Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #6 – Love Makes the World Go Round and Śrī Caitanya’s Practice of Bhakti Yoga
Dhanurdhara Swami February 3rd, 2025
Years back, when I was giving seminars at yoga studios, I was always looking for a relatable definition of bhakti for my audience. One day I unexpectedly found one. I was walking through the flower gardens of Vrindavan when I came upon a calf being born. I watched as the calf immediately went to drink milk from the mother’s udder, and the mother began to lick its calf passionately in return. The calf didn’t have the capacity to analyze her situation, thinking “this is an udder, and it provides my sustenance. It is from a cow, my mother!” Still the calf, due to their natural relationship, spontaneously identified with and reacted to the cow as its mother.
Observing this, I had an epiphany—this spontaneous exchange between the calf and cow is a perfect template for love in general which is the spontaneous energy flowing between two people with a natural relationship. It also offers a perfect analogy for the natural energy of bhakti that flows between the soul and God. More important for me, it was the relatable definition of bhakti I was looking for: bhakti is the instinctive energy of love that naturally flows in the relationship between the soul and God.
This also gave me insight into the spiritual practice Śrī Caitanya performed to attain His goal—to experience the devotion of Śrī Radha, His best devotee, at the height of Her love. In the mood of His own devotee, He drew out this natural energy of affection between Himself and God by focusing on the Supreme Lord in the form of His holy name and He also recommended that same practice to all of us to awaken our true self. But there is more.
He also was day and night tasting the verses and songs of the person whose name He was chanting and He daily worshiped Lord Jagannath, the form of the person whose name He was chanting. By doing this, His sambandha or relationship with the holy name, and consequently his absorption in the holy name, deepened. And this increased the intensity of the flow of love between Himself and God to the level of prema, perfect love for God.
As soon as I saw the spontaneous and intense exchange of love between the calf and cow, I immediately understood that I had a powerful way to explain to relatively new practitioners what bhakti is and why chanting God’s names is such an effective method to awaken love of God in our hearts. It worked! What could be a more relatable concept of reality and our relationship with reality (God) than the concept that there is an energy of pure love that helps define the ultimate reality, and that our participation in that exchange of pure love is the goal of life. So yes, “love makes the world go round!”
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