The Divine

Take refuge, in your own language

Tara Brach teaches the Buddhist practice of taking refuge in a way that makes room for almost anyone. The first refuge, she writes, “may be approached on various levels, and we can choose the way most meaningful to our particular temperament.” She sometimes says “I take refuge in the Beloved.” You might say something else. Put your word in and read the three lines slowly.

Choose the way in that is honest for you

People arrive at this word from different places, and the practice does not require you to pretend. Pick the door that fits, and start there. You can come back for the others.

This is the hardest one for me

What we mean by the divine

The word divine carries many pictures. In some traditions it names a creator, a personal presence who makes and watches the world. Those images are old and they have their place. This practice holds the divine first in another way, one the yoga traditions have carried just as long: as oneness, and as the reciprocity that binds all things. Devotion to the divine, Ishvara pranidhana, is the fifth of the niyamas; the other four are gathered on the niyama page.

Two streams of the tradition carry this understanding. The first looks inward and finds that the many are one. The second looks outward and finds that the one lives as mutual relationship. They meet in the middle, and the practice is how we learn to feel them.

The word is a door, not a gate

In Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach describes the Buddhist practice of taking refuge, and in doing so quietly solves the problem this page keeps circling. The formal practice recites three lines: I take refuge in the Buddha, in the dharma, in the sangha. Brach names the three as “the Buddha (our awakened nature), the dharma (the path or the way) and the sangha (the community of spiritual aspirants).” What she does next is the useful part.

She does not treat the first refuge as a loyalty test. “Taking refuge in the Buddha,” she writes, “may be approached on various levels, and we can choose the way most meaningful to our particular temperament.” We might take refuge in the historical man who sat under the tree and met his fear. We might, if we are devotional by nature, take refuge in a presence: “Much like praying to Christ or the Divine Mother, we can take refuge in a being or presence that cares about our suffering.” Brach names her own substitution directly:

“In taking this first refuge, I sometimes say, ‘I take refuge in the Beloved’ and surrender into what I experience as the boundlessness of compassion. When I am feeling fear, I surrender it to the Beloved. By this, I am not trying to get rid of fear, but rather letting go into a refuge that is vast enough to hold my fear with love.” TARA BRACH, RADICAL ACCEPTANCE (BANTAM), “OPENING OUR HEART IN THE FACE OF FEAR,” P. 175

And then she turns it inward, so that even the presence is optional. “In the most fundamental way,” she writes, “taking refuge in the Buddha means taking refuge in our own potential for liberation.” After the Beloved, her next line is “I take refuge in this awakening heart mind,” letting go of “any notion that Buddha nature is something beyond or outside my awareness.” The refuge ends up in the least mystical place imaginable: “We are taking refuge in the truth of who we are.”

The second refuge helps too, because it needs no belief at all. Brach notes that dharma “means the truth, the way of things, the law of nature,” and that taking refuge in it is taking refuge in “the truth that everything within and around us is subject to change.” The Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse places that same fact first among the tradition’s four core markers, or seals: “All compounded things are impermanent.” Impermanence is not a doctrine we accept. It is a fact we stop fighting. That is available to the theist and the atheist on identical terms.

The intuition behind that word is not India’s alone. Dharma grows from the older Vedic rita, cosmic order, and Pankaj Jain sets it beside the parallel terms of other ancient traditions in which people were asked to live in accord with a cosmic rhythm, the Daoist Dao, the “Confucianist term Li, Egyptian term Ma’at, and Avestan term Asha.” Honoring the sacred by living in accord with the order that holds us reads less like one tradition’s doctrine than a shared human recognition.

The gods as essences to learn from

This is the door I use, so I will describe it carefully rather than sell it. Read this way, the deities of yoga are not beings who made the world. They are compressed accounts of forces that run through a life, given a face so they can be studied, remembered, and practiced.

