Tastings: Intimacy, Relaxation, and Mercy

STUDENT 1
Shambhavi, I have question about intimacy. A lot of times I feel an intimacy, like a closeness and tenderness, you know, with others, human and nonhuman. But I feel like I often find myself acting in ways that kind of block the intimate connecting and intimate conversation. And there just feels like a kind of a friction there. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that.

SHAMBHAVI
Intimacy is completely thoroughgoing. There are no boundaries to our intimacy with other beings and with everything of this world. There's no actual separation between us and anything else.

And we could say that the state of enlightenment or being more awake is to be experiencing that intimacy in deeper and deeper, more profound ways. So we have, in our more limited lives, the desire to control that. We have a desire for intimacy—everyone has a desire for intimacy, even if it's only with one other being, or a tree, or something like that.

We all express our desire for intimacy somehow. But how far we're willing to go with it or how deep we are willing to go with it is a product of our karmic habit patterns.

And everyone has this back-and-forth—I'll feel the intimacy in these limited situations with people I like, or maybe just people I run into—and it just happens. But if something pierces my sense of boundary or individuality or the karmas that I'm trying to hold onto, then I'm going to reject it or I'm going to defend against it or something like that.

We also just have karmic habit patterns that are expressive of our limited capacity for intimacy. So we have just ways of expressing ourselves and being in the world that are part of our desire for intimacy but actually backfire on us.

And of course the best example of this is anger. Anger is a very powerful energy and a very powerful emotion. And people don't like it when you're angry at them or when someone is angry at them.

So if you're angry at someone, that could push them away. But it could also connect them to you. Though anger is a very powerful line of energy thrown out and meant to magnetize people. But in a way that sometimes pushes people away. It doesn't do what we desire it to do.

One of the things that further angers an angry person is if they're angry, and then you're not listening to them. Someone can go ballistic in that situation because the intention, their true intention of the anger, is to connect.

So if you're not willing to connect in that way, then more anger comes. 'Okay, you didn't connect with me on that. Now I'm going to get really a lot more angry with you and see if I can magnetize you that way.'

So we have a lot of these kind of behaviors that are kind of push-pull.

And because other people have their unique dimension, we can't predict how anyone is going to respond to our bids for intimacy that aren't straightforward, that are kind of manipulative and sneaky in these ways.

I'm sure that each of you could identify ways that people try to be close to you or intimate with you that you don't like and other ways that do magnetize you.

Anger is such a great example because most people don't like it when other people are angry at them. And so they'll either go away, but more often they'll try to fix it. They'll try to resolve it. So that creates a very strong bond of connection and communication.

But ultimately, it's not satisfying. It just keeps having to repeat it over and over again. Of course, that ends up not actually being that much fun for anybody.

But there's lots of things that people do like that, like being needy. Saying you're not meeting my needs in the myriad ways that people try to express that.

And of course, then, if someone likes you or loves you, they want to do this thing for you—meet your needs—and they'll keep trying. And that also forms an incredible bond of connection.

But of course, for the person who's doing that, if they actually said—well, okay, now my needs [...] Have you ever heard—okay, you're meeting my needs? Have you ever heard anybody say that?

Because if you said you're meeting my needs, then that whole mechanism goes away. Right? You no longer have any way to magnetize people into connection.

And the thing is, we don't really have to magnetize people into connection. Everybody wants connection. We just have to be open to connection. We have to be open to our continuity with beings.

And that takes a lot of vulnerability and courage, and it involves letting our sensorium get more adjusted to deeper forms of intimacy—energetic intimacy—and other deeper forms of intimacy.

That's part of what we're doing in our practice is trying to become sensitized to those other forms of intimacy that don't involve manipulation and also to increase our capacity for experiencing those subtle forms of intimacy.

And we have to go through periods when we feel a little unsettled. Spiritual life involves increasing capacity, and it can be unsettling at times. And if we are really determined to discover what's on the other side of our karmas, we'll keep going.

But if we're too attached to our karmas, then we might even reject spiritual intimacy because it's just too much. But ultimately, there is no lack of intimacy anywhere. There's no end to it. There's no boundary to it or border to it.

STUDENT 2
Yeah, I was feeling intimate with the question about ultimate complete intimacy. Yesterday I was driving through the snow, and just kind of reaching out with my awareness. [SHAMBHAVI: Yeah] And then hear teachers, they say, you know, retract your senses. And I was exploring like that, retracting the senses while being intimate with nature and reality and everything.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, teachers do say, in some traditions, retract the senses—withdrawing from the world, withdrawing [...] And the view that there's something fundamentally lesser than about sense experiences in this world, this manifest life, is the view of some traditions. But it isn't the view of this tradition.

