Greetings Reader,

When the world feels like it’s falling apart, joy can feel out of reach—or even inappropriate.

And yet, we hear that allowing ourselves to be joyful—insisting on joyfulness in spite of oppression—is an act of resistance.

If joy is to be a meaningful act of resistance, it has to be rooted in something deeper than our circumstances.

Yoga offers that depth.

How?

By showing us a path to the highest love.

Yoga wisdom describes a complete Absolute Truth that’s both a what and a who. But when it comes to love, the who is where it’s at.

In his Yoga-sutras, Patañjali, uses a non-sectarian philosophical term for the Supreme Being: the Sanskrit word Īśvara.

Now here’s where the “who” comes in: Patañjali defines Īśvara as puruṣa viśeṣa. The word puruṣa means “person.” The word viśeṣa means “special: unlike any other person.”

And he describes devotion to this one “special person” as the way to experience samādhi siddhir: the perfection of meditative absorption.

This “perfection” is the experience of our own true and eternally joyful nature.

And it’s not just garden variety joy: it’s a special joy that expands into clarity, resilience, and the strength to stay open without breaking, to keep loving without burning out.

It’s the kind of joy that only comes from the highest love.

This is the essence of bhakti-yoga.

Bhakti teaches that the most reliable path to resilient joy isn’t through fixing the world, but through cultivating a relationship with the Divine—whoever you think of when you think of the Supreme Being, your iṣṭa-devatāḥ.

And that iṣṭa-devatāḥ isn’t a whatever. It’s a whoever.

Not an idea to contemplate, but a person to love.

The perfection of yoga isn’t an abstract emptiness; it’s the lived experience of our own joyful nature in relationship to the ultimate source of joy.

This is why Krishna calls bhakti-yoga—the yoga of love—supremely joyful:

As Krishna sees it, joy isn’t a distraction from dharma; It’s the fulfillment of it.

That’s what makes it resistance: transcendental knowledge, realized through the practice of yoga, is the reclamation of our true, joyful nature from the forces that pull us into fear and despair.

But notice how Krishna also describes this knowledge as “the most secret of all secrets.”

What is this knowledge? And what’s so secret about it?

It’s the knowledge of the personhood of the Supreme Being.

And it’s a secret because even though both the Yoga-Sutras and the Bhagavad-gita describe the Supreme Being as a person in no uncertain terms, we tend to think that the texts must mean something other than what they say.

We resist the idea of a Supreme Personhood because people are limited and fallible and a lot of them are stupid and mean.

We associate personhood with ego or control. And if that’s what “God” means, we want nothing to do with it.

This is why both the Yoga-sutras and the Bhagavad-gita make it clear that the person they’re talking about isn’t susceptible to the same shortcomings that we are.

Immunity to material afflictions and character flaws is what makes Īśvara special—puruṣottama: the “ultimate person.”

Still, we may have a resistance to the idea of a Supreme Person.

So instead of asking the question, “Can the Supreme Being be a person?” try asking, “Where does the quality of being a person come from?”

Or, to make it more personal, ask yourself, “What is the source of my own personhood?”

Here’s what yoga wisdom has to say:

First, the idea of a complete Absolute Truth includes the feature of Supreme Personhood, Bhagavan, without which the Absolute Truth would be incomplete.

Second, it also includes the idea that we are directly a part of this Supreme Person; that our own personhood is derived from an infinite Person of whom we are all infinitesimal parts.

Yoga means “connection.” Bhakti-yoga means “connection through love.”

What if we could experience the perfection of yoga simply by expressing a desire to develop a relationship of love with the Supreme Person?

I’d call that a bargain—the best I ever had.

The everlasting joy of union with the source of our being isn’t love in a vacuum; it’s not a love that cuts us off from the world, it’s not spiritual bypassing, it’s not escapism.

It’s a source of everlasting resilience.

It’s a joy that grounds you, resists despair, and moves you to act with love.

It’s a joy that fills you with the determination to move the world in the direction of love, no matter what the odds.

So don’t let chaos-makers live rent-free in your head. Shut them out. Make your connection. Cultivate joy.

And radiate joy out into a world that needs it.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k

P.S.: I hope you'll join me for my next live workshop, Introduction to Bhakti-yoga, on Sunday, July 13th. We’ll explore the foundational teachings of bhakti-yoga as presented in through the theistic Vedanta lineage of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, a tradition of devotional yoga dating back to medieval India that's based on the ancient teachings of the Puranas and the Upanishads. CLICK HERE for complete information and registration.​