Satsang
PODCAST
EPISODE NO.
264

Be a Small Beacon

December 8, 2021

A person who is determined to live from the heart and treat other people with kindness is being of benefit. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi

STUDENT 1
I’ve had a few times this week where I felt really defensive, and I just would like to hear you talk about defensiveness and the alternatives to defensiveness.

SHAMBHAVI
What were you defending? Were you defending what you know? Were you defending how you do something?

STUDENT 1
In both cases it was either being right or like knowing something.

SHAMBHAVI
So, in a general sense, that is the human realm condition that we put in ordinate value on what we think we know in an ordinary sense. And we're very much identified with our little speck of a subset of knowledge.

When I say identified with, meaning what we know becomes part of our identity and how we measure our value. If we know more, we feel we're more valuable.

If we know less, or someone accuses us of not knowing what we're talking about, or even sometimes people make a minor mistake—they use the wrong word or they spell something wrong or they mistake a fact, and you can tell that it creates a feeling of shame.

This is all a result of externalizing our self value, mistaking the little bit that we know for a lot and mistaking this knowing of things for our own value.

So those are all conceptual ways of living in the world. They are based on these concepts that knowing is important, that what I know is a measurement of how valuable I am. And that's a general kind of take on that question.

So when we become defensive, when someone questions what we know, or when we just try to prove that we know a lot, which is another kind of defensiveness. So someone asks a simple question and we go off with this that and the other fancy words and spinning out like much longer than anyone wants us to and basically bragging about what we know. That's also defensiveness.

That's defending this ephemeral self and basically announcing to anyone that has the wherewithal to see it, that you care an awful lot about these little facts and analyses that you have. And that's a very fragile position to be in.

And then the more specific part of it is that certain people, and women in particular, are in general throughout their lifetime having their knowledge undermined. Not specifically factual knowledge or knowing about things, but also just knowing oneself, or knowing how one feels, or knowledge of how a situation is affecting you.

Being told it shouldn't affect you that way, or it's not really that, or you don't really know, that it's really another way. And so in general, women are surrounded by people who are redefining their knowledge for them as part of privilege.

So this creates a couple of situations that could have funny labels. One is kind of Stockholm syndrome, where you actually think you don't know anything, and you're constantly saying, I'm sorry for not knowing stuff or doubting yourself every time somebody else questions you. So that's kind of a Stockholm syndrome situation.

And then the other situation is when you start to come out of it. When you start to recognize what's happening—kind of PTSD—where we've internalized so much this self questioning and self doubt, even not just factual knowledge, but even how we feel.

There's many, many women who don't know how they feel about things because they have come unmoored through this constant lifetime of barrage of criticism and disparagement and being made to feel uncertain, even about how you feel. And it becomes dangerous to even know how you feel or say what you feel.

So it is actually a kind of trauma, I think, that a lot of women have to recover from or they don't have to, but I want them to recover. I'll just say that. My vote is recovery.

And the first step is recognizing how the constant use of your knowledge to support someone else's privilege has undermined you. The use of the denigration of your knowledge, even your intimate knowledge of yourself has been used to support the privilege of patriarchy.

This isn't some grand political platform. This is the day to day lived experience of most women all over the world, not just here.

We really have to recognize just how much this has harmed us and divorced us from even knowing how we feel about things. It's crazy not to know how you feel about something. That's knowledge. Knowing how you feel about something is knowledge.

So there's those two levels where there's a lot of competition across the board, at least in this culture, to know stuff and to be measured by what you know. That's for everybody, not gendered, necessarily. And then this other big swath of that, which is very gendered. That's pretty much the norm for most women.

So coming out of it, you have an opportunity to recognize more and to start being determined to claim your knowledge. Then you don't have to be defensive. We've been schooled to be defensive.

We live in a culture where everyone is really defensive, pretty much to a person, and we've been schooled to respond defensively to any perceived threat to our identity. And if we really had any confidence, we wouldn't actually have that kind of reaction.

But see, even that is used against us. For instance, we are constantly attacked, but yet if we react to it in a normal human way, we get accused of being defensive. So even that is like almost internalized misogyny—that you worry about being defensive when you're actually being attacked.

It's a very, very profound thing, and it takes a lot to come out of it.

I wouldn't feel badly about yourself for being defensive. We've been trained to be defensive. We've been trained to be competitive. We've been trained to experience things as an attack.

