Musings of a Devotional Bhakta

I used to think freedom was a solitary thing — a private unclasping, an individual emancipation. Now I see that freedom most often arrives as a shared atmosphere, an invisible room we build with one another. What I offer another human is not just attention but an environment: a place where their edges can soften, where my own reactivity can be noticed and held rather than acted upon. In the small economies of desire and hurt that stitch our days together, there is an opportunity to practice being spacious instead of solvent — to let my preferences be petals floating on the river of what is, rather than anchors I hurl at anyone who disagrees.

When I relax into that space I discover something deliciously scandalous: intimacy is not diminished by not controlling another; it is deepened. Real intimacy is the tender willingness to be present with someone’s full humanity — their fear, their murky grief, the small jealousies that look ridiculous in the cold light of morning — and to refuse to trundle out a personal agenda. I can hold a person without trying to fix them, and in that holding something like liberation blooms for us both. This is not passive surrender; it is an active, courageous stewardship of the relational field.

There is a practice in this: look straight at the disturbance instead of running a rerun of the old script. When irritation arises, instead of making it the lead actor in a melodrama, I can watch it — examine its costume, its origin-story, its tiny comic motivations — and let it pass. I try, with a mix of discipline and gentle humor, to see my own attachments as characters in a play I don’t have to believe in. This is the place where I learn not to collapse into shame or inflate into righteousness; instead I cultivate equanimity and a sense of mischief, the quiet chuckle that says, “Oh, so that’s you again.”

Stories and parables haunt me now because they reveal possibility: the tale of the one who is at home in awareness reminds me that freedom is not a future prize but a present posture. Miracles, in this sense, are simply moments when my habitual assumptions crack open and I glimpse a truer landscape — not because the world has rearranged itself but because my seeing has. When I remember that what I believed to be reality is only a habit, I am freed to choose compassion over reflex, inquiry over condemnation. In practice, that means offering steadiness when someone else trembles, and accepting steadiness when it is offered to me.

Love, I have found, is not a soft commodity; it is a discipline. To love another is to become a place where they can fall asleep and wake up and still be beloved — to be a refuge that does not demand repayment. Yet loving is not the same as indulging: I can love a person and still set boundaries that honor both of us. There is a luminous tenderness in that balance: a voice in me that is both merciful and clear, that knows when to hold and when to release. This is the romance of liberation — not romantic in the cornball sense, but romantic as an ongoing wooing of reality as it is, not as how I wish it to be.

I am learning that relationships are the laboratory of awakening. They are the place where the ego’s clever tricks — projection, blame, the theater of righteous injury — come out to play, and therefore the best crucible for growth. Each tense conversation, each small betrayal, each awkward attempt at intimacy is a sacred homework assignment. If I treat my partner, my friend, my sibling, as a mirror not to be smashed but to be studied, I start to use other people’s edges to sharpen my own compassion. This flips the ancient fantasy that awakening requires shunning the world; instead, I find the world itself is my practice field.

There are practical habits that hold me steady: breathe first, speak slower, and treat my preferences as experiments rather than laws. I check my assumptions with a kind of forensic curiosity: Where in me does this story begin? What am I afraid of losing? Can I name the feeling without becoming the feeling? Humor proves indispensable — the little ability to laugh when I catch myself being absurd — because it keeps my heart flexible and my perspective luminous. The dance then becomes one of tenderness and wit: serious enough to be sincere, light enough to stay human.

Finally, freedom together is erotic — not only in the bedroom but in the soulful sense: it is the sweet chemistry between two selves who are learning to show up without armor. There is a seduction in presence itself, a magnetic pull in the unclenched face, the unguarded glance, the voice that does not need to be right. To be free together is to enter a long-term love affair with reality, surprised every day that we are not what we feared but what we can choose to become. It is a vow to one another: that we will try, again and again, to be the safe space where wildness can be witnessed and wisdom can be born.