Join the Jaya Kula community in getting our courage on! During 2020, we’ll be exploring spiritual teachings about courage and bringing more courage into our life and sadhana. In this podcast, Shambhavi introduces our 2020 theme. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
Podcast First Words
Jaya Kula has themes every year. Devotion, pride, and things like that. The theme for this year is going to be courage. And I wanted to kick off that theme with a spiritual teaching that Ma gave about courage.
[Reading a quote from Anandamayi Ma] When one resides in a country not one’s own, how can one possibly evade the hardships that are a foreigner’s lot? Your motherland is where there is no question of distress and sorrow, of violence and hatred, of estrangement, neither of the opposites of light and darkness. The endeavor to find himself in his real home, in his true nature, is man’s sole duty. Courage and steadiness are what is required.
So when one resides in a country not one’s own—what does that mean? It means feeling separate. Feeling out of sync with something. That feeling of being out of sync that causes us to look for a solution. A feeling of not being in the right place, or in the right circumstance, or not feeling right with oneself. That’s pretty much a ubiquitous feeling among humans until they get a little more woke.
So when one resides in a country not one’s own, how can one possibly evade the hardships that are a foreigner’s lot? Basically saying that samsara comes with hardships. That sense of separation engenders hardships naturally. You can’t avoid it, in other words.
Your motherland, that place where you’re resting in your own nature, when you return to the mother, when you return to yourself, is where there’s no question of distress and sorrow. So we’re not making those kinds of distinctions that cause you suffering. You may feel pain, you may feel sadness, you may feel excited about something, or you may have all these regular emotions. But you’re longer judging them to be good or bad, or desirable or undesirable.