Relating to Money and the Purpose of Pranaming

STUDENT 1
I feel very trapped by a fear of not feeling financially secure. Even when I'm not in a terrible situation, this still feels very entrapping. A couple of weeks ago, he's been having some difficulties at work and was like- Hey, if I ever were to be unemployed for extended periods of time, would you ever be able to cover rent?

My gut, fear reaction that just blurted out of my mouth was no. And in my heart, I feel like I want to. I would want to be generous in that way, but I have a competing thing of this fear. It just feels like it's just very loud right now.

SHAMBHAVI
Our relationships to money usually have long ancestral roots, how we relate to money. And first of all, understand that different people relate to it very, very differently.

I recognized that when I was younger and somebody said to me, I'm feeling really great. I have $500 in the bank. I was like [laughter] What?

And then somebody else said to me a little while after that, I don't feel safe unless I have $100,000 in the bank. And that was equally like this for me at the time.

It made me realize that security and money are completely conditioned responses based on lots of different factors, not always innumerable. But the mistake that you're making is by thinking that if you had enough money, you would feel safe and that fear would go away.

You have some fear of losing it, or of disaster of some sort. And I'm sure that that has long karmic echoes back generations.

You have decided, in this life in any case, that money is the thing that's going to save you from that. And that is an error in judgment. That's an error in clarity.

It won't. Because the fear just lives, and it's going to live until you address that, without thinking that something external is going to resolve it.

If it comes from long ago and it's echoing through you, through your ancestors, nothing that you do in this life, externally, is going to make that go away.

The solution to something like that is to just let yourself feel the fear as fear, fear of disaster. I mean, maybe images will come to you, too. Maybe some things where that comes from. We'll never know for sure, but certainly in all of our histories, there's things that could cause something like that.

And recognize that it's only by learning how to take refuge in the eternal, in living presence, that that is going to start to dissolve for you and for your ancestors.

You could have millions of dollars and you would still have this fear, I guarantee that. It would not go away. And you would still be stingy, and you might still be hurting people that you love because of that.

Now you have the possibility, since you have practice and you have more understanding. You have the possibility to try to unlink that fear from the story that you've created around what the solution to it might be.

And to just let the fear be felt nakedly on its own, without that story about- Oh, I'll feel better if I have this much money in the bank, or if I make this much money, or something like that.

The other mistake that we all make is thinking that we know what's going to happen in the future. That we can plan now with any certainty for what's going to happen in the future. We can't do that.

You could make money, and you could save money, and you could deny support to your partner in a time of need, and you could sacrifice a lot, and your savings could be wiped out in an instant due to some unforeseen circumstance.

Or you could become really, really ill and not ever be able to work again. Or someone could unexpectedly leave you zillions of dollars, and then you would have wasted all of that effort. I'm just saying, those are extreme examples, but all of those things are possible.

Basically, the future is completely up for grabs. So what should we do? Determine to work with circumstances as they arise. Determine that whatever happens, you're going to work with it, whether it's rich or poor.

But I will tell you that you can't build a happy life on stinginess, and you will work with circumstances. We're all forced to. [Laughs] Regardless of whether we want to or not.

But as practitioners, we can have foresight about the fact that anything can happen. That's our foresight.

And we can determine in our heart that everything that's happening is that wisdom causing that to happen. And as practitioners, we are going to work with it as best we can.

And that can be a great relief, rather than us soldiering on on our own, trying to fix the future in some way that we think is going to ameliorate our anxiety. All it does is perpetuate the anxiety when we have that attitude.

So your fear is real. And again, we all have stuff like that. And some of us have more stuff like that because we have multi-generations of trauma. Those things create all different kinds of memories in us, most of which we're not even aware of.

The only important thing is discovering more about your real nature. And even if you die in the process, it's worth it. I'm saying that absolutely seriously.

I don't think this is going to happen, but even if one were called to die in some kind of disaster or something, but if you could be cleaving to your practice and remembering to be in the heart, that really would be a marvelous death.

One way to quell those kinds of anxieties is to think of the worst possible thing that could happen and recognize that you would make it through, either alive or dead, but that either way, you would make it through.

The worst way to die is unconscious and pursuing your fixations. You don't want to be on your deathbed thinking, Oh, I saved a million dollars, and I never paid my partner's rent. [Laughter] Yay. Yay for me.

STUDENT 1
There's also something kind of gendered in there, too. [SHAMBHAVI: Yup.] Just throwing that out there, too. But it feels weird to me, and icky...

SHAMBHAVI
I'm going to share something very unwelcome with you, as is my job very often. [Laughs]

But at your age, many people become more conservative, or they let go of the more spacious way they had of being in the world in their teens and early 20s and mid-20s.

And they now start doing things like moving back to their parents' city, buying a house, getting married, and everything becomes very locked in in terms of the the future, and things like gender roles and what the husband's supposed to do and what the wife is supposed to do.

All of those more conservative values become something that people return to. This is just something that I've noticed since I was a teen.

It's not like everybody does that, but it's definitely a huge pressure. At some point, people think- Oh, now I have to get on with my real life. Time to get married, have kids, buy a house, and do the thing. That's the definition of adulting. But there's a lot of ways to adult.

I would say in terms of the gender thing that you're expressing, don't box people in. It's terrible to be told, because I have been told this by my family, and I can tell you it's just awful to be told, You should be doing this, because you're in this role, that I see you in this role.

