Bhakti as Collective Witness

Mirabai's bhakti tradition teaches that love expressed through devotion need not be solitary—it can become a vessel for collective feeling. When we mourn public figures or shared tragedies, bhakti offers a framework for witnessing together without diminishing individual pain. The examined heart, central to Mirabai's work, invites us to ask: what does this public loss reveal about our values? By treating collective grief as a form of devotion to what we've lost, we honor both the specificity of mourning and its communal dimensions. This practice legitimizes public emotion as spiritually valid, not self-indulgent.