Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Only the One, and the true teacher, really understand what hurts inside me. I cannot keep going without speaking that living Name. So please give me the medicine — the words of the Perfect Guru. When I hold the Name close, repeating it, I am lifted up and made whole again.
The seeker calls her longing an illness — bedan — and says something striking: only the divine and the perfect Guru truly know it. There is a kind of inner ache no one else can diagnose, because it is the ache of separation from the source itself. This is viraha named as a sickness, exactly as the Sufi poets called love a malady only the Beloved can cure.
And the cure is itself unusual: aukhadh mantar — the medicine is a mantar, the Naam given by the Guru. Hau reh na sakaa bin naam vakhaane — "I cannot survive without uttering the Name." Here Naam is not a concept to understand but a living word to repeat; the repetition itself is the healing. The repeated name (Har, Har) is its own practice — saying it again and again is simran, and the doubling is not redundancy but rhythm, breath, the heartbeat of remembrance.
The verb udhreeai — to be lifted, carried across, saved — connects back to the world-ocean of the Rahao. The medicine for the illness and the boat across the ocean turn out to be the same thing: the Naam held alive in the mouth and heart.
Is there a feeling in you that you think no one fully understands? What would it mean to trust that something does?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI