Patanjali, Bhakti and Modern Life: Meditating Without Renouncing
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Living Grace in Today’s World
Living the Sadhana Without Being a Renunciant
How can one observe the sadhana while working, raising a family, and living in a modern world that leaves so little respite? In this satsang, Hans Yoganand ji reminds us that a gentle practice, lived with devotion, makes it possible to live the consciousness of Grace without aiming for samadhi. He also gives a very concrete âjnâ for not being carried away by anger, irritation or anxiety.
I understand the difficulties you may encounter in the Observance. Depending on your motivation, your Observance will differ. Patanjali said in the Yoga-Sûtras that, depending on whether the efforts are gentle, moderate or intense, the experience of the Observance will also be gentle, moderate or intense. Having a gentle practice is not a problem, as long as you accept that it will also bring gentle experiences. You can have a moderate Observance and be content with a moderate return. The problem is having a gentle practice while hoping for intense experiences, and being frustrated at not living the experiences you desired.
To have an intense practice, you need conditions that are impossible to meet today, in most Western countries, for anyone with even a minimal involvement in the life of the city, as they say: in the world, in a company, an association, a family, etc.
Those to whom the sages of old addressed themselves were, for the most part, people who devoted themselves entirely to the Observance. They aimed for samadhi, the liberation of the soul from the chains of samsara, or even, for the most ambitious, awakening. Aiming for awakening is not necessarily illegitimate, by the way; awakening isn’t dirty, it is something beautiful. Of course, ambition, even spiritual ambition, is counterproductive: it prevents detachment.
Yet most people involved in normal, natural, Western social life are subject today to constraints we did not endure in the past. Our Western world was less urbanized. Country people, who made up the majority of the population, lived more or less self-sufficiently; they were not like the workers in the great factories, who worked twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for a pittance.
They lived in a calm, serene world, paced by day and night, by the services rung from church bell towers, by the feasts of the calendar, by births, deaths, sowing, harvests, grape harvests, the milking of the cows. Of course, it was easier for them to live close to the fundamental harmony present in all things. Creation is organized according to this fundamental equation of the harmony of the Holy-Name.
When you live in a favorable environment, with no engine noise, no screens, no means of communication, with only the voices of people and animals, the sound of the wind in the trees, the thunder of the storm, the murmur of water in the rivers, and of the rain, well, you are close, very close; you are even part of this fundamental harmony. You then have no great need to be saved, nor of the Path to free yourself: you live your life.
In the past, you had no choice whether or not to take on your obligations; if you did not, you died, and your loved ones with you, of hunger, of cold. So you took them on. You were already children of God, you were in his hands, because you accepted his law, the law of nature. In France, since the advent of Christianity, you were believers, fervent believers, and sincere ones. That was no problem.
Today, in our society, it is so different! And how can we live otherwise than as society forces us to? So you cannot observe the sadhana with the intensity the traditions teach, and that I teach you too, unless you have a particular Grace and do not need to work. And not having to work is not necessarily a stroke of luck; it does not last a lifetime.
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You could then work on yourself and remain in the Observance of the sadhana from morning to night, but where would you live? In an ashram? There is no ashram of the Path in France; we are neither rich enough nor numerous enough to buy, set up and run an ashram. The only ashram of the Path is my home. There are two of us, and we live there as in an ashram, but it is not really an ashram: there are not ten, fifteen, twenty Observants with us; it is not a large house. So it is complicated to live the Observance.
But you can still draw all the flavor, all the substance of God’s Grace without being in a traditional Observance as a renunciant, a sannyâsin. You can live in your own time, in this country, with its constraints, and live Grace, the consciousness of his Grace, without following a traditional journey such as the books I quote to you teach: the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, the Dhammapada, the Vedas, the Yoga-Sûtras, the Bhaktimàrga. You can live your life as a man, a woman, a father, a mother normally, with the Path, and live that life in consciousness of God.
The sadhana applies at every level, gentle, moderate or intense. It does not change; the pillars remain the same: service, satsang, meditation, the angas. And that is extraordinary; you can make the most of it. You have little tricks. You can meditate every day, at a regular time as far as possible.
You can read and listen to satsang as many times a week as you like, at least twice, but also three, four times, every day if you wish; there is plenty to read. And during the day, you can live your life, do what you have to do when you have to do it and how you have to do it, without leaving the sadhana, without leaving the Observance, simply by doing it with the awareness that God loves you, and by being grateful to him for it.
And if you lose this awareness, you have the Holy-Name pauses to recover it. You can discipline yourself, get into the habit of stopping for a few seconds, whenever you think it possible, to recenter yourself and return to the Path, so as not to stray any further. For at first, when you stray, it is only by half a degree; but if you do not come back, if you do not correct that half degree, after a few days you are far off.
You can do something else. I am going to give you an âjnâ. It is not an order; it is a master’s spiritual counsel. Every time, and I mean every single time, you feel within you something of the order of emotion that you clearly identify as contrary to proper Observance, do everything you can not to remain in that emotion. Stop.
Stop, sit down, and take a pause. Close your eyes, relax, breathe gently, calmly, focus on the Holy-Name, in your chest, in the upper part of your chest, a little below the base of the neck, at the level of the thymus. Feel that sort of little tickle which is the kiss of the Holy-Name within you, and meditate for a few moments.
Let off the pressure of that steam engine in your mind; release that surge of anger, of incomprehension, of revolt, of hurt pride, of irritation, of a sense of injustice, of annoyance. If you really do not have time during the day to do otherwise, to have long meditations, at least do it every time something within you is in dissonance with the Holy-Name; you will see it with experience: it is its opposite, it is not right.
It is not a moral question; it is not about saying that resentment or aggressiveness is not good. I never preach morality; people may reproach me for it, but I do not preach morality. On the other hand, I have precepts, and I can tell you that if something comes to disturb your dwelling in harmony, to unsettle you, annoy you, irritate you, make you sad, bitter, anxious, make you question things, stop and practice the Holy-Name. Do not fixate on current problems, on politics, on injustices, on reasons to be anxious.
Prostrate yourself inwardly through meditation, before the Holy-Name, in the Holy-Name, and hand over to it the weight of these fluctuations which, in the long run, torment you, prevent you from making decisions and leading your life in the best way, and cloud your mind to the point that you may sometimes no longer know where you stand, nor what to do, nor what you should best do given the conditions and circumstances.
Entrust yourself to the Holy-Name; lay your worries on the altar of meditation. Sit down, meditate gently, and make yourself come back, leave this state of emotional instability. Calm your heart, calm yourself, regain self-mastery, then resume the course of your day and your obligations. Do not expect something outside yourself to bring you happiness.
Train yourself to do this every time; truly, do it every day, every single day. Do the Nectar. The Nectar can allow you to lodge your anger physically within you, so that it serves a purpose, so that it unlocks within you something of the order of devotion. Do it, do the Nectar: instead of clenching your fists, clench something else; practice the Nectar and meditate. It will pull you out of many a quagmire, I can assure you.
If you have any questions, please write here: madhyama.marga@gmail.com
Originally published at https://observance.over-blog.com on October 16, 2026.