So we're actually opening our senses. We're really not withdrawing our senses. It's a different teaching than that.

We don't make any distinction between sensory experiences and any other experience—everything is being produced by the same Self, by the one Self that is in all of existence and is existence.

So there's not really any reason to deny our senses. There's no division between different aspects of reality that would cause us to feel that that was a needful thing.

But in some traditions that are more transcendental, where we're supposed to have contact with some higher plane of reality, in the view of those traditions, it's not available in the world of the senses, then that makes perfect sense—what you just said.

In our tradition, for instance, Abhinavagupta, one of the siddhas of the tradition—he lived on the cusp of the 10th and the 11th century—he said that our senses are deities playing in the field of duality, that our sense organs and our senses themselves are God's way of experiencing the nature of the Self.

So we would never be withdrawing our senses. That wouldn't make any sense in terms of the view of the tradition. That's just a distinction between two different kinds of traditions.

STUDENT 2
Perhaps it's the attachment to the sense object—something in there that catches me and ends up being an attraction/aversion cycle.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, well, attachment to the senses or attachment to sense objects is a different kind of a question.

And we [...] of course, attachment to various sense objects or circumstances also comes with aversion to others. [laughs] And that is an expression of limitation, that's an expression of karmic patterning, where God is not having that experience. The absolute Self is not having that experience, other than as a game through the players—us.

We would be [...] eventually our sadhana would lead us to recognize what's actually going on here, and then that would lead us to not having those hard and fast attractions and aversions to things. Absolutely.

But we would still enjoy everything. So there wouldn't be any sense of rejecting anything simply because it was a sensory experience. But we would have confidence in our sadhana to erode those attachments to particular sense experiences.

STUDENT 3
Yesterday my sister asked me, what do you guys mean, like, relax, or relaxation?

SHAMBHAVI
So relax means relax our body, relax our energy, and relax our mind. So it's relaxing really from the inside out.

And relaxing means that we're not holding any concepts or any views about anything, that we're just letting ourselves be in a receptive condition without fiddling or tweaking anything.

And then whatever happens is fine. Whatever happens, happens.

So we're dealing with life with a sense of immediacy and presence rather than through the tension of holding concepts about how things should be, how things are, how we wish they were, how we wish they were not, our sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, of some sort of absolute in ways that people should be and how we don't want them to be.

All of that is relaxed and including our self-concept—I'm this, I'm not that—including all of our identities. It doesn't mean that we don't have expressions. It's just that we have no identity formation around them. We're just being ourselves rather than having a story about ourselves. That's what relaxation means.

So it's a kind of profound neutrality in the sense that we're not taking sides about life or about ourselves, and we're just letting ourselves be without fiddling with anything.

So the way that you relax is by doing sadhana and receiving transmission. That's how you relax. But you can also receive what are called pointing-out instructions, which are little phrases that don't tell you how to do something, but they point toward something that you may or may not get in that moment.

So for instance, when we do the morning heart practice, I say, forget who you are. Some people might, on certain days, have an immediate experience around that. Other people may be like, I have no idea what she's talking about. Everyone's going to be having a different relationship to the pointing-out instruction, forget who you are.

But in no way could I come up with a pro forma with steps one, two, three, four, five—here's how you forget who you are. I just have to say that, and you either jump into that or you don't in that moment, and maybe one day you do and one day you don't. The dailyness of sadhana helps to relax us in a different kind of a way, too.

There's layers of relaxation. You know, I could just lie down and go—[sigh]—that's some kind of relaxation. It's not very profound, but it is some kind of relaxation. I could eat right and then my body, energy, and mind would relax to a degree. We need that foundation.

But the kind of relaxation that is meant by waking up is completely thorough. Everything is relaxed, including your concepts about everyone and everything.

So we can eat right and we can do sadhana and we can relax to a degree and we can become more perceptive. But to give up our grip on our karmically conditioned concepts is very, very difficult. Takes a while.

STUDENT 4
I'm wondering a lot about stories, since you mentioned stopping fiddling and letting go of our stories about ourselves. There is some value to me as a spiritual practitioner in stories, but I realize there's also, like, a danger in it. And I just wondered, like, how do you discern when it's helping you and when [...]?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, there's three different things. There's just noticing things and talking about it like something happened—we moved around a lot and this happened and that happened and the other happened.