A lot of times that perception is true, but when we call people on it, they say it's not true. That's the whole crazy system that we have been schooled in.

So the only thing we're left with, which is a cool thing—realizing some of this, which is really pretty depressing—but realizing some of this really the only thing we are left with is our own knowing.

And I had this realization when I was young that it didn't matter if I was right or wrong about what I felt, or what I thought I knew because that was how I felt and that was what I thought I knew. And if I turned out to be wrong, so be it.

What could I do? What I feel is what I feel. What I feel, I know is what I feel. I know I'm not going to run away from that. This was my realization back in the day.

And I've always thought that was a very healthy aspect of myself. That when people treat me badly or when they don't want what I have to offer and they want things from me, I don't have to give, I'm out of there. I don't really hang on, which I always liked about myself.

But of course, that is not a woman coded way to be. You're supposed to hang on and put up with everything. That's your job, right? To stick around and get pummeled. I never did that. When I got mistreated. My natural response was, I don't like this guy.

It took me a very long time to just accept this. I thought there was something wrong with me. It took me a long time to just like go, you know what? Even if my reasons are completely wrong, this is how I feel and I'm sticking with it. I'll be wrong. Fine. But I'm not going to abandon myself. I'm not going to abandon myself.

So, I hope this is helpful. It is really difficult, but it is possible to recover.

STUDENT 2
I have found myself in the last week, and I don't spend a lot of time reading the news, but I just see enough of it to feel a mixture of fear and grief and kind of the ever deepening divisiveness that I see around—defensiveness. And I feel I'm helpless as to how I can work with all of that.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, it's profound. I'm with you.The way that I work with it is I just try as much as possible to stick to that real feeling of immersion and wisdom, or that real feeling of contact with wisdom, with goodness, whatever way you want to put it.

And it takes a lot of fortitude to recognize that the best thing that we can do in this circumstance is be as open hearted and generous as we possibly can. And that includes sharing our grief, also.

And keep going—and just keep going, because there's much, much, much, much more. And this moment, and this country, and this planet are just blips. They happen to be our blips. So we feel a lot of grief—just grief, at all of the animals that are dying and all the destruction that's happening and all the lack of caring.

I mean, this is stuff that I felt grief about since I was a little kid, but now everything has progressed in not a good way.

We have an understanding in this tradition that there are cycles of history and time that are related to how much openness people have to what I call the round world—the world where all beings exist, and we have more contact with God, and more possibility to realize.

And we understand from this tradition that we're in a time period where there's going to be deepening destruction. This is part of the phases of life—destruction, creation and maintenance. This is destruction on one level, right?

And destruction isn't just something that God comes in and smites us with. We are carrying this out with our body energy in mind. We are the tools, or the actors that are playing the role of the destroyers, many of us.

But many of us are also playing the role of carrying forward these streams of teachings and streams of practices, and our own open heartedness, our own fortitude and staying in touch with our essential value and goodness and that of everyone else.

And we just keep going, putting one foot in front of the other.

I think part of the question of I don't know what to do or how to deal with this is some of us think we should be doing something very grand, or at least having some moderately large impact.

And that is not the case, like one person being absolutely determined to stay in the heart and relate to others in that way and do the best they can to embody all of the aspects of the satya yuga that we can possibly embody. That one person is having an effect and is basically pulling things through along with many, many others doing the same thing.

So that's our job. Our job is to do our practice, treat other people with openheartedness and compassion and love, and keep opening even in the face of all this destruction.

And keep feeling whatever it is that we feel, and not being too self protective, and trying not to indulge in too many numb out activities or distraction activities.

But really just try to be very small beacons to ourselves and others. Very small. That's really all we can do, I think.

I feel that grief, also. Our whole planet is under existential threat. We are feeling grief. Our relationships here, particularly in this country, are terrible and the lack of care that's being embodied by those in power is really disturbing.

But in the face of that, we also have the possibility to deepen our contact with living presence and live more from the heart. And that's I think what we should be doing and not worrying too much about having a giant impact.

Even if you just did nothing but sat home and did practice and treated everyone with kindness and sweetness, that would be enough.

Sometimes we hold things apart as if we are going to get to keep certain ways of being in the world and not give them up. We don't get to make those divisions. We love everyone. The result of any spiritual practice worth anything is that you love everyone.

