Anuraga: Spontaneous Love-Response to Life

Anuraga is the Sanskrit term for that natural, spontaneous flowering of love and response that arises without effort or pretense. Mirabai's poetry has anuraga in it: the sense that these songs could not be contained, that they poured out of her because she had no choice. Anuraga is what happens when emotion is so intense that it overflows the boundaries of propriety, shame, or self-consciousness. In grief work and creative practice, anuraga invites us to bypass the internal critic, the voice that says we should be over it by now, that our emotions are too raw, too much, too public. When we create from loss with anuraga, we bypass the fortress of ego and speak what is true. This doesn't mean undisciplined work; rather, it means that the discipline comes after the anuraga—in the refinement and shaping of what has already insisted on being expressed. Mirabai's courage lay partly in her anuraga, her refusal to perform grief as anything other than what it was. Creative makers who work with loss often find that their most vital pieces emerge in moments of anuraga—when they stop managing their feelings and let the feelings move through them and into form.