Devotional Practice: The Doorway to the Divine!

I don’t usually teach much about devotion – perhaps because of the kind of devotion I practiced earlier in my yogic studies at Kripalu. When Kripalu was an ashram, we did puja (offering of devotion) to the guru. After the guru scandal there, I became allergic to devotion, for good reasons!

However, the Tantric approach to devotion is different from that. It’s a practice of loving ourselves and loving life. It’s a practice of being grateful for all that we’ve been given. 

In Tantra, devotion becomes the doorway to the divine. It’s like a container for our prayers. Devotion can be described as prayer-in-action. Devotion is the power of “beyonding" the mind, “beyonding” our limitations, and “beyonding" the veils of our conditioning – all of which keep us small, contracted, and locked in a fear state. Devotion delivers us into the present moment where there’s a clearing of the mind and heart. There’s a one-pointed focus of communing with what’s most important to us.

For the last dozen years or so, I’ve had a practice of devotional puja a few times every month. In fact, part of the formal initiation process into meditation involves the ritual of puja. Puja means “offering from the heart.” It’s a practice of devotion, but not to anyone or any particular teacher. It’s more a ritual of refining our intention and embracing life. 

During puja, I place my own heart’s deepest desire on the altar. Through special mantras and the offering of the elements, like rice, water, flowers, fruit, light, and incense, puja invokes grace. It summons the universe to pay attention and hear my prayers. It’s the doorway to the divine. I focus all of my attention on the offerings and thereby all extraneous thoughts, expectations, and anxieties are cleared away. 

Last week I did a puja for a deeper layer of spiritual and psychic protection.

Protection is a form of guardianship. Why do we need to guard ourselves? Well, I don’t think about it much and I don’t make it a big deal. But to live from the heart, you need to open your heart. To open your heart, you need to make yourself vulnerable. 

I believe that to safeguard a vulnerable heart, we need a devotional practice to protect ourselves against the negative energies in the universe that somehow, and usually unintentionally, enter our minds!

Douglas Brooks, tantric scholar extraordinaire, teaches that the universe is made up of both positive and negative energies: energies that uplift and support you, and energies that want to tear you down and eat you. Do you have a strategy for dealing with the negative energies in the universe?

I didn’t think I needed one either, until I found myself obsessing about a comment someone made about me. It was totally untrue but still, it hurt. I’m such an open-hearted person that energy goes right through me. I feel everything so deeply and because of that, I sometimes have a hard time letting things bounce off. With so much negativity in the air these days, the political divide in our country and around the world, the lies, the intense violence in the world, and the energies that instigate fear and then feed off the fumes, I feel the need to add the practice of protection.

The puja I did was about surrounding myself with a protective light, a shield, or a forcefield that could deflect all negative energies. After the puja, I felt safe and secure to be in my heart and stay open. Yet my openness now took on a different quality. It wasn’t just open for the sake of openness. I was open with protection. I was discerning.

I became the “gatekeeper” of my heart and mind. 

It takes a lot of effort to create and sustain our joy and to stay on the path of the heart. Protection is a wonderful way of loving ourselves without compromising or sacrificing our open heart and its vulnerability. Devotion then takes on the quality of unwavering dedication. It’s a strength.

It takes a kind of fierce love to be so dedicated to yourself that you are willing to protect yourself. I’ve found this fierce self-love to be essential especially when a friend, loved one, or your beloved, says things to you that are unkind and aren’t true. Sometimes people just spout off without really thinking about what they’re saying or how hurtful it can feel to receive it. I’ve been unknowingly guilty of that. I call it “foot-in-mouth” disease. I used to have almost no censorship between my thoughts and my words.

Since in Tantra we have agency, it’s not about what others say. It’s about you. 

I’ve found that with my protection of light in place to ward off falsities, negative energy, and any trauma being projected onto me, I’m much better at not dwelling on the hurtful things people say. Of course, I’m open to constructive feedback and I always want to hear when something I did or said is hurtful or could be improved. It’s never my intention to hurt anyone. But as I say in my book, when you follow your heart, you will disappoint others. And if you’re not regularly disappointing others, who might you be regularly disappointing? 

It's such a paradox, isn’t it? We want to open our heart and lower our shield, yet still be protected. I’ve added this practice of protection to my meditations and to my puja and I’ve found wonderful results. Instead of closing me down, which I thought it might do, protection allows me to open up even more. And my self-esteem has increased. When I used to side with the person spewing negativity, I would go down the rabbit hole of unworthiness. [Unworthiness is one of my triggers from childhood, which I describe in my book. We all have childhood wounds.] 

But when I put up the light of protection, I’m standing up for myself. I’m choosing the other side, not the self-shaming side, but the side of self-love, authenticity, truth, and higher intention. 

Devotion is the conduit for our prayers. Through acts of devotion, we plant our intentions into the fibers of our being. The same can be said about the practice of Ashaya Yoga. When you do asana with a Tantric heart theme, you automatically infuse your cells with positive energy. There’s a kind of devotion-in-motion that ensues – a physical embodiment of devotion – that makes your practice, not just a physical experience, but an experience of the highest order – integration of body, mind, and heart. Asana then becomes a devotional practice of honoring the divine in you as you!

May you add devotion to your practice of yoga and surround yourself with a protective circle of light. This light is the Agni Mandala (circle of fire) of Shiva Nataraja reminding us that we are surrounded by grace, that grace has our back, life has our back, and now YOU have your back!

Namaste,

Todd