Shambhavi talks about why we manipulate others and forms of manipulation we engage in. She invites students to investigate how they manipulate others, including Shambhavi! A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
NOTE: THIS IS A PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT.
SHAMBHAVI
I promised to talk about manipulation. I've been writing about this for a while, actually. Because early on when I started teaching, it really struck me how often and regularly and insistently students try to manipulate teachers.
But of course, whatever you're doing with the teacher is what you're doing with everyone. It just gets magnified with the teacher. I thought that was funny. It wasn't something I had expected, but I did think it was funny.
Because everyone always talks about how teachers are so horrible manipulating students, but it goes the other way, too. So I wrote, seducing the teacher, seducing the guru, or something like that.
It was sort of a laundry list of all the different ways students try to seduce the teacher. Not sexually necessarily, but with praise and anger and fantastical spiritual experiences and explanations and all kinds of things.
I don't know how many of you grew up in a household with someone who had some very compulsive behavior. But I grew up in a household with a hyper-critical father. Quite narcissistic and quite manipulative.
And when you're in that situation, or maybe you grew up with someone with an eating disorder, or maybe you grew up with someone who's a rage-aholic. There was a lot of dysfunction in my family, but people, by and large, did not rage at each other.
I think I heard my mom curse once, and it was shocking. Anyway, when you grow up with someone who has these kind of very strong compulsive patterns, you get very sensitized to them.
So for instance, if you live for a long time with someone who has an eating disorder, you might know when their anxiety level is at a certain point before they even do. You just become very sensitized to what's going on with the other person.
By the same token, I was very sensitized to the way that my father tried to manipulate my mom emotionally and me. Mostly women, but everyone too, to some degree or another.
The other thing about when I was growing up was I just learned to recognize manipulation. But then I also was kind of bratty, and I had a I had a strong rebel streak. And I really didn't like to be controlled.
Manipulation is basically someone trying to control you in some way. They're trying to control your view of them. They're trying to control your behavior and your emotions. They're trying to control what happens, et cetera. And of course, it all comes out of anxiety of some variety or another.
But I really just did not want to be controlled. So that was my other kind of reaction to this manipulation. One was kind of disgust, and the other one was, don't box me in, don't fence me in, don't try to control me. I'm not going to let you. Kind of an attitude.
So I've been very sensitive to all the ways in which people manipulate or try to manipulate each other. Then I had a spiritual teacher who was manipulative.
But by that point, I already pretty much knew what was happening because of my earlier experience. But I noticed other things when I was studying with this teacher, other things about people who manipulate and people who lie a lot.
I mean, manipulation is sort of a form of dishonesty. It might not rise to the level of an outright lie, but it's a form of dishonesty. You're misrepresenting yourself, misrepresenting other people, et cetera.
And then sometimes lying goes along with it. So this teacher lied outright and also manipulated people a lot emotionally. And what I noticed was that people who manipulate are easily manipulatable.
And I'm going to talk about why this is. And people who lie a lot, you can lie to them very easily. They don't notice when other people are lying, which is kind of interesting.
Being in a state of manipulating, you could be manipulating yourself. Lying to yourself, trying to convince yourself of something that's not quite true. And you can be manipulating other people's view of you, which almost everyone in our culture is trying to do in some way or another.
Or you could be outright lying. But when you are doing that, you're not in touch with what's actually happening. You're not in touch with how things actually are. You're not in touch with your own condition.
So if I'm anxious about myself, and I have spent my whole life manipulating and massaging my self-image. And manipulating other people to buy into that self-image, then I'm in some respects out of touch with my real condition.
And if I'm busy manipulating other people, then I don't really notice how other people are. I don't really notice what's really going on with other people. That means that you cut off your own natural intelligence.
So there's an aspect of, well, I'll just call stupidity about our attempts to manipulate ourselves and other people. But whenever we're out of touch with the wisdom that's coming to us from inside ourselves in reality.
Whenever we're not actually using our senses to see what's there, but we're trying to create a secondary reality, then we become rather stupid. And so I think because we're not seeing what's actually happening, if other people manipulate us back or lie back to us, you don't notice.
So I used to play occasionally with this teacher, deliberately saying something manipulative, tailored to make him feel a certain way. Occasionally, I would tell him a deliberate lie to see if he noticed, and he never noticed.
So one of the things that is really informative is if we can notice how we manipulate other people. It has a lot of information to give us about what is important to us and what areas of ourselves we feel insecure about.
