On January 29, 2017, the Jaya Kula community got together for a conversation about doing spiritual practice with the circumstance of a Donald Trump presidency. We talked about how we are bringing Donald Trump onto the path and working with others and our reactions through the lens of our practice, or not. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi.
FIRST WORDS FROM THE PODCAST
The question I would like to ask you all tonight is about the intersection of your spiritual practice and current events. We can talk about what’s happening in our country, and by default to the rest of the world, in political and cultural terms. However, what’s happening is so profound, and so destabilizing in lots of different ways, and also engaging and perhaps distracting, that it really has a direct relationship with our spiritual practice.
How or if we are, or if we are not, bringing the View and our practice and the fruits of our practice to bear in our way of relating to this? And how are we doing that or not doing it? Are we succeeding at doing that, or how are we not succeeding at doing that?
There’s a great degree of groundlessness right now. How are we relating to that groundlessness? There’s a lot of turmoil. How are we relating to that? There’s a lot of outrage. How are we relating to that? There’s shock and grief and excitement and all kinds of things happening that could deepen our practice if we relate to it using our practice. Or it actually could pull us away from our practice if we somehow internally decided that certain aspects of this were too important to bring our practice to them and try to work with them with our practice. When I say too important, I mean when people have crises sometimes they say, “Oh I was having a crisis, so I didn’t do meditation because I was too swept up in my crisis.” Or, “I was so upset and you know I just, I didn’t do my practice because, you know, what I was upset about was so important that I had to abandon my practice for a while, you know what I mean, right?” So, maybe some of us are doing that, too.