Whether it's daughter, which is what I've been told by my brother, I'm not fulfilling the role of the daughter in the family because I'm doing this.

To be told that you can't rely on your partner for support when you want to make a life change because you're the man and you're supposed to be bringing home the money, it's just a horrible thing. It's just basically putting someone in a box or a cage.

So I understand why you feel that. There's just intense conditioning for all of us to feel things like that, but it isn't kind. It's not like he's like, I'm just going to sit in the basement and play air guitar. Would you mind paying the rent? [Laughter]

He's already got a second career. He's already taken a lot of steps to start a second career. If you're going to get married and have kids, you're in that together. If you're going to do the thing, then you got to do the thing.

You can't say, Well, I'm going to get married and have kids and buy a house, but I'm going to treat you like a boyfriend. [Laughs]

I think we need to use our money wisely. I definitely wouldn't pay the rent for someone who was sitting in the basement playing air guitar. [Laughter] Of course, I wouldn't be living with that person anyway.

STUDENT 1
Yeah, it kind of challenges my own feeling of being the breadwinner, even if it's for a temporary phase.

SHAMBHAVI
You're on a very different career path than he is. You may be making more money than he is from here on out, even if he were full-time employed. That might just be what happens.

STUDENT 2
Where does things like insurance and considering getting a 401k fit in with that? Because those are things that are supposed to be mitigating the future in some way.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, that could happen. But you also have to be open to the openness of life. All of our retirement funds could get wiped out by the government. What Patrul Rinpoche said was plan, but not too far ahead. [Laugher]

You don't want to spend your life planning to fix in this future that you're not sure it's really going to happen. Put away some money, but not so much that you're ruining your life now.

And just understand that some of us are going to be wealthy and some of us are going to be poor no matter what we do. That's like, not all of this is in our control. We all have different karmic relationships to making money, and how we make money, and how much money we make, and what circumstances we live in.

Actually, it seems to me that sometimes the richer you are, the more boom and bust cycles you go through. Although maybe the bust cycles aren't what people like us would consider to be bust cycles.

But anyway, it's very much worth investigating our relationships to money, and trying to get on a more sweet relationship with money.

Whether we have very little or a lot, we can still be in a sweet relationship with money if we recognize what's really happening here, and that we only have control over a small bit of it.

STUDENT 3
I was listening to one of your talks the other day, and you were speaking about how to do pranam. She gave teachings around how to properly pranam and how you should look the person from head to toe. Maybe you could speak about that.

SHAMBHAVI
The purpose of someone like Anandamayi Ma showing up in human form, and of us having teachers at all in human form, is so that we can recognize that the essence nature of our teachers, and even the essence nature of Anandamayi Ma, an avatar, a greatly realized being, that our essence nature is the same as theirs.

That is the purpose of having teachers, even teachers of the caliber of Anandamayi Ma. So, what she's saying in her instructions for pranaming is to experience darshan, real darshan, to see and be seen in such a way that you recognize your identity with essence nature, or with the divine, or with wisdom, all the same thing.

She recommended that you look up into the eyes of whomever you're pranaming to, and there's mutual darshan, mutual seeing and being seen, mutual recognition of the nature of the Self, of the nature of reality.

And then when you go down and you pranam to their feet, you are pranaming to your own essence nature and the essence nature of everything. You're not pranaming as if that person were someone separate that you're just making obeisance to. And some like- I am a lowly worm, and you are the great one.

That's what she doesn't want. She wants you to recognize yourself in her and then pranam, so that you're pranaming to the Self, not just to someone in a form that you revere.

She had many other ways of expressing that in word and deed. Certainly, one of the ways that she expressed it was by saying, I'm not your mother, I'm your little child, I'm your little daughter.

So someone that has come out of you, that you would take care of. So instead of saying, You have come out of me, and I'm in charge of you, I'm the boss, she's saying, No, I came out of you. I'm your child. I'm your daughter.

She said that she appeared because generations of people had prayed for a female incarnation of the divine. So she literally meant that she came out of us, out of our prayers. But she embodied that by saying, I am your little girl. I am your daughter.

And there's photos of her lying in the laps of students and letting them feed her like a little child. And so we learn how to care for the Self. We learn how to care for each other through caring for her that way.

That's another way that she expressed that recognition of our own essence nature being totally enlightened, as anyone we would recognize as being enlightened.

She wanted to have a tremendous amount of intimacy with her students. She wanted them to see how she was living.

She had them sleep in her bedroom sometimes on the floor next to her. She ate with them. She laughed and traveled with them. She wandered around. If there were cafés, I'm sure she would have gone to cafés with them.

But she wanted us to be intimate with wisdom, not to hold her or anything else at arm's length. In fact, there's things she says in satsang- Don't hold me at arm's length, or why are you holding me at arm's length? I am your very Self.

I think this is a hallmark of many teachers in Indian traditions that they are exceptionally transparent to and intimate with their students in a way that we're not used to as Euro-Americans dealing with our religious figures who're kind of like in these weird clothes, up on these podiums, thrones and things.

Even the Tibetian teachers can be a little bit like that, kind of forbidding.

But when you go to India, people throw themselves at their teachers. They throw themselves at the statues of the deities. They smear their teachers with things and put things around their neck and dress them and feed them.

It's really quite different and quite terrifying when you're not used to it, and also quite astounding and wonderful.