Obviously, this all comes out of insecurity and anxiety. We don't think we're okay just the way we are. We want to be seen a different way, or we are afraid of the natural flow of events, and we want to try to control them through manipulation.
We don't trust anything about the process of life, so we're always trying to manipulate something there. But usually it's about self-image for sure. And getting other people to stay with us or put other people where we want them to be in some way or another.
So if we can think about the major forms of manipulation that we indulge in, if we can identify them, then we can actually identify where our major insecurities lie. Where our major anxieties lie.
So someone who's always trying to prove to other people that they're smart, and this is pretty common, talking a certain way, talking too fast, interrupting with the right information and the right answer. You know, all the things that people do to prove that they're smart.
Having the analysis quicker than everybody else. This is rife in academia. If you identify, if you are able to step away from that and not just feel the compulsion to prove that you're smart all the time.
Because if you're just in it and you're just trying to do that, you get no information about it at all. Maybe occasionally you might wonder why someone thinks you're an asshole. [laughs]
Or why people are backing away while you're talking. [laughs] If you even notice that. But you might even just be too in it to even notice it. But if you can reflect on exactly the form that your manipulation takes, what is its content?
What exactly do you try to manipulate other people into thinking or believing or doing or feeling? Then that is a lot of information for you about what you're insecure about. And that's valuable information for a practitioner.
And it's also getting back to what's really happening and getting out of the compulsive, externalized behavior a little bit. And then just trying to relax. Trying to relax around that.
How you manipulate people tells you what anxieties you have. How you are able to be manipulated tells you about your clarity or lack thereof and your needs.
So people respond to manipulation positively because they have needs. They have things that they want. And then the person who's manipulating every once in a while manages to land on one of those things that somebody else wants.
If someone who's a chronic manipulator gets you in their grip, it's really because they are promising you something you want. Or they appear to be giving you something that you want.
But really, they're just trying to bind you to them with that empty promise. I've noticed that a lot of the manipulation, especially social, everyday social manipulation, is just to get by.
There's a level of anxiety in general, and then you have certain chops. You know, to borrow a term from music, certain tunes that you play over and over again to just get through the situation.
This all relates to the idea of friendliness. That we as practitioners, we must develop friendliness towards ourselves and towards life and towards our practice. Towards all our foibles and our fixations.
The first step is a friendly feeling toward those things. Then we can relax enough to continue in the right direction. Then we don't have to be so controlling. And doing spiritual practice is the opposite of being controlling.
We are being disciplined. That's different than being controlling. But we literally have to give up all controls even as we're being disciplined. So developing a friendly feeling toward all these things is imperative.
You don't get to skip that part. And the strategies that you've been employing aren't working. None of our strategies are working. I mean, they might work on some people.
And then, of course, if we're deep into our strategies of manipulation and we really don't have any distance on them, then we just find people who buy into it. We find people who confirm the world that we want.
And then we really are going the very, very long way around. We should really try to laugh at ourselves and feel kindly toward ourselves and friendly toward ourselves. We all wear a lot of masks, that's for sure. And we're expected to.
So we shouldn't sugarcoat this. When we do start to drop some of those behaviors, in some respects, we might find ourselves at different points being at odds with the social milieus that we are in.
Workspaces or families or friendships. When we stop performing a self, in certain situations, we will get negative feedback or negative pushback. We do need to have some fortitude.
But luckily, when we begin to make contact with that more spontaneous, resilient self, it is so relaxing. It is so wonderful. We recognize its value. And there's a certain tipping point that happens.
When no one is going to stop us from being who we are, whatever that is. No amount of pushback is going to stop us. So I'm just trying to get you all to that tipping point if you're not already there. It's a long road, and this culture does not teach us well in that regard.
But I think there's certain things that people like myself who have some natural karma for being teachers, there's certain parts of our unique dimension that we come in with. That are the things that we feel are the most important things for us to give.
And I think for me, it's definitely number one, devotion. But number two, the confidence in just being yourself. And the understanding that that is the most wonderful way that we can end up.
Just being ourselves with confidence and having the resilience to live through whatever difficult situations we find ourselves in because of that. I think that's something that I'm always trying to impart to people.
And give people the example of that, but also the understanding that you also have that capacity regardless of where you start out. And give you some tools to do that.
Of course, you have to want that first, but you have to want that. Because, again, it can get a little inconvenient. [laughs] It can really mess up your life sometimes to just be yourself and relax. And not be pushing out a persona.
