How Bhakti Chooses You
[Level 2: Mystical] How I accidentally stumbled into bhakti yoga through consistent meditation and what it taught me about surrender, service, and love
NOTE: I originally wrote this June 9th, 2025 for the HealthyGamer Memberships platform for the group of folks on there interested in spirituality and what was fondly referred to by the community as “The Weird Stuff”. Over the next few days be working through my backlog of posts I’ve either made on there or saved in draft and never actually got around to publishing. Anyway, on to the content!
Some realizations can only be expressed after you’ve lived them. Here are mine.
The first: the most important thing you can do every day is to say and think constantly (and lovingly!): “How may I serve You?”
Water the plants? That’s tending to God.
Make coffee for your husband? That’s an act of service for God.
Make a healthy breakfast for yourself and eat it? That’s nourishing God.
All these things flow effortlessly from the heart of the one that has been opened to God. The Higher Love flows through them and they are not burdened by resistances and grumbling.
All this time the answer was not different techniques for meditation. Countless times I had been told to surrender. It is not the flip of a switch. It is not a one-time event. It is the softening and ripening of a fruit on the vine, tended to by consistent sunlight and periodic watering. The fruit cannot be rushed to ripeness by over-watering. It cannot reach maturity in a single day of sun. The nourishing rains must come with clouds that block the light of the sun. Both are needed.
Bhakti is not a chosen path. It is the result of choosing to return to meditation and stillness each day with a willingness and persistence to draw closer to God. Even this spark of initial desire is not chosen. It is bestowed unknowingly and unconsciously in the heart of the soul-turned-seeker. The seed is planted by unseen hands and its stirring causes the seeking. The seeking eventually leads to the abiding. The abiding leads to Love. The spark is ignited into a flame and fanned into a flame, a blaze, an inferno that burns away the dross of the old. The soul dances in the fire of the Self that burns alive the mind, transmuting it into a tool of the Divine.
All of my seeking has been merely my being stirring, awakening to love, seeking its Beloved beyond the veil of illusion.
Bhakti cannot be taught. Bhakti is pure expression of Love, coming from the soul itself that arrests the mind, the one that seeks to “follow a path”. Your mind cannot choose Bhakti. It is not chosen. It is the natural state of Being. It is a realignment.