We don't get to compartmentalize our love or compartmentalize our kindness. We don't get to have conditions for whether we're going to be kind or not.

When I say be kind, I mean reach for that real feeling of kindness. I don't mean pretend and behave kindly.

We don't get to not do that work. When we say we're practitioners and we are on a path we have signed up for kindness. That's what we are agreeing to. We're agreeing to doing our utmost to find real kindness in our hearts for everyone.

There is no exception for that, no exception for any person, no exception for any circumstance, no exception for how we feel about somebody in particular. We are always reaching for that, and that's what we signed up for, and it is completely non-negotiable.

So if we can do that, if we can make that effort, then we are doing a lot and we are being real practitioners.

For me, it's just very, very simple—in Jaya Kula, which is really all I can speak to since my whole life revolves around Jaya kula—no matter what is happening my effort is to treat everyone with kindness.

So that doesn't mean that people don't get the harm that they're causing named. And it certainly doesn't mean that we're going to make some false equivalence between different people's oppressions just for the sake of fairness of some sort.

For instance, among various progressive-y, even I would say radical yoga people that I encounter on Facebook or something ,they call other women Karens and have a lot of names for people that are really, really disparaging. Which isn't to say that we can't point to a name or the harm that is being done.

But I am just not down for disparaging anybody, even if they're doing heinous things. That is not part of where I live or what I want to see happening in Jaya Kula or elsewhere.

So really where I'm at is how can we work together to really feel a sense of equality and kindness towards each other? Really do that nitty gritty work to have that happen in community?

I tend not to argue or take stands with people or try to teach people who have no desire to hear what I'm saying or change or aren't interested or totally disagree and there's no point to it. So there's a kind of a softness there where we just have to use our skillfulness and our discernment to understand when there's actually an opening for communication, because sometimes there's not.

I'm just not down for disparaging of any kind toward anyone for any reason. I really feel a pain when I read some of the stuff I read on Facebook from actually spiritual people really, really disparaging others really is painful to read. It isn't in any way shape or form part of any of the traditions I've ever practiced.

And there's no exception clause where you get to hate a group of people or reject them out of hand or call them names. That seems to me just a horizontal move. We're trying to correct a great harm, but we're then perpetuating harm.

But at the same time, I want to say that we have to name that harm, and particularly with women, that harm has not been named. And I think that it's so subtle and so pervasive that it’s a lifetime of recognizing that, and we should recognize that so that we can not keep putting ourselves in line for being harmed more.

It doesn't mean we have to reject anybody, but it might mean we can't spend time around certain people. Not spending time around people does not mean that we aren't feeling kindly toward them in our heart or wishing the best for them.

But it is more subtle. It's just so subtle. We have to make decisions.

Anybody who's been terribly harmed by something has to make decisions about where to spend your time, where to place your body, who to let into your life. And these are all decisions that [are] very counter to the narrative of our culture, where we're supposed to be rejecting everyone who's done us harm.

We can hold people in our hearts even if we decide we can't be around them.

So that's a little bit of a snapshot of where I'm at and where I hope Jaya Kula will be at or is that at least in part.

But I do want to say that you can only call in people who want to be in. And I think this is part of the grief of this time—recognizing, at least in this country, how far out and uncallable certain people are. And they're putting themselves there deliberately.

Not everything is fixable on our own terms. Everything is ultimately just going to come out in the wash, but we only have a limited amount of impact or influence, so we can't call everyone in. We can call in those who want to be part of the conversation.

And I think there's a lot more leeway than a lot of progressive folk give other people, but there's not infinite leeway. Everything cannot be resolved.

I read stuff about Ma and everyone she called in. I want to be like that, but I recognize that I'm not. I'm not her. She was more capable.

There was a story about her. She was riding in a car, and I guess there was nobody else with her but her and the driver, which seems was really odd. But anyway, the driver stopped the car in the middle of the woods and came back and was going to rape her.

And the story goes, she just looked into his eyes and just sat looking at him and he just went, oh, okay. And he went back to the front seat and they continued on their way.

But it's kind of like, don't try this at home. This might not work for you, right? Maybe you have to scream or shout or punch somebody or kick somebody. So, it’s a very, very nuanced thing.

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Satsang with Shambhavi is a weekly podcast about spirituality, love, death, devotion and waking up while living in a messy world.