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NOTE: THIS IS A PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT.
SHAMBHAVI
I promised to talk about manipulation. I've been writing about this for a while, actually. Because early on when I started teaching, it really struck me how often and regularly and insistently students try to manipulate teachers.
But of course, whatever you're doing with the teacher is what you're doing with everyone. It just gets magnified with the teacher. I thought that was funny. It wasn't something I had expected, but I did think it was funny.
Because everyone always talks about how teachers are so horrible manipulating students, but it goes the other way, too. So I wrote, seducing the teacher, seducing the guru, or something like that.
It was sort of a laundry list of all the different ways students try to seduce the teacher. Not sexually necessarily, but with praise and anger and fantastical spiritual experiences and explanations and all kinds of things.
I don't know how many of you grew up in a household with someone who had some very compulsive behavior. But I grew up in a household with a hyper-critical father. Quite narcissistic and quite manipulative.
And when you're in that situation, or maybe you grew up with someone with an eating disorder, or maybe you grew up with someone who's a rage-aholic. There was a lot of dysfunction in my family, but people, by and large, did not rage at each other.
I think I heard my mom curse once, and it was shocking. Anyway, when you grow up with someone who has these kind of very strong compulsive patterns, you get very sensitized to them.
So for instance, if you live for a long time with someone who has an eating disorder, you might know when their anxiety level is at a certain point before they even do. You just become very sensitized to what's going on with the other person.
By the same token, I was very sensitized to the way that my father tried to manipulate my mom emotionally and me. Mostly women, but everyone too, to some degree or another.
The other thing about when I was growing up was I just learned to recognize manipulation. But then I also was kind of bratty, and I had a I had a strong rebel streak. And I really didn't like to be controlled.
Manipulation is basically someone trying to control you in some way. They're trying to control your view of them. They're trying to control your behavior and your emotions. They're trying to control what happens, et cetera. And of course, it all comes out of anxiety of some variety or another.
But I really just did not want to be controlled. So that was my other kind of reaction to this manipulation. One was kind of disgust, and the other one was, don't box me in, don't fence me in, don't try to control me. I'm not going to let you. Kind of an attitude.
So I've been very sensitive to all the ways in which people manipulate or try to manipulate each other. Then I had a spiritual teacher who was manipulative.
But by that point, I already pretty much knew what was happening because of my earlier experience. But I noticed other things when I was studying with this teacher, other things about people who manipulate and people who lie a lot.
I mean, manipulation is sort of a form of dishonesty. It might not rise to the level of an outright lie, but it's a form of dishonesty. You're misrepresenting yourself, misrepresenting other people, et cetera.
And then sometimes lying goes along with it. So this teacher lied outright and also manipulated people a lot emotionally. And what I noticed was that people who manipulate are easily manipulatable.
And I'm going to talk about why this is. And people who lie a lot, you can lie to them very easily. They don't notice when other people are lying, which is kind of interesting.
Being in a state of manipulating, you could be manipulating yourself. Lying to yourself, trying to convince yourself of something that's not quite true. And you can be manipulating other people's view of you, which almost everyone in our culture is trying to do in some way or another.
Or you could be outright lying. But when you are doing that, you're not in touch with what's actually happening. You're not in touch with how things actually are. You're not in touch with your own condition.
So if I'm anxious about myself, and I have spent my whole life manipulating and massaging my self-image. And manipulating other people to buy into that self-image, then I'm in some respects out of touch with my real condition.
And if I'm busy manipulating other people, then I don't really notice how other people are. I don't really notice what's really going on with other people. That means that you cut off your own natural intelligence.
So there's an aspect of, well, I'll just call stupidity about our attempts to manipulate ourselves and other people. But whenever we're out of touch with the wisdom that's coming to us from inside ourselves in reality.
Whenever we're not actually using our senses to see what's there, but we're trying to create a secondary reality, then we become rather stupid. And so I think because we're not seeing what's actually happening, if other people manipulate us back or lie back to us, you don't notice.
So I used to play occasionally with this teacher, deliberately saying something manipulative, tailored to make him feel a certain way. Occasionally, I would tell him a deliberate lie to see if he noticed, and he never noticed.
So one of the things that is really informative is if we can notice how we manipulate other people. It has a lot of information to give us about what is important to us and what areas of ourselves we feel insecure about.