And that's a very open-ended kind of story. You're not claiming that that's the whole story or that you've wrapped it up. And hopefully you won't attach a whole lot of importance to that. It's just something that was mentioned in the moment and we had fun communicating about it, and then you won't even think about it much later.

So that's a kind of ephemeral story that's very open and has lots of holes in it, and you don't really think of it as some explanation of everything that you are now going to, like, repeat over and over again. It was just in that moment, and it was maybe helpful to reflect on it.

But then we have other stories that we have kind of embedded in us that guide or run or ruin [laughs] our everyday experiences and our emotions. Those stories, they have elaborate versions and they have simple versions.

One version might be, everyone's going to be disappointing. Or, I have to look out for everyone because I could be disappointed at any moment.

That's a story that can really inform someone's body, energy, mind, and their relationships, and it can be elaborated. Like, so-and-so did this, that, and the other, and now I'm disappointed and angry. Right?

So from that simple—life is disappointing—comes, like, this whole range of elaborate stories about other people and circumstances. Those are the kinds of things we want to have erode when we're doing practice.

And then, of course, there are teaching stories and stories that describe spiritual principles to us and even transmit things about spiritual life to us. Of course, every tradition has those.

There are stories that are told about teachers who inspire us and guide us. There are stories that are written down, like the Mahabharata is a very long story that's written down, that you read it, and it just has many, many layers, and you keep learning from it.

But I would say that eventually even those stories kind of lose their grip when the whole way that reality can be received as this giant story becomes more apparent.

As Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche wrote, I forget about the books when I realize that reality is my text. Somehow, eventually what's happening becomes more engaging than those stories. But those stories are still very, very engaging and helpful and useful for most people.

It's the stories that we repeat and that even are repeating us, we could say, that are really at issue—the ones we're attached to or that have us in their grip. It's hard to say we're attached to them when it feels like they have us, like, enslaved, right?

We think that we have this view of things, and we have this analysis of things, and we have this explanation of things that is valid or something worth exploring, or even something worth going into in therapy, and, you know, it's my problem. And then it becomes very, very interesting.
But actually those things have us. [laughs] We're really kind of enslaved to them.

STUDENT 5
I was hoping you could talk about mercy. In my mind, mercy and grace are related, but I think there's a distinction there. And I also think that my feeling of mercy is very Christianized. And I was hoping you could, like, shift it into this View.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, I don't think there could ever be a complete definition of mercy. It's an experience. When you come in contact with that living presence, an aspect of it is something that could be called mercy.

In my day-to-day experience as a practitioner, how I have received mercy is just the infinite chances that we get to wake up. No matter what we do, no matter how heinous our behavior is, no matter how many opportunities we turn away from, no matter how much we stumble or screw up, there's just always another opportunity—always, always, always, always.

And I think that that is mercy. To me, that's my personal definition of mercy.

Grace is an all-encompassing term that just means the experience of living presence. It's pretty simple, although it's also not. But it includes everything. Grace just includes everything.

STUDENT 5
Grace is, like, vaster, and mercy is [...]

SHAMBHAVI
Mercy's, like, an aspect of grace, but it's not the whole thing.

Someone else could experience the mercy of this living Self, this living presence differently or not at all. Maybe someone else would never use that word. I think I just use that word—I don't know that I've ever read that word anywhere in any teaching text that I've studied.

A lot of the words that I used to describe living presence are just directly out of my own experience. They're not necessarily anything you're going to find in a list somewhere else.

Mercy just occurs to me because of that, what I just said. God just never gives up on us, ever, no matter what. Grace is just that outpouring of the Self and our reception of it.

We say things like, it's grace that I had this opportunity or, I felt grace during some particular experience. But that's just because we're more shut down most of the time.

Grace is actually just that living wisdom and its total outpouring all the time. And any encounter with that, whether it's through an energetic experience or something more encompassing than that or some opportunity, like you said—like, an opportunity to resolve a karma or an opportunity to practice, or [...]

Abhinavagupta defined grace—which, the word for that in these kinds of traditions, is shaktipat. So he defined even our own longing as shaktipat, as grace.

We already have had shaktipat, he said, if we even desire to be on a path. So it really is all encompassing. And there's particular things, you know, 'I feel so blessed.' Well, you know, everyone and everything is blessed. It's just we only notice it a little, tiny, tiny bit of the time. [laughs]