The advantage is that the stories stay demanding. If Kali is a goddess I do not believe in, I can dismiss her. If Kali is the name for the ferocity that destroys what I have outgrown, including the parts of my self-image I am fond of, then she has something to ask of me on a Tuesday. Under the banyan tree we can see this at work: Shiva’s grief becoming Virabhadra is not a fact about the past, it is an account of what happens when sorrow finds its footing, and the Warrior poses put us in the shape of it. Shiva holding the poison at his throat is a teaching about what a practiced nervous system can do with something toxic: neither swallow it nor spit it at whoever is nearest.

The most developed version of this reading belongs to Ashok Bedi, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst who treats the Hindu deities as a “latent code” of archetypes to be deciphered and used. In his hands the goddess is one force wearing several faces: “Shakti may manifest as lover (Laxmi), mother (Parvati), daughter (Saraswati), creator (Aditi) or destroyer (Kali).” His reading of Shiva’s blue throat, where Parvati holds her husband’s throat so he keeps the poison lodged there rather than swallow it all the way down, is the single clearest example I know of a myth doing real psychological work. Those readings now sit alongside the stories under the banyan tree, marked as the archetypal reading.

The honest risk of this door is that it can become a way of keeping the tradition at arm’s length, taking the psychology and leaving the devotion, which is a thing Western practitioners do to living traditions rather routinely. I try to hold that risk in view. Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse names a related danger from inside the tradition. In What Makes You Not a Buddhist he calls the four seals, beginning with impermanence, the tea, and every ritual, symbol, and cultural trapping merely the cup that holds it: “Incense and candles are exotic and attractive; impermanence and selflessness are not.” The tourist collects the beautiful cup and forgets to drink the tea. His sorting does not map cleanly onto my three doors, and it cuts a different way than my own worry, since he would sooner drop the ritual than the truth. But the underlying caution is one and the same: it is easy to keep the parts of a tradition that photograph well and leave the parts that ask something of you. It steadies me, though, to notice that reading a deity as a symbol is not only a Western graft onto the tradition: Paramahansa Yogananda, writing from inside a devotional lineage, glosses Kali as “a symbol of God in the aspect of eternal Mother Nature,” her four arms “two beneficent, two destructive,” standing for “the essential duality of matter or creation.” And he does this even as the rest of his book addresses that same Mother as a living presence who hears and answers, which tells me the symbolic and the devotional readings can live in one heart at once, a gentler picture than my three separate doors suggest. Reading the gods as archetypes is a reading, and the people whose ancestors have prayed to them for millennia are not making a category error I have kindly corrected.

If the divine is someone, not something

The texts this site draws on mostly assume this door. The Bhagavatam is not a psychology manual with a deity motif; it is a devotional work by people in a relationship with someone they loved. Reading it as anything else is a choice, and it should be named as one.

If this is your door, the practice is bhakti, and it is arguably the most direct one the tradition offers. Prahlada under poison and fire, Draupadi raising both hands when nothing else worked, the gopis dropping everything at the sound of the flute: none of these are metaphors to the people who told them. They are accounts of being answered. Ishvara pranidhana in this reading is exactly what it sounds like, surrender of your actions and their fruits to someone real, and the tradition holds it as a complete path on its own, needing no philosophy underneath it.

Nothing on this site is written to talk you out of that. Where I read energy and essence, you may read presence, and the pages will still work: the poses, the breath, the stories, and the ethics are the same. Brach’s point stands from your side of it too. The refuge is real; we differ on the name.

Bhakti: the yoga of devotion

The Bhagavad Gita frames yoga not only as eight limbs but as paths a life can walk, the margas. Karma is the path of selfless action, jnana the path of knowledge, raja the meditative discipline of Patanjali, and bhakti the path of devotion. Of the four, bhakti asks least of the intellect and most of the heart. The devotional path is the mutual, intense love between a devotee and a personal divine, and the Gita itself ranks it highest, calling the one who worships with faith the most devoted of all yogins (6.47). It is a complete path on its own, and it needs no philosophy underneath it.

