People speak of devotion as though it were primarily a feeling. A warmth toward something sacred. A gentle turning of attention toward what you love. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
I was a princess. I had a husband, a palace, a defined social role, the expectation of a specific life. I left all of it. Not because I was unhappy in the ordinary sense. Because what I was devoted to could not live inside the structure I had been given, and I had to choose.
Rabi'a al-Adawiyya chose a harder renunciation — the renunciation of wanting anything from love, even its return. I was not capable of that at first. My devotion to Krishna was desperate and ecstatic and full of longing. What it taught me, slowly, is that the longing itself was pointing somewhere more important than its object.
Dipa Ma said that what loss made possible was the discovery of what she was when the scaffolding was gone. Devotion, taken seriously, produces something similar — it strips away what you are willing to sacrifice until what remains is the thing you would sacrifice anything for.
The examined life asks: what would you keep, if you had to choose? Most people have not asked this question honestly because the answer might require them to leave something.