Feeling Hurt and Sacrifice

STUDENT 1
Could you talk about feeling stuck about how someone has hurt you?

SHAMBHAVI
Sure. Because I think we've all experienced that, right? [STUDENT 1: Yeah] We have a lot of very strong ideas about how other people should behave, and particularly about how they should behave toward us. [laughs]

And we think those ideas are righteous, and good, and healthy, and whatever else we think about them. But they're actually the cause of immense suffering for us—these unspoken or spoken rules about how we should be treated.

And we have another narrative that is very strong—particularly in this historical time period, particularly in this country—which is this very psychologized view of the self that says we can become damaged for life.

And that something very essential about ourselves can be damaged by other people.

These two things are convictions about how we should be treated and are the narrative that we've embodied—that we can be damaged for life in some very essential way—are a really the cause of much of the suffering that we experience.

And we need to start slowly, because this doesn't happen overnight. But we need to start becoming unmoored from these ideas.

We need to get some distance on these convictions so we can start to un-embody them.

They are just historically time-limited ideas. They came from somewhere specific. They were not given to us on tablets of light by a god with a white beard.

These are ideas about what the Self is, and who other people are, and how people should behave that have come to us through our cultures and through our families.

And some of them have sources, in particular, historical figures who develop certain ideas of the Self that just kind of caught on.

So this is one area, I think, of life where View teachings can be very, very important. Because sometimes in the best possible circumstance, when we hear View teachings, they kind of shift something for us.

They give us a new possible way of being human—of inhabiting our human lives that we hadn't really thought of before.

So, I'll throw a few things out there.

One is that no matter how you think other people should behave, other people are just going to do whatever they do. And that's just the way it is.

Your ideas about how people should behave is not going to make anyone behave in any particular way.

The second and more important idea is that we all have what is called a unique dimension that's made up of various patterning that comes from many, many different places.

And when people behave in a harmful way, in a way that's expressing a lot of emotional limitation, or limitation in how they're showing up in this life, they are doing that out of compulsion.

Even if they look like they're making choices, a lot of the things we think we're making choices about we aren't.

We have a narrative about a choice we're making, but actually it's just the same old thing we keep doing over and over again.

So we can have our narrative about it, but basically it's got us. It's driving us. We're not driving it.

This is extremely important to try to let sink into your psyche. When someone mistreats you, they are not mistreating you. They are just expressing their particular patterning in some limited way.

And you could be anybody.

You could be removed from the picture. You could be photoshopped out, and someone else could be photoshopped in, and they would just carry on.

It seems like it's about you, and maybe they think it's about you, and you think it's about you. But it isn't actually about you, whatever it is.

So it's extremely important to understand that you are just a player in some someone's karmic drama when they do hurtful things to you.

That doesn't mean they're not hurtful. It just means you are not specially targeted. You are targeted, but you could be someone else—because that pattern is just looking for a thing to run itself on.

Now, sometimes we feel very hurt. No one's mistreated us, but they've just left. [laughs]

They just don't want to be our friend anymore, or they don't want to be our lover anymore, something like that.

Or they said they were going to live in the small town where we live forever but then they decided they wanted to move to the big city, and now we feel betrayed.

This is all to do with our conditioning that we respond to these things as if we've been betrayed or hurt.

Other people are just growing, and doing their thing, and changing like living beings do—and we're hurt by that. I don't know if that's your situation, but certainly that happens to a lot of people.

And I'll tell you that it really sucks more for the person who is being told they're hurting you than it does for you if you're in that condition.

Because if you're just somebody who's living their life, and you're not mad at anybody, you're not trying to hurt anybody. You're just trying to be fulfilled as a person.

And you've got someone in front of you saying you're hurting me! You're abandoning me! That really sucks [laughs] because you really aren't trying to hurt anybody.

You know, and it really has nothing to do with you if somebody feels that way. But that does happen, too. And I have quite a bit of experience with that, just being someone who's always been kind of on the move. [laughs]

When you're trying to like, discover more about reality and then you start doing spiritual practice—I realized last week that I've been doing practice for nearly 40 years—stuff changes!

And sometimes people don't like that. And that really does suck when someone's suffering because you grew.

You grow, and you grow, and you care more about people, and you feel more compassionate for people. But then there's a few people out there who are suffering because you grew.

They don't like it.

Then we have to try to understand that our reactions to things that people do, even if they're horrible—like murder, or putting you in a concentration camp, or rape. Even if what someone does is horrific, our reaction to it is our reaction to it.

There is no one particular generic reaction that everybody is going to have to the situations that we're in that are hurtful.

And I've brought up these examples many times, because these are really inspiring examples for me.

There were, and still are, Tibetan lamas who are in Chinese labor camps who did not feel that they were horrifically unlucky. But who felt that they were able to further their practice, and their sadhana, their realization in those situations—and were actually grateful for them.

