Sobriety in Sadhana and Contacting Living Presence

STUDENT 1
A couple weeks ago, you were talking about saying 'why not?'. And it was really resonating with me. But then there was some piece of my mind that was wondering about sobriety from addictive substances or other things that we might choose not to do.

SHAMBHAVI
'Why not?' is a question about why not do something that's more expressive of our real nature, our freedom. Why not do something that's of value to ourselves and others? Why not enjoy things in a way such that it supports us to realize?

Why not doesn't mean why not just go along with our same old patterns and then die. Maybe that's why-not bypassing, I don't know what that is. [laughs]

But what Max is referring to is a movie that I saw many, many years ago called Eijanaika. It's a Japanese film by the director Imamura. And it's about a sex worker who stages a revolution in the 1800s in some prefecture in Japan.

And it's a very joyous kind of a revolution. Lots of breaking out of convention, not just with sort of serious revolution, but also with a kind of playfulness that goes against the...domination, basically.

She has a little theater troupe, the hero of it. And they sing this song called Eijanaika. Why not? Why not? And it's basically flaunting their freedom in the faces of oppression.

Following along with old habit patterns is not freedom. And we aren't actually choosing.

We might have simulated choice. If I say, hey, I'm gonna go do some drugs or drink, and that's my habit that I've always done, then I'm not really choosing. I'm just putting a little stamp of some kind of better-sounding brand on my compulsion.

We all have habit patterns and contrivances of many different varieties, not just substances.

We have emotional habit patterns, thought habit patterns. And some of them look great, and some of them we know are a cause of suffering. Some of them are enjoyable, very obviously enjoyable. Some of them have a lot of pain associated with them.

But in any case, what we are trying to do by engaging in practice, is we're trying to free ourselves from these tendencies that are habitual. So that we can have 360-degree range of motion, so that we're not just pulled in one particular direction.

This is called attachments, these habit patterns. If I have an attachment, I'm pulled over here, and then I have another one pulling me up there. And all of a sudden I'm in this shape, and I can't go over here.

And I've got all reasons why I need to keep doing this, and all reasons why I shouldn't keep doing these over here.

This is like a limited range of motion.

We can use any kind of philosophical or spiritual or psychological or any other kind of reason for why we should just keep doing what we've always done. That's just part of the pattern.

And we really want to be living without those kinds of justifications and explanations. They're also part of what is imprisoning us.

Sobriety in the largest sense means knowing what's really important. Having identified what's really important, what's really of value, and not letting yourself get distracted from that. That's what the overarching definition of sobriety is.

It's not just about substances. It's emotional sobriety. It's intellectual sobriety. It's all kinds of sobriety. It's another way of just saying, seeing how things really are and not letting yourself get distracted from that.

Substances are a really interesting use case, literally use case, because they have a relationship to spiritual practice. In that people drink alcohol and take various drugs in order to be relieved of a burdensome experience of oneself. And that is exactly the same reason we do spiritual practice.

Many of you have heard me quote many, many times, one of my favorite writers, a French-Cuban writer named Severo Sarduy. He's not alive anymore, he died of HIV.

He was what he called a beer-o-maniac. I guess he liked beer. And he was a painter and a literary critic and a novelist and a poet. In any case, he said, I drink because God denies me true intoxication.

That one thing that he wrote really taught me a lot about intoxication and why people use substances. I drink because God denies me true intoxication.

There's some relationship between intoxication with ordinary substances and the kind of intoxication we seek when we are doing spiritual practice. There's some similarity in motivation there.

The big difference, though, is that drinking and doing drugs will only lead to breakdown and numbness, and limiting of our freedom.

Whereas when we do spiritual practice and seek that kind of intoxication, it leads to discovering our indestructible value. It leads toward becoming open-hearted and compassionate toward people. It leads toward a flowering of our lives and possibilities, not a shutting down of them.

Even though they're related, they lead kind of in opposite directions.

Although people who have breakdowns caused by using various substances sometimes do have spiritual awakenings of sort, or recognitions of sort, about what they've been doing. Not always, but sometimes.

The attitude toward sobriety in an ordinary sense, in Jaya Kula, comes from my own experience since I was a little girl, where I've always been pretty uninterested in getting high.

Because I had other kinds of experiences of just being awake and in my normal frame of mind that were so interesting that whenever I did drugs or drink– Which, I grew up too, I was a teenager once, I did those things.

But whenever I did them, they were, in my own experience, very impoverished experiences compared to what I was just experiencing in my normal frame of mind.

So I never had any real interest in doing them other than peer pressure of some sort.

Then, as I came into being someone who was really doing a lot of seated practice and had teachers, and I encountered my main teacher, Anandamayi Ma. She taught very explicitly and directly that becoming intoxicated with the use of substances is not desirable and is not something we should do.

That going into some kind of trance state or shutting down our senses in any way was not desirable and was not part of a spiritual path as far as she was concerned. For me, that was confirmation of what I had felt anyway, since I was a kid or a teenager.

At Jaya Kula, we have many people who are in recovery. But in any case, there's nothing here that says people cannot participate if they're using intoxicants or in recovery. That is not a thing at all.

And there's actually a group of students who have formed their own little recovery group, a support group for themselves, which is really wonderful.

But if you want to work closely with me and you really want me to guide your sadhana closely, or you want to be part of the governing body of students of Jaya Kula, you have to commit to sobriety.

And it's not a moral judgment at all. It has a few different practical implications. One is that recognizing we're here to do sadhana together and wake up, not put ourselves to sleep.

This community is really focused on doing spiritual practice and not so much discussions about things, but really getting to doing things that are very practical and useful.

And people are doing a lot of individual seated practice, which is how I have always practiced.

There's probably, in Jaya Kula, less group practice than people are used to, maybe, in some other communities that you may have come from. Although satsang is one of my favorite practices, and it is a group practice. So we do that and we do kirtan.

Anybody can participate at any level of sobriety or lack thereof. But there's a commitment to sobriety that I expect from people who want to work closely with me and who want to be in the governing body of students.

The other reason for that, particularly in terms of being in the governing body of students, because Jaya Kula is basically run by students, is that we are trying to hold a container for people who DO have tendencies to take substances to some abusive degree.

We're trying to hold a container for them to feel supported to not do that.

Up until very, very recently, the general rule about sobriety was you can drink, but not to intoxication, and you can't take any recreational drugs, if you want to work closely with me. You can, like, drink socially in a normal way, but not to the point of intoxication.

And recently I decided that I wanted to give more support to the people in recovery here, and just to kind of go along, walk along with them, so they felt loved and supported.

Now, in the last six months or so, we've had a rule that any Jaya Kula events will be clean and sober. We used to have, occasionally, alcohol. Particularly like Shivaratri, it's traditional to have alcohol or something like that.

And when we would have official Jaya Kula dinner parties, which we love to have, pre-pandemic, there would be wine or whatever there. Or saké or something like that.

But we've decided, or I decided, not to do that. In order to just walk along the path with the people that are trying to maintain sobriety.

STUDENT 2
Something that I've been working with lately that feels relevant is making what feel like riskier choices in my life. But it's like a project. Figure out how to drop that.

SHAMBHAVI
You can't really drop anything. This is the weird thing. You can't really let go or drop anything.

The only thing that we can do is go directly to whatever contact with wisdom we have. And then whatever it is will eventually yield to that.

The project of figuring out how to drop things is definitely a way that a lot of people experience when they're trying to circumvent or move beyond certain habit patterns.

But that just ties us up in this work and gets us more involved, in a sense, with the elements of the project and the things that are in our way.

This is why we do so much practice with the heart space, the cave of the heart. Because by going in there and just making contact with that friend, what I call the friend, or living presence, we just let the things that are in our way alone.

We unmind them. And we go directly to that source of wisdom. It's really a feeling that we can follow in this more...intuitive is a good word, but certainly less intellectual, or with less work.

We can just listen for the promptings of that and follow those things and let the elements of our imprisonment alone. Unmind them.

And sometimes we do things that are risky when we are following like that. But sometimes we're doing things that are very conventional, too. I mean, it doesn't always look like something revolutionary or risky. It can look like anything.

And it is always a process of, as Ma said, coming and going. Because nobody here has constant contact with the source of that wisdom.

