Bhakti as Embodied Knowing

Bhakti is a path of feeling, singing, dancing, devotion through the body. Mirabai's love was expressed through movement, music, touch—the full embodied self. In attraction, we often diminish or distrust bodily knowing, especially around desire. We intellectualize attraction or dismiss it as 'merely physical.' Bhakti reintegrates these: the body's response is intelligent information. The way your nervous system settles or activates around someone, the way your breath changes in their presence, the pull of your attention toward them—these are forms of wisdom. Embodied knowing in attraction includes sensuality without shame, desire without guilt, physical magnetism without reducing the person to their body. Mirabai's poetry celebrates both spiritual longing and bodily response; they're not separate. When we honor attraction as an embodied knowing, we become literate in a language most of us were taught to mistrust or suppress. This concept validates the felt sense as a legitimate way of knowing another person and ourselves.