Obviously, this all comes out of insecurity and anxiety. We don't think we're okay just the way we are. We want to be seen a different way, or we are afraid of the natural flow of events, and we want to try to control them through manipulation.
We don't trust anything about the process of life, so we're always trying to manipulate something there. But usually it's about self-image for sure. And getting other people to stay with us or put other people where we want them to be in some way or another.
So if we can think about the major forms of manipulation that we indulge in, if we can identify them, then we can actually identify where our major insecurities lie. Where our major anxieties lie.
So someone who's always trying to prove to other people that they're smart, and this is pretty common, talking a certain way, talking too fast, interrupting with the right information and the right answer. You know, all the things that people do to prove that they're smart.
Having the analysis quicker than everybody else. This is rife in academia. If you identify, if you are able to step away from that and not just feel the compulsion to prove that you're smart all the time.
Because if you're just in it and you're just trying to do that, you get no information about it at all. Maybe occasionally you might wonder why someone thinks you're an asshole. [laughs]
Or why people are backing away while you're talking. [laughs] If you even notice that. But you might even just be too in it to even notice it. But if you can reflect on exactly the form that your manipulation takes, what is its content?
What exactly do you try to manipulate other people into thinking or believing or doing or feeling? Then that is a lot of information for you about what you're insecure about. And that's valuable information for a practitioner.
And it's also getting back to what's really happening and getting out of the compulsive, externalized behavior a little bit. And then just trying to relax. Trying to relax around that.
How you manipulate people tells you what anxieties you have. How you are able to be manipulated tells you about your clarity or lack thereof and your needs.
So people respond to manipulation positively because they have needs. They have things that they want. And then the person who's manipulating every once in a while manages to land on one of those things that somebody else wants.
If someone who's a chronic manipulator gets you in their grip, it's really because they are promising you something you want. Or they appear to be giving you something that you want.
But really, they're just trying to bind you to them with that empty promise. I've noticed that a lot of the manipulation, especially social, everyday social manipulation, is just to get by.
There's a level of anxiety in general, and then you have certain chops. You know, to borrow a term from music, certain tunes that you play over and over again to just get through the situation.
This all relates to the idea of friendliness. That we as practitioners, we must develop friendliness towards ourselves and towards life and towards our practice. Towards all our foibles and our fixations.
The first step is a friendly feeling toward those things. Then we can relax enough to continue in the right direction. Then we don't have to be so controlling. And doing spiritual practice is the opposite of being controlling.
We are being disciplined. That's different than being controlling. But we literally have to give up all controls even as we're being disciplined. So developing a friendly feeling toward all these things is imperative.
You don't get to skip that part. And the strategies that you've been employing aren't working. None of our strategies are working. I mean, they might work on some people.
And then, of course, if we're deep into our strategies of manipulation and we really don't have any distance on them, then we just find people who buy into it. We find people who confirm the world that we want.
And then we really are going the very, very long way around. We should really try to laugh at ourselves and feel kindly toward ourselves and friendly toward ourselves. We all wear a lot of masks, that's for sure. And we're expected to.
So we shouldn't sugarcoat this. When we do start to drop some of those behaviors, in some respects, we might find ourselves at different points being at odds with the social milieus that we are in.
Workspaces or families or friendships. When we stop performing a self, in certain situations, we will get negative feedback or negative pushback. We do need to have some fortitude.
But luckily, when we begin to make contact with that more spontaneous, resilient self, it is so relaxing. It is so wonderful. We recognize its value. And there's a certain tipping point that happens.
When no one is going to stop us from being who we are, whatever that is. No amount of pushback is going to stop us. So I'm just trying to get you all to that tipping point if you're not already there. It's a long road, and this culture does not teach us well in that regard.
But I think there's certain things that people like myself who have some natural karma for being teachers, there's certain parts of our unique dimension that we come in with. That are the things that we feel are the most important things for us to give.
And I think for me, it's definitely number one, devotion. But number two, the confidence in just being yourself. And the understanding that that is the most wonderful way that we can end up.
Just being ourselves with confidence and having the resilience to live through whatever difficult situations we find ourselves in because of that. I think that's something that I'm always trying to impart to people.
And give people the example of that, but also the understanding that you also have that capacity regardless of where you start out. And give you some tools to do that.
Of course, you have to want that first, but you have to want that. Because, again, it can get a little inconvenient. [laughs] It can really mess up your life sometimes to just be yourself and relax. And not be pushing out a persona.
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Photo by Thomas Bormans