We are, until we're more awake, we are coming and going away from it. The method is to keep bringing ourselves back to it. Whenever we notice our energies getting all wound up, even in the good work of trying to drop our habit patterns.

A more direct route is to go to the heart space, or wherever you go, to contact that, and just listen and follow whatever that says. That's the direct path.

Now, we know that most of us are not taking the direct path most of the time, and that's okay too. But when we can remember, we should try to do that so that it isn't so much of a project.

The project is listening, not deconstructing. Wisdom will deconstruct our fixations for us. Contact with that living presence deconstructs karmas without us having to do anything other than rest in that wisdom. So try to remember that as much as possible.

And the rest of the time, as all of us are doing, we're getting all involved with ourselves.

This is what happens in the Mahabharata for sure. Krishna keeps popping in and saying, hey, if you just do it this way and follow me, it will be the shortcut. But everyone's like, oh, no, I couldn't possibly do it that way because I made a vow, or, I have to do it this way, or my relatives want this, that, or the other thing.

800 pages later, 100,000 shlokas or something like that, people finally get to wherever it was that they would have gotten if they had just followed Krishna directly.

And this is an incredible symbol of human life that sometimes we're going the short path and sometimes we're going the slow path. But it's all fine. It all works eventually. But when you CAN remember, just remember, this isn't a project.

The only project is to become immersed in the natural state.

And if we have ANY inkling of what that is, if we have any direct experience of that, we just keep going back to that well over and over and over and over again. Until it becomes our new normal.

There's not a sense of frontal approach or frontal attack of our problems in this kind of tradition. We're trying to do an end run.

It's not that we don't want to know about the things that are in our way, but we don't want to spend too much time fighting them.

Like Ming used to say, don't fight the tigers if you possibly can avoid it. Sometimes we can't avoid it, but when we have enough advanced notice, we can sneak around them.

STUDENT 3
How do you discern between a sense of that state that we're looking to rediscover, and delusion?

SHAMBHAVI
You become more discerning about that by doing spiritual practice. But it isn't an intellectual exercise, or... You can't decide with your mind how to decide between those two things.

It is a felt sense and a direct knowing that comes out of doing practice and having contact with the unconditioned natural state.

Having contact with the unconditioned natural state is equal to getting more discernment and more wisdom. That's what happens when we get more contact with it. Compassion naturally starts to bloom. Devotion naturally starts to bloom. Discernment naturally starts to bloom.

All of these things are what the natural state is full of, and when we have contact with it, those become more available to us. It's that process of doing practice and continually reacquainting ourselves with the natural state that brings that discernment.

However, there are ways in which we're already having a felt sense, but we're so trained to use our minds to try to decide things that sometimes we don't know.

But it is very easy to know when we're in a state of compulsion, and deciding to go in a certain direction is not really a decision. It's more just...habit pattern. Those habit patterns have a particular texture. They have a particular way that they feel.

First of all, they feel incredibly familiar. We have these ways of relating and reacting in life that we've done tens of thousands of times over and over again.

And so when those things come up, they have this feeling of familiarity. It's what we've always done.

When we have that feeling of 'this is what we've always done,' it has that feeling of staleness and familiarity, then we could pretty much guess that this isn't that freshness of living presence coming to bestow wisdom on us.

The other thing is that when we follow whatever we are receiving from the direct contact with living presence, it may be scary. It may feel like we're in free fall, especially in the beginning. It certainly did for me. I felt like I was just free-falling a lot of the time.

But every time we do it, on the other side of that is a feeling of relaxation. Like a feeling of wholesomeness, and feeling of rightness with ourselves and more confidence. We gain more confidence every time we do that.

When we follow habit pattern, on the other side of following habit pattern is more habit pattern. There's no relaxation. There's more anxiety. There's more churning of the gears. There's more emotion in the same flavor that we've always experienced it.

Because every time we follow habit pattern, we deepen that pattern. There's just more of it on the other side of acting on it.

There's a very different feeling tone when we act on wisdom and when we're following than when we're being pulled along by our usual habit patterns. There's a sense of continuation on the other side of that.

On the other side of following natural wisdom, there's a feeling of peace and just rightness with oneself. There's no more questioning about it, no second guessing oneself.

It doesn't continue occupying our body, energy, and mind. It's like something comes to completion.