Where the first doorway opens onto a presence that hears, bhakti is what you do once you have walked through it. Its practices are relational rather than analytical: kirtan, the call-and-response singing of the divine names; japa, the quiet repetition of a mantra on a mala; puja, the tending and offering at an altar; and seva, service given as worship. The Bhagavatam names nine forms this love can take, the navavidha bhakti, moving from hearing the stories and singing them through remembering, serving, and befriending, to the final offering of the whole self (Bhagavata 7.5.23–24, where the child Prahlada teaches them). The classic systematic elaboration of these forms into a full science of devotional emotion is Rupa Goswami’s sixteenth-century Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu, summarized in English as The Nectar of Devotion. Read this way, devotion is not a feeling you wait to be given. It is a set of practices that grow the feeling. The word itself carries this. As the scholar Neha Patel notes, bhakti comes from the Sanskrit root bhaj, which can be rendered by “a myriad of verbs, including but not limited to: ‘to share’, ‘to revere’, ‘to adore’, ‘to love’, and ‘to serve’,” so that devotion is “not merely a passive state of adoration” but a spectrum of participation and committed engagement.

As a movement, bhakti is less one thing than many. The literary historian Madhuri Deshmukh notes that the word “has become a sort of historiographical shorthand for the diverse communities of devotion that found expression in enduring poetry and song in South Asia between the sixth and the seventeenth centuries, from the Tamil-speaking south to Kashmir,” a span of a thousand years and half a subcontinent rather than a single founder or creed.

Bhakti also opened doors that orthodoxy kept shut. The historian Anshu Malhotra observes that “bhakti is seen as a ‘feminized’ religion, many saints (bhaktas) adopting the voice of the woman in relation to their male god,” and that it “has a tendency to break free from the hierarchic world-view of Brahmanism, opening a religious path to all castes and women.” That is the ideal rather than a settled fact: the same scholarship finds bhakti’s emancipatory promise was in practice mixed, often reconciled with the very norms it strained against, which is the tension Mira’s own story carries.

The tradition also remembers this love in particular voices, not only in the crowd of gopis. The clearest is Mirabai, the sixteenth-century Rajput princess who took Krishna as her only husband and sang her way out of the duties a wife was expected to keep. “I have chosen no miserable bridegroom, who will die at each rebirth,” runs one of her poems: measured against an undying Krishna, an earthly marriage looked to her like the smaller loyalty. The scholar Kumkum Sangari reads Mira’s songs as a genuine refusal, a woman using devotion to step outside the prescribed role of the Rajput wife, the noble precepts of stridharma, and she is careful not to romanticize it. The refusal was contested, cost Mira her standing, and left her repeatedly perceived as mad or immoral, so the freedom this devotion offered was real and precarious at once. Her poems survive as one living form of the ninefold love named above, remembrance and self-offering turned into song. The religious-studies scholar Karen Pechilis, reading women poet-saints from Mira back to the Tamil Karaikkal Ammaiyar, characterizes the whole genre this way: “Bhakti poetry is experiential in nature: it is observational, situational, and sensory. One sings about what one knows.” The devotion in these songs is not an abstract theology but a report from inside a lived relationship.

Her own words carry it better than any gloss. “The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira’s body,” she sings; “all the other colors washed out.”

In the devotional reading, this love does not close the world out. It widens. The Gaudiya commentator A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, glossing the Bhagavatam, puts it plainly: “When love of Godhead is attained, love for all other beings automatically follows because the Lord is the sum total of all living beings.” Read this way, bhakti and the oneness later in this page are not rivals: the love turned toward the divine turns, by the same motion, toward everything the divine holds. This is a devotional and sectarian reading, offered as one tradition’s own gloss rather than as a neutral summary.

Bhakti is also the current that runs, quietly or openly, through several of the postural lineages. Wherever a style of yoga leans toward love and surrender rather than only toward the body, it is carrying bhakti into the room. These are the branches on the styles page that reach toward the divine.

The many are one: Advaita

The Upanishads, the contemplative heart of the Vedas, return again and again to a single discovery: behind the countless forms of the world there is one reality, Brahman, and that reality is also the innermost Self, Atman, in every being. The divine is the wholeness, and we are not outside it.