And I'm not saying that all of us can be that way. Obviously, we're not necessarily in that condition, but it's just an example of how even the worst situations, there's no prescribed reaction.

So understand that whatever reaction you're having, including holding on to hurt, is part of your unique dimension.

It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the actual situation. It's just patterning, it's causing you suffering.

And it's something that slowly over time, you want to detach yourself from whatever story you're telling yourself about it—it was so terrible, I was so harmed.

And that gets me on to the point about harm. The view of this tradition and the experience—the direct experience of anybody doing this practice, is that there is a self that is indestructible and cannot be damaged.

And when we are in touch with that, then lots of stuff can happen that's really painful. But we don't feel like we're essentially damaged. It's just something that happens.

It's like a tsunami instead of a little wave. But we're still going to come up okay, because we're in touch with that eternal Self and its eternal value.

So we don't feel devalued by what other people do.

And that is really the ultimate medicine.

It doesn't mean that we're going to bypass feeling sad, or feeling grief, or being in emotional pain. We're not going to bypass that, but we're going to have underneath that the absolute confidence in that Self.

And we are not going to feel like, my life is ruined, or I'll never get over this, or any of those things. Really, the best medicine is being in touch with that. But hearing that there's a different way to relate to these things is also sometimes very powerful.

STUDENT 1
I know that, and I can actually feel that. But then as you were talking, I realized that the stuck feeling is that I feel like I need validation that I was hurt.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah. Well, wanting to be understood and wanting someone to understand that you are in pain [STUDENT 1: Yeah] is a powerful motivator. But we have to be as sober as possible.

Sometimes people have the empathy and the wherewithal to recognize that in someone, and sometimes they just don't.

They just don't have the inner resources to be able to offer that to you. And if that's the case, really let yourself see that. You can't change that in somebody.

Lack of empathy in a person is one of the hardest things to shift. I can tell you that as a spiritual teacher.

I don't encounter a real deep lack of empathy all that often, but I have encountered it. And it's very, very difficult to shift.

Not much can be done in a lot of cases.

And really, the best revenge is finding the wisdom in the situation and growing.

You can validate that you were hurt, but there's a lot more than that. That's not going to really be much of revenge. That's a horizontal move.

So what is the wisdom in the situation for you? How can you grow from this? Basically, mining that wealth that's in these painful situations.

That's really where you start to feel, okay, this hurt, but there's value in it.

What wisdom have you gained? What new skill have you gained? How are you more discerning now? Do you have more insight? Has something been taken away that was an obstacle for you as a person?

All those kinds of questions are about the value, the wisdom in our difficult situations—or even any situation, but particularly in difficult ones.

STUDENT 2
Shambhavi, I've been wondering about how we understand the word sacrifice. I've been reading and studying the Zhouyi where Ming says the highest form of sacrifice is giving away the rewards. I think I associate sacrifice with loss, and kind of renunciation.

Something up in that Christian—the Yahweh vibes [SHAMBHAVI: mhmm] sense of sacrifice.

SHAMBHAVI
Do you know what the word in Sanskrit is for sacrifice?

STUDENT 2
No

SHAMBHAVI
Yajña.

STUDENT 2
Oh, yajña.

SHAMBHAVI
Think of yajña, which is fire ceremony, and think of the ghee as the oblation that's being poured into the flames.

The ghee is a living symbol of vital essence. And it's being poured into the flames, and it's being burned up.

It's fueling the fire. It's becoming the fire. And just think of oneself as this infinite vase, or infinite container of ghee infinitely pouring into that fire.

So this is what is meant by that kind of yajña.

And what it says in the Bhagavad Gita, of course, is that everything that a realized person does is yajña. The realized person is continuously pouring themselves into the sacrificial kund as an offering.

And this is reflected in what Abhinavagupta said, is that— among the many definitions of self-realization he gave, one of my favorites is that there is complete lack of reference to self. And everything is a reference to others. And you're just in a state of total and continuous giving.

This is yajña. This is sacrifice, but it's a ritual overflow.

The only way that this can happen is if you are being immersed in, or in touch with that inexhaustible source of the ghee—that inexhaustible potency, that inexhaustible fecundity.

Then it's just continuously pouring and nothing is ever used up. But when we have a sense—when we're still conceptually tied to this sense of limited energy, limited goods, then giving becomes at times exhausting.

Particularly if it's transactional, if we're giving because we want to get.

What the Zhouyi is talking about, and what's being talked about in the Bhagavad Gita, and by Abhinavagupta, and by Ma, is that giving is life's greatest pleasure.

And when you feel that for real, it actually is life's greatest pleasure.

It's not going to be exhausting.

Imagine yourself as this continuous stream of ghee. But then you have to be ghee. So think of becoming ghee as your goal.