Working with Abusive Teachers, Prayer, and Cultivating Resilience

STUDENT 1
Okay, so this is a question about, if it's possible to receive a teaching apart from a teacher? And what I mean by that is, when you discover that a teacher is, well, human, or maybe really has abused their power as a teacher.

But yet you still really relate to the teaching that they give.

SHAMBHAVI
I think the first principle is that everyone is a mixed bag. Even the greatest teachers, the ones that you don't have too many problems with.

There's not going to be a teacher who never annoys you, never has a limitation, never has any kind of fixation that they're displaying. That just doesn't exist. Everybody is a human being. Everyone you encounter is going to be a human being.

The question is how much they're walking the talk. How sincere is their effort? And how sincere is their desire not to harm people?

One of the things I've seen as a big dividing line between what for me personally are teachers who are acceptable that I would actually, at this stage in my life, even bother listening to, and not, are:

Do they have a sincere desire to be of benefit and not be harmful?

Because– The reason I say that is not an ethical reason. The reason I say this is because in my experience, when you get to a certain place of experiencing the nature of reality, the Self, pure Buddha nature, whatever you want to call it, you lose the desire to harm.

You just lose the desire to harm.

And it's a natural process. And that doesn't mean that you never make a mistake, or someone might think you're harming them for whatever reason. It doesn't mean that you're perfect or anything like that.

It just means that you have no desire to hurt anyone. No desire to manipulate anyone. No desire. In fact, you have the opposite desire.

Knowing– Myself, I'll just talk about myself. Knowing that I still have a lot of limitations, I really, really don't want to create difficulties for people.

Even though I know that I'm going to screw up sometimes, or sometimes the situation just inherently has in it, because of the characters involved, that some upsets are going to happen.

But I sincerely do not want to be clumsy with my students or anybody in that way, and I do my best not to be. And I think that that desire comes from my practice.

It doesn't come from some idea that that's a good thing, or I should be that way, or definitions of ahimsa, or anything like that.

It simply comes from my encounter with my own guru, Anandamayi Ma, aka reality, aka the absolute. It comes from my encounter with that, seeing what everything is, and now you just lose the desire to in any way harm or manipulate anybody.

So to my mind, this is, like, a big dividing line among teachers.

Because there are teachers who deliberately manipulate people, who know they're harming people and who just, for whatever reason, out of their own compulsion, don't care enough to stop.

And what that says to me is that they do NOT have the realization they say they do. That's what that means to me.

Given that, you can still learn from very bad teachers. I mean, bad in the sense of doing bad things.

And I think the 12-step program adage is what works here. Take what you need and leave the rest. That's a mature attitude as far as I'm concerned.

So this past week, I had a conversation with one of the people who feels very, very harmed, and she has a completely different attitude than I do. She just is, throw it all away, I don't want any– nothing good about it, etc.

I don't have that attitude. And there are teachings in the ancient scriptures from India that say the very best students can surpass a bad teacher. They can benefit and surpass a bad teacher.

It doesn't mean you have to stick around and BE with that person.

The other thing I say about that kind of situation is, now you see things clearly. You got that out of it. If you start out with a teacher being snowed by them, that means you have a limitation in your clear-seeing.

Your perceptions are more limited by your compulsions, by whatever is going on for you. And if you do practice and go through that circumstance, and now you have more clear vision, you have actually gotten something from that circumstance.

And I think that's in part what those circumstances are for.

I mean, that's part of the wisdom of those circumstances, is that our own limitations, the thing that attracts us to people—let's say men—like that. I mean, there have been abusive women teachers, too, but it's generally men.

The thing that attracts us to those kind of teachers are the things that WE need to lose.

Because no matter how manipulative a teacher is, no matter how adept they are at manipulation, and control, and lying, and whatever they're doing, there is somebody out there who sees it.

There is somebody out there who takes a look at that teacher and goes, blegh. But you didn't. Right? At first.

All that means is that on the spectrum of clear seeing, somebody was here and you were here. Now you're having more clear seeing.

So it is one of the ways that wisdom is working with us. And Ma described this very clearly. First of all, she said a quote I love to repeat. She said, if the cart takes you to the train, get on the train. Don't disparage the cart, because it got you to the train.

This is what she teaches. Some teachers are carts. [laughs] They don't have very much horsepower. [laughs] But if they get you to the train, and really, it's your effort that gets you to the train, it's not really even the cart itself.

She also said, if you are given samaya diksha or diksha from a teacher, and that teacher abuses you, then the initiation– You don't have any responsibility to that person. At all.

And she said, if you think someone is your satguru, your real, one, true guru, but then you CAN leave them, you have it within you to leave them. They never were that for you. You were just fooling yourself.

Because once you encounter satguru, which doesn't– Okay, let me just say right out of the gate that there is not a ladder of teachers that you all get to have, and at the inevitable end of your path is satguru.

