How can bhakti help us overcome our emotional fears?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, if our fear is, we are having some emotional fears.
Yeah, that is, there are three fears, the top ten fears, which I talked about that, they did some surveys. The three fears that are very, they are modern fears, you could say. So, one of them is fear of parents.
Another, which is a typically modern fear, is a fear of rejection. In the past, most marriages were by arrangement. So, now you go and propose to someone, what if that person rejects me? So much fear because of that.
So, that’s a, especially among teenagers and those who are of a marriageable age. Constant fear that is there. So, we may have relational fears, which are largely emotional.
Now, when this happens, there are multiple levels at which it can be dealt with. But, the most important thing is to recognize that ultimately our emotional shelter is Krishna. In the fourth canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam, Dhruv Maharaj’s mother tells him that whatever love I can offer you, Lord Vishnu can offer you more love than billions of mothers like me.
Therefore, take shelter of Lord Vishnu. So, here what does it mean? She is not saying that my love for you is false. Sometimes she is saying that there is no love in this world.
It’s in terms of the unlimitedness of the love that is there in the spiritual world. It’s very small over here. But, yes.
She is saying that, yes. I offer you some love. But, Lord Vishnu can offer you much greater love.
So, similarly, when we have a relationship with someone, through a relationship we get some affection, we get some protection, we get some reciprocation, we need to see that ultimately it is Krishna offering us love through that person. That it is Krishna. There is that famous prayer, You are my mother.
You are my father. You are my brother. You are my friend.
You are my wealth. You are my knowledge. You, Lord, are my everything.
Now, what does it mean? It doesn’t literally mean that the mother is God, the father is God. It means that all these are things from which we get shelter. We get protection.
We get strength. You know, from our mother, from our father, from our friends, from our wealth, from our knowledge. So, what he is saying is, what this verse is saying is, yes, it is actually Krishna who is giving the shelter through all these things.
So, we acknowledge the medium. Medium is important. But the medium is not the source.
And sometimes in our life, we may have got love and shelter and reciprocation through one medium. And life changes, people change, we change. Sometimes that person may not offer us that reciprocation.
So, if we are not able to see the connection of that person with Krishna, then we feel as if I am going to be divested of love. I am going to be betrayed. I am going to be rejected.
I am going to be lonely. I am going to be unsheltered. But if I see that actually this is connected with Krishna.
It is Krishna who is giving the shelter to me through this person. We value that person because there is a personal reciprocation with them also. But at the same time, we don’t limit that reciprocation only to that person.
So, then Krishna may arrange to give that love to somebody else. Or Krishna may reveal himself directly within my heart. So, if we recognize this point that whatever emotional support we get from anyone, that is ultimately Krishna giving to that person, then the amount of insecurity because of that person’s change of behavior or the possibility that person may turn away from us or against us, that decreases substantially.
Having said that, we need to first develop our relationship with Krishna. And we can get a lot of emotional strength also through our connection with Krishna. If we become intensely devoted to Him, we intensify our bhakti practices, then we do get a lot of emotional shelter in Him.
And then the emotional anxiety, agitation that is there, that goes down substantially. That is, the second thing is that with respect to the anxieties, even with respect to emotions, we have to object, we have to, we are, some of us may be more emotional, some of us may be more rational, but even when we are emotional, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a rational faculty at all. And if somebody is very rational, that doesn’t mean they don’t have emotional faculty, it’s just one bit more.
So if we know that there are certain things about which we become emotional, then at times when we are not emotional, when we are rational, at that time we analyze and we prepare. Okay, you know, in this situation, I tend to become very emotional. So what can I do to deal with it? Maybe, if this person speaks like this to me, I feel very, very hurt by it.
Maybe I know, I can, this is my friend, I can call and talk with this person, now this is what I can do. Or this is a situation when this is likely to happen, then let me move away from that situation beforehand. When the exchanges start becoming very bitter, better before somebody speaks too much, just walk out from there.
Basically, we use our rational side to prepare for the way our emotions function and then deal with it practically. So, we need to have emotional connections with multiple people and they are all different ways of relating. We get some relationship with us, some support through our friends, some support through our family members, some support through our relatives.
So, then, one problem often comes up is we have too much expectation from one person. So, especially, in today’s world, in the past, there were joint families, now we have nuclear families. So, what happens is, in the joint families, we could get different kinds of emotional support from different people.
Now, it all becomes concentrated in one relationship and that’s why if we are in a devotee community where we become a part of a family that is bigger than just our own small family, then we can get some support from others also. So, if we know the situations when we tend to get agitated and we prepare for that by also having other emotional shelters. Krishna is our ultimate emotional shelter, but we also need shelters in this world.
So, if we can connect with other devotees also and share our heart with them and we find out that some devotees only can connect, then their emotional anxiety can be calmed down much more.