Bhairavi Sadhana – Significance and Benefits

The significance of a period of sadhana is to bring an organic intelligence to your system which makes life effortless. Do not imagine that creation is a problem that you have to solve. Creation is not a problem. Creation is a tremendous phenomenon. You can either ride it, or you can be crushed by it. The choice is yours. If you ride it, it is a phenomenon beyond anyone’s imagination. If you are crushed by it, it is a horrible thing.

The word “sadhana” literally means a tool or an instrument. Sadhana is a tool to be able to ride the surf of life. I was in an international airport recently, and there was a young woman there. She was sitting in the center of the hallway, not on a chair but on her bag. Thousands of people were walking up and down, everyone with their trolley – someone rushing to the airplane, someone getting off and coming – but she was undisturbed by all this. She was sitting there with a small mirror and a little tweezer, and plucking her eyebrows very efficiently.

I thought her level of focus was quite something. The important thing was the tiny little tool that she had. She was using it so efficiently in the middle of a hallway in an airport, where thousands of people were moving around. From the smallest level of instrument to the highest, it is the level of focus and involvement that makes the instrument effective. Of course, the design of the instrument is important, but still, with so many people going around, you could poke your eyeballs out with this tweezer. The level of involvement is very important. It is all a question of how much it matters to you. Not your eyebrows, I mean your spiritual process. If you grow a third eye, there is one more to be tweezed! But it usually does not grow a brow, just the eye!

The sadhana is structured in such a way that the maximum results happen with minimum effort. Sadhana is like an eyebrow tweezer – if you apply it meticulously, it works well. Otherwise you can poke your eyeballs out with it. That is not the purpose for which it is created. It is the meticulous way in which you go about it and the level of involvement and focus in it that will bring results. The tool is important, but how you use it is most important. If I ask you to tighten something with a screwdriver, and you put the wrong end in, all you will do is poke yourself.

Bhairavi sadhana is very simple. We could make it more complex, but if we make it very sophisticated and complex, a lot of people will not understand what it is all about. Do not be fooled by the simplicity. If you give yourself absolutely, it produces results that you cannot imagine possible. That is all it takes with life, because we do not have to create it – it is already there. We just have to make it function smoothly and efficiently at its highest possible level. If you had to make life, that would be a different kind of challenge. Everything is there. You just have to position it right. That is all. And that will happen with the sadhana.

This sadhana is intentionally structured in such a way that some of it appeals to you and some of it does not. What does not break you or bend you, that is what you are comfortable with. But what you do not like is most important. If you are doing what you like with hundred percent involvement, then you must do what you do not like with two hundred percent involvement.

Are you eating the neem ball in the mornings? Maybe you are throwing it in the back of the throat and drinking water over it. You must put it in your mouth and chew it. Instead of a neem ball, we could provide you a rasgulla. But you can eat a rasgulla with complete unawareness. If we give you a heap of rasgullas, after some time, you will not even know how many you have eaten. But will you ever forget how many neem balls you ate? If someone says, “You ate only two neem balls,” you will say, “No, I ate three!” Neem is very beneficial, but above all, things that you do not like make you very alert to life.

Your likes and dislikes are just a question of thought. You can think, “I like this person.” The next moment, you can think, “I hate this person.” You are allowed that freedom. If you think, “I like this person,” it will be true. If you think, “I don’t like this person,” that will also be true for you. After all, it is your thought – at least you must be able to think pleasantly. The sadhana is such that you understand the instruments of body, mind, speech, hearing, and seeing. All these are your instruments and how you learn to use them is your business. You can use them towards your wellbeing, or you can use them to make yourself into a private hell of your own.

During this sadhana, every breath, every step, and every heartbeat should be on and on. That is when you know how significant simple things can be, and what great things these simple things can do. Such simple things have done miraculous things. It is the atoms that built the whole cosmos. They are so insignificant that you cannot even see them in a microscope. We could have ignored them, but they made the planet, the universe, and everything. Do not ignore those simple things. It is only because those simple things have been ignored that life has become complex. If you had taken care of those simple things, life would be wonderful.

How to sit, stand, and breathe – bring these simple things into your life. Life will become a graceful process. That is what the sadhana is about. The only aspiration in your life should be you must do your life in the highest possible way; otherwise it is a worthless life. You do not have to do what I see as the highest. But at least what you see as the highest must happen. If you do not aspire for what you hold as the highest, that is a wasted life. Do not be a wasted life because the most precious thing about life is life itself – not the diamonds, the property, or the money. Will you get this now or will you get it on your deathbed when you are taking your last breath? You will anyway get it one day. I think today is a good day.

The sadhana is essentially towards empowering your emotional intelligence. Today in the world, the word “intelligence” is identified as IQ. IQ means, “I stand in the queue.” That means you are always behind someone. Because the nature of the intellect is always trying to imitate and be one-up on the other. Wanting to be better than someone is also an imitation of someone. Essentially, this means we are trying to do a little better than the monkeys – that is evolution.

Right now, for most human beings, the intellect is a useless instrument unless there is a bank of information. If there is no information, most people do not know how to use their intellect. This is not the nature of emotional intelligence. It doesn’t need any information. It can just embrace everything and know it. It can feel its way through life. It need not stand in a queue behind someone, it need not try to be better than someone. It is simply a way of being involved with life, knowing life by involvement not by dissection. This is the difference between intellect and emotion. Intellect tries to know everything by cutting it open, by dissection. Emotion knows things by embrace, by inclusion.

The sadhana is essentially to heighten your emotional intelligence because it is a much easier way of doing things. If you want to dissect the divine, that is not a good thing and you will not get anywhere with it. The best way is to embrace. When you embrace someone, you are also allowing yourself to be embraced; otherwise it will not happen. Devotion means just that. Devotion is not about dissecting the divine; it is about dancing with the divine and becoming one with it.

Emotional intelligence means that your ability to live well is by your own innate nature, not because you are better than someone. There is no hierarchy in this. Nobody can decide, “This person loves more than the other person.”. Quantities do not apply to emotional intelligence. When quantities do not apply, the high and low disappear, big and small disappear; life becomes as it is. Is an ant a more important life than you or are you a more important life than the ant? The ant considers its life as important as you consider your life – probably more.

Intellect is always trying to set one thing against the other. It is your intellect which has created conflict, it is your emotion which can bring this together. But if emotion follows intellect, emotion will also become a deadly conflict. If your intellect follows the emotion, then there will be no conflict; there will be sweetness in the world. There will be wonderful situations in the world. Bhairavi sadhana is essentially oriented towards that. It is a simple structure, but if you give yourself to it, it can do miraculous things to you.

If you give yourself over during these twenty-one days, you will have not only purified yourself but all the spaces around you. The nation and the world will immensely benefit from this. And devotion is not a twenty-one-day chore. You must continue to overflow with it on a daily basis. It is not something that you do or do not do; it is something that you live. It is like your breath. If the grace of Bhairavi, if her footprint is established in your heart, you never have to worry about victory or failure, prosperity or poverty, and life or death for that matter. For one who manages to land in the lap of the Divine, all these things are just trivial, they are of no consequence. May this process truly overwhelm you.

Editor's Note:  Click here to register for Bhairavi Sadhana 2023.