A Yogini Who Made Unity Ordinary

 

A Yogini Who Made Unity Ordinary

A spiritual reflection on Lalleshwari

Unity is often treated as a destination—rare, elevated, difficult to reach. It is spoken of in grand declarations and remembered on special days. Lalleshwari, revered with affection as Lal Ded and Lal Arifa, did something far more radical: she made unity ordinary. So ordinary that it stopped needing explanation.

She did not announce oneness. She lived in a way where separation simply failed to arise.

Most spiritual traditions attempt to resolve division by teaching harmony as an ideal. Lalleshwari approached from another angle. She noticed that division survives on attention. It feeds on repetition, on stories told again and again about difference. She starved division not by opposing it, but by refusing to give it a stage in her daily life.

Her yogic insight was deceptively simple: what you do not dramatise, dissolves.

She did not wake up to unify religions or reconcile communities. She woke up present. Fully present. In that presence, distinctions softened naturally. When awareness is steady, the mind has no urgency to classify. Unity then is not a belief—it is a byproduct of clarity.

Lalleshwari’s yogic life was not performed in caves or secluded sanctuaries alone. It flowed through lanes, homes, conversations, silences. She showed that the deepest spiritual maturity is not mystical intensity but relational ease. When the self is no longer defended, others are no longer encountered as threats.

This is how unity became ordinary around her. Not through effort, but through absence of inner friction.

She understood that people fracture the world because they are fractured within. Inner conflict projects outward as ideology, superiority, fear. Lalleshwari addressed the fracture at its root—not socially, but inwardly. She aligned body, breath, awareness, and speech. When alignment is lived, unity requires no teaching.

What made her incomparable was her refusal to turn unity into a project. Projects create sides: those who are doing it right and those who are not. She had no such hierarchy. Her presence carried a quiet permission: you do not need to become different to belong.

In her world, people of different faiths did not come together to “practice harmony.” They simply interacted without tension. Unity was not an event; it was the background condition. Like air—noticed only when absent.

This ordinariness is precisely why her legacy endures. Extraordinary spirituality dazzles but rarely transfers. Ordinary spirituality migrates. It enters kitchens, markets, daily decisions. It becomes culture.

Today, unity is often spoken of loudly and lived rarely. It is posted, debated, demanded. Lalleshwari offers a corrective: if unity requires constant assertion, it has not yet settled into being.

Her yogic insight invites us to examine a difficult question:
Where do we still make unity special, performative, or conditional?

Because wherever unity is conditional, division is quietly preserved.

Lalleshwari did not teach people to agree. She taught them—by example—to be unthreatened. When you are not threatened, difference relaxes. When difference relaxes, unity feels natural.

She was a yogini not because she mastered postures or doctrines, but because she mastered integration. Nothing in her life was split—sacred and secular, inner and outer, self and other. That wholeness radiated outward as simplicity.

Unity, in her presence, stopped being a goal.
It became the way things already were.

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Practical Daily Toolkit: Making Unity Ordinary

1. Morning Grounding (2 minutes)
Before the day begins, feel your breath and body without naming them. Unity starts before thought.

2. One Unlabelled Interaction
Each day, meet one person without mentally naming their role, belief, or category.

3. Inner Friction Scan
Pause midday and ask:
“Where am I subtly resisting what is?”
Release the tension gently.

4. Difference Without Distance
When disagreement arises, stay connected to the person—not the position.

5. Evening Integration (5 minutes)
Ask:

• Where did I live divided today?

• Where did I live whole?