Shambhavi gives a moving dharma talk about three skills we absolutely need if we want to grow spiritually. Patience is how we cooperate with nature. Loneliness motivates us to seek the ultimate intimacy, and we have to be able to sit through the chaos of relative groundlessness. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
Podcast First Words
So tonight I thought I’d talk about three things that we really need so we can have any kind of significant realization. The first one underlays the second two. In other words, you have to have the first one in order to get through the second two.
The first one is patience. We don’t have patience in our culture today because we can’t tolerate not being good at things quickly. Our pride is so much and our fragility is so much that we often just don’t start. Especially when we encounter something that’s difficult to learn or requires us to go through stages where we’re not good at something. Or we start and if we don’t get results right away, we quit. So this is a special kind of impatience that we suffer from.
Of course, there are other kinds of impatience. Some are just due to being too pitta. Pitta creates impatience in people. But generally, pitta impatience is a little different. With pitta impatience you’ll just work really, really hard to try to get through something faster, rather than giving up. So it’s a different kind of impatience. You don’t give things their due time. You try to push through with effort.
Another kind of impatience that we experience is that we just simply don’t understand what this process is in the beginning. We think—oh, I learned something from my teacher. I have some techniques. Now I’ll just apply them, and I’ll get results. We don’t have the insight yet to understand that our sadhana is collaborative. That we’re collaborating with a mandala of circumstances and that we’re just one factor in that mandala. It’s not entirely up to us when we get results or what results we get.
