The Miracles You Keep Walking Past

There was a time before any of this made sense. Before the spiritual work. Before the sessions. Before I knew what I was even noticing.

I learned to feel grateful for the smallest things most people around me didn't even register.

Not the big things. Not the promotion or the perfect holiday. The smallest things. A moment that would be invisible to everyone around me. A conversation that shifted something I couldn't articulate yet. A stranger showing up at a time that couldn't be coincidence. A small incident that would be missed by everybody around me, but I could see it. And I'd be grateful for it. Excited about it.

And that gratitude opened something in me. It opened me up to the signs. The ones that are always there. Always arriving whether you notice them or not.

What people call parables. Stories from ancient texts. That wisdom playing itself out in real life. It happens all the time. Not in some mystical, dramatic way. In the quiet way. The way you only catch if you're paying attention. If your internal noise is low enough. If you've stopped rehearsing what you need and started actually seeing what's here.

We all miss this. Not because the signs aren't there. Because we are looking for something louder. Something that matches the picture we have already drawn in our heads. Something that confirms what we already decided we need.

But that's not how it works.

The miracles don't announce themselves. They show up as the stranger who sat next to you when you needed exactly that conversation. The plan that fell apart and left something better in the wreckage. The pull toward a place you had no intention of visiting.

You have to be quiet enough to receive them.

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Pushkar

I don't know why I'm attracted to Pushkar. I've tried to explain it. I can't.

But I keep going back.

The first time I came, I came with longing. That deep ache for something I couldn't name. Most people who end up at sacred places come like that. Wanting something. Needing something. Hoping the place itself will hand them what their life hasn't.

Over time, the longing became silent. Not dead. Silent. It turned into awareness and acceptance. Just being able to see things as they are without needing them to be different. It stopped being about what I could get. It became about what's going to happen.

Shifts. One after another. Quiet ones.

I was here for my birthday once. Disappointed. Sad. Pretending it didn't matter that I knew nobody. And I found myself surrounded by people who wanted to listen to what I have to say. People who just came out of nowhere and spent time with me. Not because I was performing anything. Not because I was offering anything.

They just showed up.

Nobody asked me to prove myself. Nobody asked me what I do. What my background is. What I can give them. They just sat with me. And in that sitting, something happened that all my years of trying to earn belonging could never produce. Belonging just arrived. Without me doing anything to earn it. Like it had been waiting for me to stop trying so hard.

This time was different again.

I found myself part of a community. People I did not know. People not from my social background. People whose lives looked nothing like mine. And there I was. On the floor. In the aangan of an old temple. Not a mass market tourist spot. Not a place you find on Instagram. Being welcomed. By the Divine Feminine. By everything around me.

And I felt nothing but grateful for every single experience that was coming through.

I couldn't tell you why. I couldn't give you a logical framework. I couldn't make a presentation about what shifted and when. But something in me knew. I was exactly where I was supposed to be. And the knowing didn't come from my mind. It came from somewhere deeper. Somewhere the mind can't reach, no matter how hard it tries.

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From Theatre to Truth

My first Shakti Peeth was in Kolkata. I'd visited multiple times over my whole life. And every single time, it was performative. Go. Bow your head. Pray for money. Pray for a woman. Pray for whatever the ego was chasing that month. Same theatrics as everyone else standing in that line. Same transaction with the divine. I'll do this, you give me that.

I didn't know any different. That's what I saw everyone around me doing. That's what I was taught devotion looks like. Show up. Ask. Perform the right steps. Receive. And if you don't receive, show up again. Ask harder. Perform better.

Nobody told me that devotion might look like something completely different.

Then on one of my birthday visits to Pushkar, I heard about a Shakti Peeth there. And when I visited, it was unlike anything I'd experienced at the other places. It was quiet. It was small. There was a small community of the people who live near it. A baba who loves to call himself Bikhari Baba. A man who has dedicated his entire life to helping people feel the bliss of Ma. Not to convert them. Not to collect followers. Not to build an empire. Just to help people feel what he feels.

He welcomed me. Treated me like I existed.

Not like a customer. Not like a devotee performing the correct sequence of steps. Like a human being who had arrived at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. I can't overstate how different that felt from every other sacred space I'd walked into with my list of demands.

I came back home. Within a short period of time, I got a deep call to visit Ma Kamakhya. This was not planned. Not on any list. Not part of any spiritual checklist I was working through. It just pulled me. The kind of pull that doesn't come with a reason. You don't decide it. It decides you. And when I got there, I just belonged. Not the belonging you earn by saying the right things or knowing the right people. The belonging that exists before you arrive.

The right guidance came at the right time. As it always does when you stop trying to manufacture it.

And that visit changed my life.

I'm not going to explain how. Some things resist explanation. They lose something when you try to package them into words. All I can tell you is that something that wasn't part of my awareness before suddenly became central to it. The Divine Feminine. Shakti. Not as a concept I'd read about. As something I could feel. Something that was alive in my experience in a way it had never been before.

This is where something became clear.

It doesn't matter what form your spiritual practice takes. Whether you work with Shakti. Whether you follow a deeply ritualistic path. Whether you sit in silence. Whether you chant. Whether you pray to a form or to the formless.

At some point, none of that feels like the point anymore.

Because every path, if you follow it honestly, if you follow it without turning it into a performance, brings you to the same place.

Yourself.

