Bhakti yoga

Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion: love directed at a personal deity and expressed through practice, from singing and remembrance to service and complete self surrender.

The Sanskrit root is bhaj, meaning to share, to partake, to participate, and that root tells you something the English word devotion does not. Bhakti is participatory. It is not private admiration, it is joining in: a household shrine, an evening of bhajan, a queue at a temple, cooking for a festival, a pilgrimage with people you would not otherwise have met. If you are Indian, the odds are that your family already practises this and calls it religion rather than yoga.

Of the four paths, this is the one with the widest reach and the smallest entry requirement. Chapter 12 of the Bhagavad Gita treats devotion as the foremost and the easiest of the routes, and the Gita as a whole still declines to rank the four. Easiest does not mean shallow. It means the door is low, and what is asked afterwards is the same as everywhere: consistency, and conduct that matches what you say.

The tradition is specific about what devotion consists of. The nine forms, navadha bhakti, are listed in the devotional literature and set out in the Chaitanya Charitamrita, and they are worth knowing because they show how much of this path is doing rather than feeling.

• Sravana, listening: to the stories and the scripture, read aloud.
• Kirtana, singing: praise sung together, which is where most people meet this path.
• Smarana, remembering: holding the divine in mind through the day.
• Pada sevana, service at the feet: rendering service.
• Arcana, worship: the offerings and the ritual before an image.
• Vandana, homage: bowing, greeting, acknowledgement.
• Dasya, servitude: taking the position of one who serves.
• Sakhya, friendship: relating to the divine as a friend, which is the form the poet saints used most beautifully.
• Atma nivedana, self surrender: the complete giving over of oneself, and the last on the list for good reason.

Two things are worth noticing. First, six of the nine are actions you could do this evening with no preparation and no teacher. Second, feeling is not on the list. The tradition asks you to sing, to serve, to bow and to remember, and it treats the love as something that grows out of that rather than something you must summon first. That is a piece of practical psychology as sound as anything in Patanjali.

The literature is old. The Bhagavad Gita gives devotion its own chapter, the Bhagavata Purana sets out its modes in detail, and the Narada Bhakti Sutra is the compact philosophical statement of it.

What turned it into the religious life of a subcontinent was a movement rather than a text. Devotional religion of this kind rose from about the middle of the first millennium in Tamil Nadu, through the Saiva Nayanars and the Vaishnava Alvars, and flowered between roughly the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries across the whole country. Its instrument was poetry in the local language rather than Sanskrit, sung rather than recited, and its social consequence is the part I would ask any student to notice: it put a path to liberation within reach of people who had no access to Sanskrit learning, no leisure, and often no standing.

Swami Vivekananda gave this path one of his four books, Bhakti-Yoga, which appears with Para-Bhakti or Supreme Devotion in the third volume of his Complete Works, and it is where the fourfold scheme most people learn came from. He also warned, at length, about fanaticism as the characteristic disease of devotion, which is a warning from inside the tradition and not an outsider's complaint.

Almost none of this path is on a yoga site, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. Bhakti is practised in temples, in kitchens and in living rooms full of people singing, and there is no posture in it.

Where it touches what I teach is sound. Chanting is the one devotional practice that is also a physical practice, and it is measurable in the plainest way: a long, even, resonant exhalation slows the breath and settles a person. Om chanting is where to begin, and it is the same instrument whether you take the syllable as sacred or simply as a sound. Bhramari, the humming breath, is the same mechanism turned to a different purpose, and it is the practice I most often give to somebody who cannot settle. Dirga, the long three part breath, is what makes any sustained chanting possible at all.

The other honest overlap is the sitting. An evening of kirtan is two hours cross legged on a hard floor, and I have had more than one person come to my class for exactly that reason and say so cheerfully. Sukhasana on a folded blanket, Vajrasana, or Padmasana if the knees allow it, and honesty about knees that will not fold. There is no merit in ruining a joint to sit in a particular shape while singing.

This path chooses people more often than people choose it.

• You already pray, sing or keep a shrine. You are practising bhakti. Nothing needs to be added except consistency, and perhaps one of the nine forms you have been avoiding.
• You want a practice you can share with your family. This is the only one of the four that is naturally collective. Singing together is the whole method.
• Argument is not how you get anywhere. Then do not spend years on jnana yoga out of a sense that it is more respectable. It is not.
• You have no object of devotion and no wish for one. Then this path has nothing to offer you and I would not press it. Karma yoga and raja yoga ask nothing theological.
• You want the settling effect of chanting without the theology. Perfectly reasonable, and it works. Om chanting and Bhramari are on this site with no belief attached.
• You are anxious or not sleeping. Deal with that directly first: yoga for anxiety, and the bedtime sequence.

My verdict. I teach in a residents' association hall in north Bangalore and a good number of the people in my room have been doing bhakti yoga all their lives without ever using the phrase, and I would not dream of telling them that what they do at their shrine is a category of anything. What I have observed over about forty years is narrower and I will stand behind it: the students who keep any devotional practice, of whatever kind, are noticeably better at consistency than the rest. They turn up. They are not chasing a result from the hour. Whatever else devotion does, it trains a person to do something regularly without asking what it is doing for them, and that is precisely the ability that a yoga practice lives or dies by. The one caution I would give, and the tradition gives it too, is about attaching to a person rather than to the practice. Devotion is not obedience to a human being.

Bhakti yoga is not taught here, and there is nothing devotional in the hour. The classes here are one teacher, about forty years of teaching, one hall at the residents' association in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, in person there or live online, all ages and all levels, and the hour is asana, pranayama and relaxation, taught slowly. The classes here are not labelled by style and they carry no religious content.

That is a deliberate choice and worth stating. There is no group chanting, no invocation, no image, no prayer and nothing asked about what anybody believes. People of every faith and of none share the floor, and the only common language in the room is the breath. If you would like chanting as part of a class, Sivananda is the school that includes it as a matter of course, and kundalini classes open and close with it.

What is here for somebody on this path is the physical means: Om chanting taught as a breathing practice, the long three part breath that supports it, and hips and knees looked after well enough to sit through an evening of singing. The four paths page puts devotion beside the other three, and the classes page has timings and costs.