Prema: Love as the Container for Loss

Prema—transcendent, selfless love—is the emotional and spiritual center of bhakti practice. For Mirabai, her love for Krishna was large enough to contain her grief, her rage, her confusion, her despair. Prema was not sentimental; it was fierce and clarifying. When grieving a lost identity, grief becomes unbearable when it exists in isolation, when you are angry at yourself or ashamed of the change. But if this same grief is held within a larger love—love for your own becoming, love for truth-telling, love for the person you might become—it transforms. Mirabai did not grieve in bitterness but in a paradoxical state of sorrow and devotion simultaneously. She was sad and loving. You can practice this by cultivating prema toward yourself: a love that is committed to your awakening, even when awakening means the death of an old self. This love becomes the vessel in which your grief can exist without destroying you.