Beginning

My Vedic astrologer Marga Laube encouraged me yesterday to formalize my writing practice. And since my recent (third) return from India, my spiritual friends have taken to jestingly calling me Bhakti Shakti, a revision of my year old nickname Bhakti J.
So I am here, showing up, making time, carving space, and taking on this name.

Bhakti is the hefty part of both nicknames, the beginning, the root. Bhakti means spiritual devotion, divine love, supreme union. Bhakti is a great source of joy in my life: I offer my footsteps, my breaths, my heartbeats, my waking, my eating, my typing these words, to God. Or I could say it another way: I love myself as I walk, as I breath, as I wake, as I eat, as I type these words. Or I could say: I love the world, everything I see and experience, Yes. The world, the whole universe, is all one big grand manifestation of the divine in form. This can be an intentional practice, it can also be a real spontaneously arising experience to see it as such.
When I first came back from India I had written all this love poetry to Krishna. I had put my forehead on the marble floor of a temple and felt the presence of God. I haven't felt alone since. So my friend Matt dubbed me Bhakti J.

Shakti is just the sanskrit word for energy. When I meditate or chant or say the mantra, my shakti - the energy that pulses inside of me - gets steamy, hot, like smoke in a hot fire, rising up and warming my physical anatomy and fueling whatever action I am doing with love, generosity and power. This time when I came back from India, my friend Kalima turned the name into the rhyme. She said she could see the energy in me, feel it from across the room. It's true: since I've been back I've needed to sleep less, I'm inspired to do more, I'm excited about the life that I live already, rather than always diving for buried treasure. I've got more to offer. My energy is leaky, overflowing on the top.

I love these words. I love that they rhyme. I love that my friends see these words in me.

I like too that the acronym they form is B.S. This reminds me not to take myself too seriously. To laugh at myself, whether I'm feeling low or fully enlightened. This is also something I sometimes have to decide to practice, sometimes something that I simply experience as truth.

I want to write about what that's like: to hop off the seesaw of enlightenment and contraction, of success and failure, of good and bad, as my teacher Harshada says, and just watch the play of the back and forth. Enjoy it. Laugh. Love.

A stranger on the subway platform asked me for money last week. I smiled. Then he told me, "I love you." I said, "I love you, too." I walked on, but it really hit me. I meant it. I received his love and genuinely extended mine.

Welcome, companions, pilgrims, fellow Bhaktas. Feel your own shakti tonight. Feel it's warmth, and let it heat you, love you, from the inside. Let it heat you up and then reach out to warm up and love those around you, whether they are your families, your partners, your students, your strangers.

As Joseph Levine said, "Let it shine!"