The Ashtavakra Gita states the same identity in a plain image: “Just as any fabric is the white cotton thread, so is this creation just the pure unalloyed divinity” (2.5). The many forms are not laid over the one; they are the one, the way cloth is nothing but the thread it is woven from.

The Shvetashvatara Upanishad names the perceptual move that recognition asks of us, seeing through the surface of name and form: “Only when we pierce through this magic veil / Do we see the One who appears as many” (IV.5).

Vedanta’s third pillar, the Brahma Sutras, states the same recognition as a definition. Its second aphorism fixes Brahman not by negation but by origin, as that from which come “the origin, sustenance and dissolution” of the world (1.1.2, Janmadyasya yatah).

This is Advaita, not-two. In the scholarly account, its most fundamental thesis is “that brahma is the ultimate reality, and that the world is sublated and the jiva or the individual self realizes its identity with the Brahman” (Anupam Jash, in the Springer Encyclopedia of Indian Religions). It is one school of Vedanta among several, and the strongest reading of oneness the tradition offers. The divine is the seamless being, consciousness, and bliss that the meditation tradition calls sat-chit-ananda. Realizing it is the aim of contemplative yoga: to know directly that the witness in us and the ground of all things are one. The Jungian analyst Ashok Bedi keeps the old image of the droplet and the ocean for this: the atman is a droplet in the ocean of the Primal Soul, Brahman, and the essence of both is one, as water. He adds a turn that reaches toward the second stream of this page, that the dependence runs both ways, since “the individual soul is the medium through which the Primal Soul incarnates in the created human world.” The recognition is not India’s alone. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan who renders the word as “nonduality (advaita in Sanskrit),” finds the same nondual seeing at the core of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, and argues that “Jesus was the first nondual religious teacher of the West,” a way of seeing carried quietly in Christianity for centuries before it went underground. The Sufi tradition arrives near the same union by a different road, through love rather than identity. In Awakening, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan writes that one is “liberated from the prison of duality to attain the liberty of at-onement” through the love that bridges “the separation between lover and beloved,” and he reaches for the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad to say it. The tenth-century martyr-mystic al-Hallaj put that union at its most vertiginous: “I am He whom I love; and He whom I love is I. We are two spirits dwelling in one body. If thou seest me, thou seest Him, and if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.” The routes are not identical, and it is worth marking the seam: the Sufi lover and Beloved become one, where Advaita begins by denying there were ever two. Both end with no separation left to defend, and the Beloved named in the refuge above turns out to be near kin to the Brahman of these verses.

Vedanta itself makes room for both doorways in a single distinction. It speaks of Brahman in two ways: nirguna, without attributes, the impersonal absolute these verses reach for, and saguna, with attributes, the same reality worshipped as a personal Lord. As the scholars Eliot Deutsch and Rohit Dalvi put it, describing the personal God of the theistic schools, “This is Īśvara, Lord, or saguna Brahman, Brahman with attributes.” The impersonal ground of the first door and the personal Beloved of the second are, in this reading, one reality approached from two sides.

The Mandukya Upanishad grounds all of this in the single syllable OM and a map of consciousness itself. “AUM stands for the supreme Reality,” it opens, a symbol for what was, what is, and what shall be. It then names four states of awareness: the waking state turned outward, the dreaming state turned inward, the deep sleep in which one neither dreams nor desires, and a fourth beyond all three, “Turiya, neither inward nor outward,” “Beyond the senses and the intellect.” Turiya is not one more experience set beside the others but the awareness in which waking, dream, and sleep arise and pass, and the Upanishad holds that “Those who know AUM as the Self become the Self.” On this reading the absolute is reached less by adding an experience than by recognizing the ground already present beneath all three ordinary states, which is the same recognition the non-dual verses above describe, given here as a structure of consciousness rather than a doctrine to believe.

