Yogini Ekadashi

Yogini Ekadashi falls on the eleventh tithi of the dark fortnight of Ashadha (Jeth Vad in the Gujarati reckoning), arriving between Nirjala and Devshayani Ekadashis, just before the Lord's great rest begins. Its mahatmya is told in the Padma Purana, where Shri Krishna narrates it to Yudhishthira.

In Alkapuri, the city of Kubera, lived a gardener named Hemamali, whose daily seva was to bring fresh flowers from Manasarovar for his master's worship of Shiva. One morning, lingering in pleasure with his wife, he forgot the flowers altogether. Kubera, kept waiting in his puja, cursed him: he would suffer leprosy and be parted from his beloved. Wandering in misery, Hemamali at last reached the ashram of Markandeya Rishi, who, seeing his remorse, taught him the vrat of Yogini Ekadashi. By its observance his disease fell away, he regained a divine form and was reunited with his wife. The scriptures declare that this single vrat bears fruit equal to feeding eighty-eight thousand Brahmins.

The heart of this katha is not the curse but the lapse: a servant whose one appointed seva was to bring flowers, and who let his own pleasure delay them. Yogini Ekadashi is observed so that this never becomes our story — so that the small, daily offerings we have been given to make reach Prabhu on time, with a whole heart.

For a Pushtimarg Vaishnav the vrat is not an austerity performed to earn merit; it is a day emptied of worldly weight and filled with Shrinathji. The lightness of fasting is used for smaran and kirtan, for sitting longer in seva, for asking nothing. Hemamali was not restored by penance but by grace flowing through the vrat — and grace, pushti, is the very name of this path. The phal the shastras promise is immense, yet the sweeter fruit is inward: the senses grow quiet, negligence dissolves, and the flowers of our seva — attention, time, love — reach the Lord fresh, as they always should have.