When I traveled to India in November, I was able to go to a small village outside Mumbai (so small that no one at the hotel knew where to tell the taxi driver to go!). The village is home to an ashram, and many related historical sites from its founding guru's life. As often happens while traveling alone, I befriended two strangers who were happy to adopt me for the day and guide me around the village.
We visited buildings where the first guru had taught or slept or been photographed. At each site, perhaps a bed or a chair, my new friends would pause to kneel down and gently touch their foreheads to the ground. They would sometimes stay that way for almost a minute, doing who knows what! My friends told stories of the gurus' lives in great detail, smiling as if remembering the stories from their own pasts. They took me to the gift shop filled with posters and pendants and laminated pocket photos of the gurus. We passed a group of a hundred people sitting under a tent near the main road. They were all swaying and singing, eyes closed and smiles wide, with a wild-haired loin-clothed yogi who had finally come down from the mountain. For real.
I found myself judging the people of the village for their devotion to these gurus dead and alive. What I was interested in was spirituality beyond idolatry. Why would they focus so much attention on the story of a guru's life or a picture of his face, or worship him like a god? Wasn't their devotion to another individual beside the point of surrendering to oneness?
Devotion might have a negative connotation for those of us who feel disinterested in the requirements of religion. But let's see what it really means: to be devoted to something is to return to it over and over. Being devoted means staying loyal to something. The "something" my friends in the village were loyal to was the feeling of love. For them, seeing a picture of their guru filled them with that feeling of unconditional love. It returned their attention to love, each time, over and over. It thereby was a way for them to regularly invoke unconditional love. For me? A picture of a [very nice, I'm sure] Indian man in a white loincloth sitting on a bench in 1955 did not catalyze me into embodying love. So what triggers that unconditional love in me?
PUPPIES!
Yep, each and every time I see a puppy, or even a picture of a puppy, I am filled with the warm fuzzies to the point where I think I might explode fuzz. The playful innocence of a puppy invokes a feeling of unconditional love in me. This is my Puppy Practice. My friend Mitch suggested that instead of expecting to feel devotion toward a photo of a guru, I should use whatever trigger directs my attention to the love that's already inside me. However I do it, the more I practice purposely bringing out that feeling of love, the more it will come out naturally --even when I'm not thinking about puppies.
What does it for you? Humming a song? Seeing a picture of your granny? Watching a toddler play? Figure out what brings out that warm, fuzzy feeling in you no matter what. Return to that trigger as often as you can during your day. Train your attention to return to the unconditional love within you more and more. That's devotion.
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