Bhakti-yoga, the yoga of love and devotion, is a living tradition, which is described in ancient scriptures like the Bhagavad-gita, the Upanisads and the Puranas. Bhakti-yoga is not a belief, it is a science. It does not belong to any religious order or philosophical system. Bhakti is a universal principle and it is not limited to a temple, church, mosque or any institution.
The power of love is so much stronger than everything else that exists. We can renounce everything, but we can never live without love. We may live in the most difficult circumstances, but if we have loving relationships then we feel our life is meaningful and fulfilling. But on the other hand, even if we have everything we want, all opulence, all kinds of enjoyments, money, position, fame, power, people praising us, but if there is no real love in our life, we are feeling desperate, hopeless, empty. This is because the nature of the soul is to love.
Our loving propensity expands just as a vibration of light or air expands. The missing point, however, is to where to repose our love so that we won’t get frustrated. Bhakti-yoga teaches us how to connect with the innermost of our heart and repose our loving propensity in our origin, in God. If we really want to transform our lives, we should not go for a stale, peaky kind of love, but we need intense love, the overwhelming love of Jesus Christ, Mother Teresa and Haridas Thakur.  We may think this is not possible for us, but actually prema, love for God, is already situated in the heart of all of us, and bhakti-yoga has the potential to fully reawaken it.
Our need to love can be fully satisfied only when it is reposed in the original person. By reviving this original, supreme love we will immediately and simultaneously love every living entity and nothing can ever frustrate our love. In the present age it has become almost impossible to tame the mind, to relieve the mind from all troubles and anxieties and make it calm and peaceful. But in the presence of bhakti, when our heart is involved, the quality of our mind immediately changes. We start living in complete harmony with our surroundings and we become thoroughly happy. Greed turns into satisfaction, envy into compassion, anger into forgiveness, and lust into pure love.
The process of bhakti-yoga is also called devotional service. It starts with hearing (sravanam), chanting (kirtanam) and meditating (smaranam). The complete practice includes the use of our intelligence, our mind and all our senses in the service of the Absolute.
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