Bhakti as Antidote to Numbness

Bhakti—devotion characterized by passionate, personal relationship with the divine—was Mirabai's path. She refused the cold distance of formal religion; she demanded relationship, intimacy, feeling. Modern collective grief faces the opposite danger: numbing. When tragedies occur constantly in media, we develop protective numbness. We see numbers instead of people, headlines instead of faces. Bhakti as a practice restores the capacity to feel deeply and personally, even in response to public loss. It asks: can we approach this loss with the same intensity and personal engagement as Mirabai approached the divine? This means fighting the numbing pull of media cycles and abstract statistics. Bhakti practice in collective grief means returning to particularity: learning the name of the person who died, their story, their specific humanity. This passionate attention, this refusal to let tragedy become abstract, is what bhakti offers—a way to stay awake and feeling, together, in the face of public loss.