Keep taking the name even when you feel nothing.
अनुभव न हो तब भी नाम लेते रहो।
For the stretch where most people stop. Feeling is not the measure. The dry weeks are part of the road rather than a detour off it, and continuing through them is what turns an attempt into a practice.
Keep going when you feel nothing
Sooner or later almost every devotee arrives at the same complaint. The routine is intact, the name is being taken, and there is no longer anything behind it. The early warmth has gone, the practice has become mechanical, and the honest question is whether continuing something so hollow is worth the time. He hears this constantly and his answer does not vary.
Continue. That is the instruction, and he gives it without softening it into anything more comfortable. The dryness is not evidence that the practice has stopped working, and it is certainly not evidence that you have been rejected. It is the ordinary weather of a long practice, and the people who came through it are simply the ones who did not stop during it.
His reasoning goes to what feeling actually is. Emotion is a response, and responses are unreliable by construction: they depend on sleep, health, the month you are having, what happened at work. If feeling is treated as the qualification for practising, the practice inherits every fluctuation of your mood and eventually stops, because moods reliably stop.
Living with this saying
He also points out something uncomfortable about the dry period. A practice continued while it feels wonderful proves very little. Anyone will continue something that is currently pleasant. The stretch where nothing is coming back is the first point at which what you are doing stops being an exchange, and he is fairly direct that this is when it starts to count.
The failure he wants to prevent is not the dryness itself but the audit that people run during it. Devotees begin checking each session for evidence of progress, find none, and conclude they are doing it wrong. The checking is the difficulty. Attention spent measuring the practice is attention not spent in it, and a practice under constant assessment cannot settle.
What it asks of you is stubbornness rather than technique. Keep the routine exactly as it was on the days it felt good, do not shorten it because it now feels like nothing, and stop asking yourself whether it is working. If feeling returns it will return unannounced and usually when you have stopped looking for it, which is the pattern nearly everybody who has come through this describes.
A saying, not a certified transcription: a short statement of a position he has taken consistently in public satsang.
Questions about this saying
What does Premanand Ji Maharaj mean by “Keep taking the name even when you feel nothing”?
For the stretch where most people stop. Feeling is not the measure. The dry weeks are part of the road rather than a detour off it, and continuing through them is what turns an attempt into a practice.
What is this saying in Hindi?
अनुभव न हो तब भी नाम लेते रहो।
Is this an exact quotation?
No. It is a short statement of a position he has taken consistently in public satsang, not a certified transcription of one recording.
Where can I hear him speak about this?
His satsang is recorded and published on the official channels. This site is an independent devotee site and is not connected to the ashram.