Prayers inspired by Damodarāṣṭakam: Kartik special
As the sacred month of Kartik begins, I’m embarking on a new offering — a series of prayers inspired by the Damodarāṣṭakam, the beautiful song we sing daily during this month.
Each prayer will be based on one line from this poetic classic, drawing out its timeless emotions and spiritual insights in a contemporary voice. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing thirty-two prayers — reflections meant to help us all enter more into the universe of divine love revealed through the Damodar-lila, where the infinite Lord is bound by the love of his devotee.
I hope and pray that these prayers help us open our hearts more fully to the Lord who lets himself be bound — not by ropes, but by affection.
May this Kartik become a journey to a deeper, richer, sweeter devotion.
Your beauty supreme, O Lord, let me cherish
Make my life a part of your symphony of beauty
Draw me to the love that inverts all hierarchy
Let my heart learn the love that can catch the uncaught
Your tears don’t diminish your glory—they deepen it
You become endearingly vulnerable to show how love is endlessly valuable
In You, O Lord, Even the Negative Becomes Positive
Your purpose is successful even when my service isn’t
Carry me from drops of fleeting pleasure to the ocean of your ever-blissful love
Lift me from making you a part of my life to making me a part of your life
Let Me Approach You Not as a Puzzle to Be Solved but as a Person to Be Loved
Let me act on my drop-like devotion and aspire for the ocean of devotion
May the mystery of your love be solved by your love
Desiring you, O Lord, means selecting, elevating, and concentrating desire
May I behold with my eyes and hold within your heart your all-attractive form
Let my mind, a wanderer, become a pilgrim
May your form play forever in the courtyard of my heart
May your specific intimate loving exchanges inspire me to universal intense loving expressions
May the beauty of your hair free my heart from Maya’s lair
Let my mind keep returning to you till it rests in you
You, O invulnerable, become vulnerable to reveal what is supremely valuable
Grant me the boat of your remembrance to cross the ocean of material turbulence
Your glance is merciful glance, let it make my empty heart full
Perceiving you, O enchanter, is both enriching and impoverishing
Free me from the limiting notion that you are limited by any situation
Help me accept material curses that open me to spiritual blessings
Glorious is the push and pull of your grace
Glorious are those liberated from the desire to be liberated
As you used the rope in your play, rope me too into your play
Amazing is what you allow to be done to you for love’s sake
Grant me the shelter of the one who is the shelter of devotion