In “A Question of Devotion,” the 100th episode of Being Yourself, Gangaji speaks about the explosion of love we can experience on the spiritual path and the fear that can arise in its wake. In this essay, Barbara Denempont, host of Being Yourself and executive director of the Gangaji Foundation, shares how she came face to face with her own fear of devotion, what she thought it would cost her, and what she discovered in a moment of surrender.
Devotion is effortless. That is what I discovered. For the longest time, I thought it was some kind of personal failure, a sign of weakness that I would be devoted to something or someone else. I was wrong. Devotion is my nature.
As someone who didn’t particularly follow a spiritual path in her younger days, the concept of devotion was already far from my experience. But when you look carefully, you are devoted to something. You are giving your life to something. The question is, “What are you giving your life to, really?”
It is relatively easy to look at one day of your life and see how your energy was spent and where your attention was drawn. For the longest time, I can’t say I gave much thought to what I wanted beyond simply pleasing others. Perhaps that was what fueled my aversion to devotion.
There was some idea that if I could be good, I would survive. That was the real motivation. My survival. That seems natural enough. Not even unreasonable. But fortunately for me, it was not enough. And that, in a nutshell, was my spiritual search. Finding enough. I wanted to be enough, and I knew that I was not enough in so many ways. Life appeared as a competition, and I was losing ground. In my mind I wasn’t last, but I wasn’t near first either.
It shocks me, even now, to write that down. No wonder survival wasn’t enough. No wonder. No wonderment. All that seeking approval and success and trying to avoid failure was empty and unsatisfying and exhausting.
I suppose that the luck of desire is that it reveals what is utterly unsatisfying and sets you on the search for more. In my mental and physical exhaustion, I left New York City for Boulder, Colorado, with no plan in sight except to rest. I didn’t know what was to come. What I can say now is that after all that searching for relief or solace or kindness or love, it’s in the stopping of the search that Life reveals itself in its blissful enormity. That’s the great paradox.
I first met Gangaji at a public meeting in Boulder in 1993. I didn’t understand a word she was saying, but she did stop me in my tracks. The following year, I joined her for a two-week retreat at Breitenbush in Oregon. While I had deep realizations during that retreat, my mind was active too. As she began reading a letter I had written to her, Gangaji called out from the stage:
Barbara, where is Barbara? You too have been watching, watching, checking, checking, checking. That's good. It's good if really you're watching. Rather than just using this habit of watching. It's good if you really want to see.
I did want to see.
From the first time I met Gangaji, I could hear the dare in her voice when she encouraged us—encouraged me—to stop and be still. Such a simple instruction, and I found it hugely challenging.
I fought with myself over what it meant. What would I be giving up? For some reason, I thought it was my independence. Whatever that was. Somehow, it felt as though I’d be giving up my ability to choose. But what choice was I really talking about? Looking back, I can sum it up in one word. Power. My independence seemed like the only power I had. I was self-reliant, and it had served me well when it came to survival. When I contemplated the idea of giving up my self-reliance, even for just a moment, the fear of devotion surfaced.
Not needing someone else for my survival seemed like a lot to give up. Of course, this whole notion of independence is illusory, even ridiculous. It isn’t real. But this so-called power, or better said, my desire for it, was actually holding me back from experiencing love in the deepest sense. With my attention on being independent, I lost sight of what really mattered at the core.
I imagine this is the disconnection Adam and Eve felt. I was one human being in a lineage of billions who have felt cast out of the garden. My refuge was self-reliance, which gave me a remarkably false sense of security.
What I wanted was love.