Not every path through oneness wants the separation gone. The devotional schools of Vaishnavism keep the difference on purpose, holding that the sweetness of loving the divine depends on remaining someone who can love it. As the scholar Leena Taneja records the Gauriya Vaishnava saying, a devotee “wants to taste the sugar (difference), not become it,” so that the aim of bhakti is not to lose individual being but to love across a cherished distance. Set beside the Advaita of this section, it marks the tradition’s own honest split: one road dissolves the two into one, and the other keeps the two so that love has somewhere to go. The page holds both, because a practitioner meets the divine sometimes as the ground they already are and sometimes as the one they long for.

The one lives as relationship: interbeing

If the first stream looks inward to find the one, the second looks outward and finds that the one is made entirely of relationship. Nothing exists by itself. Everything is woven of everything else, and that endless mutual belonging is itself the face of the divine.

In this view the divine lives in the relationship itself, the breathing exchange between us and the tree, between the rain and the river, between one being and the next. Thich Nhat Hanh gives the picture its plainest form in Going Home: a wave does not have to die to become water, because in the ultimate dimension “the wave is already water,” and when it looks deeply it finds that “her being there depends on the presence of all the other waves.” Reverence becomes reciprocity: to honor the divine is to give back to the web that holds us.

How this lives on the mat

Whichever door you came through, the practice from here is the same, which is the quiet argument of this whole page.

This is the last of the five observances of the second limb, Niyama. That final observance is Ishvara pranidhana, surrender to the divine. Read in this way, surrender is the practice of remembering oneness and acting from reciprocity. It threads through the whole of yoga. Maetreyii Ma puts the structural claim plainly in Living Love: without Ishvara pranidhana it is not really possible to do the other practices, for it is the base of all the practices of yama and niyama.

In the Yamas, the ethical roots, reciprocity becomes action: ahimsa, non-harming, is the simplest acknowledgment that another’s life is woven with our own. In Asana, the body learns that it is made of breath traded with the world. In meditation, the practitioner rests in the wholeness directly, until the boundary between self and all-that-is grows quiet.

Surrender to the divine, then, asks very little belief and a great deal of attention. It asks that we notice, in the pose and in the breath and in the meeting with another being, that we were never separate. The remembering is the worship.

It is worth reading this tradition honestly, because scholars do not agree on what Patanjali means by Ishvara. One influential reading, associated with Mircea Eliade, treats the Lord of the Yoga Sutras less as a worshipped God than as a kind of model or archetypal yogi that the meditator holds the mind upon. Edwin Bryant argues the reverse, calling the Yoga Sutras “an inherently theistic text” and noting that the archetypal-yogi reading is “nowhere to be found in the traditional commentarial tradition of the Yoga school.” Georg Feuerstein agrees the theism is original: “The popular academic notion that the conception of God was interpolated into classical Yoga is completely unfounded.” Yet he grants that Patanjali’s Lord is a peculiar one, “a special kind of purusha” who, unlike the creator worshipped in the devotional schools, is “without any creative function.” A second debate runs beneath it: Patanjali’s system rests on Samkhya’s dualism, and where Feuerstein reads that “Patanjali taught a dualistic metaphysics,” scholars such as Ian Whicher make “a plea for a nondualistic reading” of the same text. The surrender described above still stands as a practice; what stays genuinely open is whether the divine one surrenders to is a personal God, a uniquely liberated self held up for contemplation, or a non-dual ground read back into a dualist scripture.

One more divergence belongs here in the same honest spirit, because it cuts against the oneness the rest of this page leans toward. Advaita Vedanta holds that there is a single Self, and that atman and Brahman are, in Georg Feuerstein’s words, “one and the same.” Classical Samkhya and Yoga, the systems Patanjali writes from, hold the opposite: not one Self but many, a separate witnessing purusha for every being. Feuerstein reports their argument plainly, that “if there were only a single purusha, everyone would be liberated at the moment the first person is, which is evidently not the case.” He is candid that the claim is philosophically awkward, and the non-dual traditions reject it outright. This page keeps the oneness of Advaita as its main thread, but the reader should know the tradition is not agreed even on the number of the Self, and that the dualist, pluralist reading is the native ground of the very yoga the eight limbs come from.

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