Chaos and disappointment are absolute necessities on the spiritual path. It’s part of the job of your practice and your teacher to make sure things fall apart. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi.
FIRST WORDS FROM THE PODCAST
When things fall apart, it’s not just a good opportunity. It’s an absolute necessity for things to fall apart, for things to go wrong, for your usual ways of doing things to not work out the way that you want them to, for you to feel uncertain, for you to feel fearful, for you to feel like you don’t know what is going to happen next, for you to feel anxious about your future to the point where you can’t really do anything about it, for you to feel like you lost your ground.
These aren’t just happenstances that are fortunate— they are absolute necessities, and it is part of the job of your practice and the teacher to make sure that things do fall apart.
Because what happens when things are going well? Whenever we have a definition of things going well and things going wrong, we are already in ordinary-ville. So when things are going well, who are they going well according to? They are going well according to small self. Going well according to ordinary-mind concept. Going well according to karma, our habitual patterns. Going well according to what we decided is going well according to our culture, our families, our religion, our whatever. Our self-image, our self-concept, our career path, our life-coach. Going well according to all those things means that little self is in there going “Yeah, baby! I’m going to get what I want. Yahaha!”
