NEW YORK (RNS) — Manirag Reddy Gaddam, a 30-year-old data analyst from Hoboken, New Jersey, said he had never anticipated his sudden turn to the Hindu faith in his 20s. Equally unexpected, he said, was pulling an all-nighter last year as he celebrated Mahashivratri, the daylong Hindu holiday dedicated to principle deity Lord Shiva. 

“I was planning to exit at 2 a.m.,” said Reddy Gaddam, “but the air was so electric that I just stayed. By the time I went home, it was 8 a.m. It was crazy.”

This year’s celebration of the holiday, which fell on Sunday (Feb. 15) and ended early Monday, was no less of an exertion. “Today, I’m fasting as well, like I haven’t eaten anything today, I didn’t drink anything,” said Reddy Gaddam. “I don’t know how I’m surviving, but I have a lot of energy.”

From a rented event space in New York with nearly 300 others, Reddy Gaddam watched a Mahashivratri celebration livestreamed by the Isha Yoga Center in southern India. The celebration, hosted by the renowned guru and yoga teacher Sadhguru, drew an estimated 140 million followers around the world, who chanted, meditated and danced in remote locations for 12 hours. 

Mahashivratri, which means “the Great Night of Shiva” in Sanskrit, takes place as Lord Shiva’s cosmic energies are said to be at their highest. Falling as the new moon of the lunar month of Phalguna is dark in the sky, the festival is traditionally marked by staying awake for 12 or 24 hours, as devotees deepen connection with themselves and Lord Shiva. Sometimes the 12 hours are spent in meditation, or in “marathons” of devotional singing to the deity of destruction and transformation.

“When you sit with your spine straight, there’s an upsurge of energy,” said Reddy Gaddam. “When we’re doing this whole meditation together, it is magnetic, like you can feel that energy. I was just feeling ecstatic. We kept dancing the whole night, we sat down for 30 minutes, and then we just kept dancing up until morning. We felt the presence of Adiyogi,” he said, using an alternative name for Shiva that refers to the god as the first ascetic yogi, from which all yogic wisdom arose.

Mahashivratri also marks the divine marriage of Shiva and the goddess Parvati, the embodiment of feminine energy, which is called Shakti. Devotees of Shiva, called Shaivites, worship both the masculine Shiva and feminine Shakti together as Paramashiva.

In Los Angeles, Tripurasundari, an initiate of a Shaivite Hindu community, Kailasa USA, has been preparing for Mahashivratri for months. On the biggest night of the year for the “Hindu micro-nation,” as the group calls itself, almost 100 devotees offered milk, ghee, flowers and fruits to the Shiva Lingam — the stone obelisk that represents Shiva in his transcendent form.

Swami Nithyananda, himself considered an incarnation of Paramashiva, the union of feminine and masculine Shakti, oversees Kailasa’s temple, which is home to the largest Shiva Lingam in North America. 

“It’s really easy to stay up all night,” said Tripurasundari, a California native. “You have so much bhakti because there’s so much energy,” she said, using the Sanskrit word for love of the divine. “And of course, a lot of us wake up and we do puja (ritual worship) and we do yoga, and we meditate, and our kundalinis (primal energies) are awakened. There’s so many aspects of that energy staying alive within us.”

According to many Shaivites, the ultimate goal of enlightenment in “Paramashiva’s economy” can come from connection with Shiva — the primordial energy which is not only a god, but a representation of all metaphysical existence. “So much healing can happen when we just realize that we are consciousness, that we are Shiva, and this is how we’re empowered, and how Swamiji empowers us,” she said. 

But like interpretations of Lord Shiva, Mahashivratri celebrations are diverse. Rishik Dhar, the head of the online educational community Shaivite.org, practices Kashmir Shaivism, a largely philosophical approach to Hindu life that overlaps with science and astronomy. These Kashmiri Pandits, as these devotees are called, celebrate the day of Shiva and Parvati by indulging in a feast, a “tantric” way of marking the holiday that, Dhar said, “scandalized” the many Hindus who either fast or refrain from eating meat on the day.

Despite the “surface level” differences, he said, “the philosophical idea or ideology is more similar than different. Paramashiva is that absolute consciousness of which everything else emerges, and what we are praying for is that oneness with that absolute consciousness.”

On Mahashivratri, Hindus celebrate the cosmic coming together of Shiva and Shakti, said Dhar. What’s important across many paths of devotion, is that “we worship and ask for that same realization to occur in us as well. It is the same idea that we all want to realize that we are just an extension of Shiva, basically.”

Yogiraj Utkarsh, CEO of the World Yoga Federation, which certifies yoga instructors and was founded by the modern Indian Swami Vidyanand, held his first-ever 24-hour kirtan, or devotional sing, on Sunday. A broad range of yoga teachers, Hindu and non-Hindu, celebrated at a yoga studio near Los Angeles with 30 musical artists, among them the Grammy-nominated kirtan singer and producer Dave Stringer.

Utkarsh said some people he invited had wondered if anyone would be willing to come sing and dance for 24 hours straight. 

“But I said, the Divine will come,” he said. “That is enough for me. The real kirtan, you don’t do for an audience, you do for the Divine. And if you do with that intention, there is no force on the earth that can prevent the Divine from coming.”