My wish had been to love Shiva in every way I could, in every form. That led me to exploring bhāvas in a particular way. It has been a deeply meaningful and emotional journey for me, and I would do it all over again. Every bhāva is sweet and beautiful, my time spent understanding and cultivating each one was transformative in its own way. This is part of why I keep stressing the importance of having that clarity about your goals; where one starts can profoundly impact how one’s journey evolves. But I must stress now before I continue:
One does not need to experience every single bhāva to attain their goals.
There is no single correct path.
One can achieve moksha, or liberation, if they so choose, through just one bhāva. It is common and normal to spend all of a lifetime in just one bhāva, in fact. Speedrunning them in order to experience all of them is a tempting pitfall. I, like anyone else, want to share the benefits with you and what I enjoyed. So that is what I focus on in this series. For my journey, with my goals, this was an extremely important and vital experience. For me, exploring every single bhāva in as much depth as I could was necessary because of what I asked for and what I wanted to do with my spirituality.
That does not mean that my way is the only way.
I certainly do not want anyone to feel that their spirituality is not as developed or is lesser just because they are focusing on one bhāva over another. Your spiritual path is holy, and I hope that you feel that way as well. It is yours and yours alone; its uniqueness to you is what makes it beautiful. And so while we explore each bhāva, I want to remind you that wherever you are is exactly where you are meant to be. How could your love, your bhakti, be experienced in any other way? It is meant to be experienced by you as you experience it and as you wish to experience it.
The goal of exploring these bhāvas here is to reveal one other path among the infinite paths we all forge in our seeking. I am humbly offering my journey to you so you may find yourself, either in where our paths meet or where yours diverges. Both are equal.
The key to exploring any bhāva is to submit to it entirely.
It requires immense vulnerability to face oneself. Humans especially struggle with a variety of emotions and how to deal with them, and what causes these difficulties is a mix of internal and external factors. It is hard for us as people to face ourselves because of how the human mind works. But it is also difficult because of how we have structured our society to punish each other.
Part of submission is surrender, and surrender is vulnerable. It makes us feel exposed, even when we are only in front of deities. Even when we are only in our own presence. Working through these difficult emotions is challenging and a real effort. And the magic of any bhāva manifests the more we are willing to give ourselves over to the experience of that bhāva. Frankly, it is in that discomfort that we can see ourselves for who we are, as we are aware in the absence of comfort who we are when we are comfortable. That discomfort allows us to decide if the comfort is aligned with our values. The more deeply we allow ourselves to be changed and the more deeply we allow ourselves to embody any bhāva, the greater understanding we have of ourselves and the world around us. Each necessitates the other.
That means that one is not tied to experiencing all of the bhāvas. The seeker knows what they are seeking. And so, as we explore, I recommend you keep an eye out for which bhāva you are most inclined to explore. Follow your heart. If you want to explore all of them or more than one, at the right time, I have found, the heart finds the appropriate path. Be patient with yourself, and more importantly, indulge your desire for it is the first indication of the path.
Remember that this is not a linear path.
Many people talk about the bhāvas as if they are stepping stones. And as they are conceived and set up, I can understand why. It feels like each step is a deeper and more intimate connection with the Divine. However, this is only so because of how we have structured our society. We as humans have decided to value relationships in a hierarchy. That is a choice that we make. In fact, these choices are not even universal among us! Different cultures rank human relationships in a different order. So who is to say that following the order of bhāvas as they are “traditionally” discussed (or perhaps, more accurately, discussed in popular culture today) is the only way?
As full disclosure, I did not experience these bhāvas in a linear way. These five bhāvas are typically ordered in a hierarchy, as if they are each a step on a progressive journey that is meant to be followed in succession. We talk about them as if they each are another deeper step, and we should all be moving from śānta bhāva, dāsya bhāva, sakhya bhāva, vātsalya bhāva, and finally, to mādhurya bhāva. But why do we talk about it that way?
We as a culture have decided to place a certain value on parental relationships and on romantic relationships. That does not mean that they inherently have more depth than any other. It just means that we give them prestige. When we as humans approach Divinity through this lens, we invite an unnecessary pain into our hearts. We introduce competition in a path that is meant to be our own. We are the ones who introduce prestige and hierarchical valuing (and as a result, devaluing) into our spirituality. I recommend we move away from the idea that these bhāvas are meant to be ranked or that any leads into another. Rather, I think the story is much simpler.
Love begets love.
I experienced many of them simultaneously. What I learnt, if anything, was that the rules are like guidelines. They are a framework that can help you structure your path. So whatever your goal is, sticking to one bhāva or exploring more than one will be a decision you will have to make for yourself.
Here, I explore them in the more popular order of our current era. To maintain consistency throughout this series, I will consistently order them in this way. But I want to highlight that this is done more out of convention and ease than even my own personal experience.
In fact, my personal experience did not follow this order at all. Cultivating these bhāvas simultaneously and introducing them out of the “conventional” order allowed me to develop an understanding that would have been hindered by the “rules”. And as I explored these bhāvas, the lack of rigid rules and boundaries, both in experiencing them and in my own approach, laid bare to me exactly one thing:
Love has no hierarchy.
It is perfectly okay to transition from mādhurya to dāsya to vātsalya bhāvas, for example. It just means that your relationship is changing and that you are discovering yourself. None of those experiences of love is lesser than another. The prestige we have attached to relationships is precisely that: a human attachment. They are human judgements.
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