If you think that way, that's going to lead to you manufacturing feelings about certain teachers. They're not grounded feelings.

You might encounter that person in this life. You might not. You might encounter it in a different form. You might not. It might not even be of interest to you. It might.

I'm just saying, this is Ma's teaching. That if you think someone is your one true guru, the one that's revealing to you the nature of reality, but you can leave that person—in your heart, she meant—that wasn't really it. It just wasn't it.

So she was very spacious in her views about gurus. Like, when you hear– And certainly I was brought up this way in the spiritual educational system. I was brought up, if you break your samaya, whatever, it's very, very bad for you, and blah, blah, blah.

But Ma's teachings are more real, I think. More real.

STUDENT 2
When I was in Maine, I was angry a lot. At you.

And I'm really grateful for my time in Maine because I think it, like, supercharged my spiritual life and connection to the community and connection to you.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, I wish more people had that awareness. In our competitive society, there's less room for people to feel comfortable not being in some special relationship with the teacher.

Like, everybody sees who's been initiated and who's hanging out. And people think, oh, I want to be there. But it's just proper. It's proper that there would be all kinds of people in all kinds of conditions.

Some just here because they like to hear me talk or they want to date with somebody or whatever. Some people here because they love the teachings and they're practicing, but they're not going to get initiated or whatever.

And I just think it's fine that there's a whole continuum of people here. I just wish people had more clarity about it.

Because people get into this thing where they think they're being excluded from some mystical center. And really what it is, is hungry ghost.

It's like, have a clear vision of what kind of relationship you want. Because a relationship with me really depends on you. Your desire, and what you want in terms of the teachings and your own realization.

People that really only want emotional closeness and are not really into the teachings in a full-on way have problems. Because they have all these feelings of longing, but they don't actually want to be in a teacher-student relationship.

They want to be in a mother-child relationship. Or some other kind of relationship. And it's really great to just get clarity about what it is you want and be responsible for that.

STUDENT 3
In the past couple years, when I feel like I have really embraced being less driven by shame, and been able to be more confident and comfortable moving outside of conventional expectations, I find that family members or friends see that as maybe erratic or something.

SHAMBHAVI
So for whatever reason, I've always just done exactly what I wanted to do, even as a little kid. And I've just experienced a tremendous amount of what you're talking about.

At the end of the day, though, you don't really have a choice. Whatever losses are incurred, you could not have avoided them.

That's comforted me in a weird way because I'm just following the wisdom that I am experiencing. I can't say where it's coming from, but I've always been following that. And as I've said, when I didn't follow it, I felt this force, like, making me follow it.

So I don't know if it's that clear to you, but if you're being yourself and following your own wisdom, or the wisdom, whatever contact you've gained with that, you don't have a choice.

What does that mean? It means that we feel our feels, but we have to develop a certain amount of resilience to loss.

But there's also gain, too. I mean, it's not all about loss.

We're living in a culture that is tremendously beset in all sorts of ways that people are embodying. And so when you start to wake up to natural wisdom, there's so much to gain in terms of confidence and self-love and valuing yourself.

And being able to be more truly intimate with people. More playful. More– Just the feeling of home. Like, home is everywhere. Home is the feeling of home. It's not a place.

And when we get out of sync with ourselves, when we're not following that felt sense of rightness and goodness for us, then we're not at home. We've left home.

At a certain point, it gets to what's called the choiceless choice.

I don't know if you're at that point yet. But it does get to a point where there's just no question, you're going to follow that no matter what. And whatever anybody says about it or does about it or whatever falls away is just going to happen.

And so then we have to get our resilience up. And, luckily, as we go along there's a lot more of that happening.

So we're forced to develop more resilience and just be working with whatever happens. And not thinking something else should have happened or it's bad, what happened.

As long as you're following that felt sense of inner goodness or outer goodness, what– wherever it is, you cannot go wrong. No matter what you lose, no matter what anybody else thinks of it, you can't go wrong.

And the times when you feel uncertain because you're getting a lot of pushback, are the times when you have to dig really, really deep and re-seat yourself in that. And gain more strength and more resilience and more resolve and more contact with that wisdom.

So the times when you're getting the most pushback are actually times of developing tremendous depth, often. In your contact with yourself.

It's not easy. Especially being in a culture that is so unsupportive of this. And in a time in general that's completely unsupportive of this. We're really out of step with what's happening, but it's a great way to be out of step, I think.

And there's also, dare I say, just for a woman doing what you're doing or what I'm doing, more pushback. Because for a woman to just do what they want to do in the way they want to do it, that's just not okay for some people. [laughs]

And it gets reinterpreted in all sorts of nasty ways that don't really have any bearing on you. They're not even really about you at all.