Spiritual Fitness

Bhakti yogis carefully control their senses and minds by engaging them in service to Krishna and Krishna's devotees. The control is not the white-knuckle restraint we tend to imagine when we hear the word discipline. It is, instead, the quieter and more lasting work of giving the senses something better to do.

"Thus practicing constant control of the body, mind and activities, the mystic transcendentalist, his mind regulated, attains to the kingdom of God by cessation of material existence."

— Bhagavad-gita 6.15

Constant, not occasional

The Gita's word is constant. Not heroic, not occasional, not reserved for the dramatic morning. The senses are practiced the way a musician practices scales — daily, gently, without spectacle. The mind, after long enough, learns the new song.

And so the small interior weather of the practitioner begins to change. The room of the chest, once crowded, becomes a room one can return to. The senses, once scattered, begin to point in the same direction — toward the holy name, toward the service at hand, toward the next quiet hour.

There is no spectacle in this. There is only, slowly, a life that has become its own steady practice.

Some months ago, during a serious drought, I adjusted the small automatic watering system in our backyard, lowering the volume and the frequency. Within two and a half months the garden had quietly given up — leaves dry, growth stalled, the figs paused mid-effort.

Two weeks ago I increased the daily water by five percent. Just five. The garden has begun to perk up: green tips returning, the figs filling out again, even a rose or two emerging from the brown.

The arithmetic of practice

It is hard not to see in this a small parable for spiritual life. A five-percent increase in one's daily bhakti practice — a slightly longer round of chanting, one more chapter heard, a few more minutes given to service — is often enough to revive a wilting taste for it. The change need not be dramatic to be real.

The bhakti scriptures advise us, accordingly, to keep a careful eye on our daily intake of devotional water. Not because the soul is fragile, but because attention is. Adapted from a reflection by Vaisesika Dasa.