Kṛṣṇa bhakti is not a path of disembodied spiritual union; it is an imaginative, holistic, and embodied bhakti.
There’s a certain kind of magic in deity yoga, where we develop an intimate relationship with the deity, the object of our adoration. Pūjā is the procedure of developing this deep and sweet intimacy.
A mūrti is not an idol. It’s a living “vessel” of manifestation, incarnation, and personification. It follows the same logic that if you want to drink water, you require a glass.
Smaraṇa directly translates as “remembrance.” For many schools of bhakti, especially those informed by literature like Bhagavad-Gītā and Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, (or the “Bhāgavat School”) remembering the Godhead at the time of death is the ultimate fruit of a successful human life.
To understand the word tarka or its importance, we must first retrace our steps to find the fundamental problem that we are trying to address through spiritual practice.
Within Hinduism, a traditional teaching regarding the bewildering diversity of divine forms is that the formless Supreme Being adopts many different guises as an act of compassion.
Devotion is the fuel for sādhana (spiritual practice), the sweet longing that inspires sitting for meditation, for ritual, for learning and teaching.