"He lived free and remained free, and let everyone remain free likewise." Sri Ramana Maharshi, Erase The Ego

Ramana didn't follow a path anyone prescribed for him. No guru made him great. No scripture illuminated him. He was the quest and the goal. He was unique in remaining true to himself and being himself. Not because he rejected everything. Because he stopped needing anything external to validate what he already knew.

That's what every practice points toward. Not the practice itself. Not the deity. Not the tradition. Not the temple. Not the ritual.

You. Who are you? That's the only question that was ever being asked.

Every sacred place, every practice, every teacher, every pull you can't explain. They're all just bringing you closer to that question.

And most of us will try every single one of them before we realize the question was never about the path.

It was about whether you're willing to actually sit with yourself when the noise stops.

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The Bliss You Keep Missing

You are a soul having an experience.

I know you've heard that before. You've read it in books. Seen it on Instagram. Nodded at it. But have you actually let it land?

Not as something you agree with. As something you live from.

Because most of us live as if the opposite is true. We live as the experience. We become the experience. The job. The relationship. The heartbreak. The achievement. The failure. We wrap ourselves so completely in what's happening that we forget who is actually having it.

When you associate yourself with the experience, when you become the wave instead of remembering you are the ocean, you miss the bliss of being alive. The simple, extraordinary bliss that requires nothing from the outside to exist. You miss what's sitting right in front of you because you're busy chasing what you've decided you need.

"A major aspect of our mission on Earth as souls is to mentally survive being cut off from our real home. While in a human body, the soul is essentially alone." Michael Newton, Journey of Souls

Mentally survive being cut off from our real home.

That's the assignment. Not accumulate more. Not achieve more. Not manifest more. Not negotiate with the universe for better terms. Survive the forgetting long enough to remember what you are.

And what do we do instead? We chase. We make lists of what we want. We bargain with God, with the universe, with whatever we believe in. "I'll do the spiritual work. I'll meditate. I'll go to the temple. I'll do the rituals. But you have to give me what I want." We set conditions. We create timelines. We decide in advance what the miracles should look like and then we get angry when they show up differently.

That's not spirituality. That's a business deal. That's the ego wearing spiritual clothes and calling it devotion.

I did this for years. In Kolkata. At every temple I walked into with my list. Give me this. Make this happen. I'll show up, you deliver. And when it didn't work, I didn't question the approach. I questioned the deity. I questioned my luck. I questioned my karma. Everything except the one thing that needed questioning: the assumption that the universe owed me the outcome I'd already planned.

The things we chase, most of them come from our association with this body. This identity. This name, this story, this collection of preferences and fears and desires. And desire isn't the enemy. I'm not saying that. Kashmir Shaivism teaches that the universe is consciousness celebrating itself through form. Desire is part of that celebration. Wanting is not the problem.

But when the wanting becomes louder than the living, when the chasing drowns out the being, something fundamental is off.

"The aim is to enjoy the process of life, not be trapped by it." Sadhguru, Karma

You fulfill your role when you're piloting this body toward what the soul came here to do.

Not what the mind wants. Not what the ego demands. What the soul agreed to before you got here. And there's nothing more useful than that. Nothing. Not money. Not status. Not the relationship you've been asking for. Nothing is more useful than aligning with what you actually came to do.

And you don't know what that is. Not fully. You see one link of the chain. The past and the future are hidden. You don't have the bigger picture.

So do your part. Show up honestly. And stop asking for things to happen in a particular way. Because what you want comes from the ego, from the overall association with this body. And you are not this body. You are a soul. And when you fulfill the role of what the goal of the soul is, there's nothing more useful than that.

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Come Home

There are things to be grateful for all the time. Right now. Not someday when things work out.

Not when the relationship arrives.

Not when the promotion comes through.

Not when the healing is complete.

Now.

The miracles are happening around us all the time. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind you miss when you're too busy rehearsing your next prayer. The kind that only registers when the noise inside is low enough to notice.

And we always forget. Life is not happening to us. It is happening for us.

That job you lost. For you.

That relationship that ended. For you.

That plan that fell apart.

That person who left.

That door that closed in your face. For you.

Not to punish you. Not to test you. Because your soul chose the curriculum.

And the curriculum doesn't care about your comfort. It cares about your evolution.

"As the drop of water is to the ocean, that is what Oneness is. The essence of the drop is every bit the essence of the totality." Rasha, Oneness

You are not separate from what you're longing for. The love, the belonging, the peace.

It's not somewhere else. It never was. You just convinced yourself it was something you had to go out and find. Something you had to deserve.

But it was never about deserving. It was always already yours.

And the way back isn't through chasing more. Acquiring more. Asking the universe for more while holding a scorecard.

The way back is through gratitude for what is already here. Through noticing. Through being quiet enough to catch the small things. Through sitting on the floor in the courtyard of an old temple with people whose lives look nothing like yours and feeling, for no reason you can explain, that you belong.

That belonging isn't something Pushkar gave me. It's something Pushkar showed me I already had. It was always there. I was just too loud, too busy chasing, too full of my own plans to notice.

Come home to yourself.

Whatever the universe has planned.

Whatever your destiny holds.

Whatever belief system guides you.

Do your part. Show up honestly.

And stop asking for things to happen in a particular way.

Because you do not know the bigger picture.

The miracles are already happening.

You just have to stop walking past them.

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