1572: Should I Stay or Should I Go, Does Bhakti Require Renunciation? / Q & A Volume 268
Wisdom of the Sages
David Ramella
5 • 970 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can you practice deep spiritual life without walking away from your worldly responsibilities? Or is renunciation—of family, career, and social ties—a necessary cost of devotion? In this essential Q&A edition of Wisdom of the Sages, Raghunath and Kaustubha address one of the most pressing questions for modern spiritual seekers: can the path of bhakti be lived fully without uprooting your life? What unfolds is a powerful conversation about clarity, compassion, and the dangers of spiritual misunderstanding.
This episode dives into three thought-provoking questions:
• Is bhakti really free from the strict renunciations of other yogic paths—or is that just a myth?
• How do we trust Krishna’s plan without falling into inertia or passivity?
• How should we respond to skepticism around the bhakti tradition, especially in light of scandal and misrepresentation?
Key Highlights:
• Why external renunciation is not the essence of bhakti—and how reorienting our vision of family, work, and social life is often the real path forward.
• The subtle but vital difference between walking away from the world and seeing it through a new lens of service.
• What it truly means to “accept what’s favorable and reject what’s unfavorable” for spiritual growth.
• How to stay steady in your practice even when exposed to harmful or fanatical representations of bhakti.
• Why spiritual life is about progress, not perfection—and how to build a path that is sustainable, sincere, and real.
🎧 Tune in now for a conversation that redefines what it means to be spiritual in the real world.
🌍 Join the bhakti movement: #BhaktiYoga #SpiritualProgress #WisdomOfTheSages #YogaInModernLife #BhaktiWithoutRenunciation #KrishnaConsciousness #SpiritualBurnout #SrimadBhagavatam #BhagavadGita #ModernBhakti #DailyWisdom #QandA
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, it's Raganov, and I'm announcing our Super Soul Academy, 203-hour yoga teacher training. |
| 0:08.4 | We call it the Bhakti yoga cultural immersion, and we've been doing it for 10 years. |
| 0:14.7 | And it's hosted at the beautiful Goverdowne Eco Village with Ragnaswami and all the monks. |
| 0:19.5 | What a backdrop for transformation. |
| 0:22.7 | It all culminates in the incredible flower festival. |
| 0:26.4 | Find out why people love this training and it's our greatest offering throughout the year. |
| 0:30.8 | If you're a yoga teacher and you want to add Bhakti to your teaching, this is for you. |
| 0:36.1 | Go to my website, this is for you. Have a great day. In order to practice Bhakti, it is not required that |
| 0:57.8 | you walk away from home and that you walk away from society. This is a very clearly, you know, |
| 1:03.9 | illuminated point in the practice of Bhakti. It's not based on renunciation. You get, when you |
| 1:09.2 | come to the Bhagavā, you see the Bhagavikita was a response to the teachings of the Upanishads, which emphasized renunciation, right? |
| 1:17.0 | It's the forms and in the relationships of the material realm that keep us bound, walk away from them. |
| 1:24.5 | In the path of Bhakti, as was taught in the Bhagavakita, is saying you don't need to renounce them. You need to reorient how you see them. In the path of Bhakti, as was taught in the Bhaghāgitha, is saying you don't need to renounce them. |
| 1:29.6 | You need to reorient how you see them. You know, you need, you can stay within your family, |
| 1:36.0 | you can stay within your society, you can stay within your workplace and so on. But you need to |
| 1:41.2 | reorient how you see them. And that, in a sense, means you renounce them |
| 1:45.3 | internally. You let go of a certain possessiveness that you had in relation to your family, |
| 1:51.5 | in relation to your job, in relation to your society, right? This is my job. This is my family. |
| 1:56.8 | These are my kids. This is my money. This is my home. You don't need to leave the home and leave the family and leave the society, but you do need to reorient how you relate to it, how you see yourself in relation to it. And that, in a sense, you could call that an internal renunciation, but not the external renunciation. And so when you write that in many talks with devotees, |
| 2:19.8 | I've heard them suggest to leave my wife and daughters behind |
| 2:22.7 | if they do not support my following the Bhakti Path, |
| 2:26.3 | this suggestion has been made so frequently |
... |
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