Some one asked a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about how the
idea of an individual is a construction of the mind, if this process or understanding was similar to what many people refer
to as "Giving it over to God" or surrendering to God. I would say absolutely.
The practices we do have a power to uncover the powerful tendencies
to own our experience and from there to defend it. Working with yoga and the breath we see how we tend to live on the surface
of life, and with some reassurance we allow ourselves to plunge into the depths of a deeper sense of self. Within these depths
it is easy to see how we suffer because we don't know who or what we truly are. The practice of metta, or loving kindness
meditation is a depth charge to the heart.
Within tradition yoga systems, the practices of the heart are known collectively
as bhakti yoga. Here is a contemporary master of traditional yoga writing on bhakti yoga:
"Absolute love resolves duality. Even in love between two persons,
separation ends. If love for the Divine, or God, is total, it liquidates the individual. In perfect love or surrender,
the individual is dissolved in the Divine not like a crystal in salt water, but like water in water. There is only the Divine
which expresses the inside and outside of you. The individual is a notion, all is Divine. You dissolve as the wave dissolves
into the ocean; what goes is only your notion -- that you are different."
