EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
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Welcome to my podcast Shadow to Self. This is a special episode and i am dedicating it to George Floyd. The son of this land who died and his death will lead to the awakening of a greater consciousness. This is my belief and this episode i dedicate to the exploration of anger, it’s worth, its usefulness and why it is not time just to be angry in our limbic system. It’s time for the consciousness of our collective to be angered because when anger is properly experienced and channelled it becomes a great force of much needed change and the change that we are now becoming ready for is the end of discrimination. The discrimination based upon gender, sexual preference, religious choice and finally and most importantly based upon color.
Do you know that so many decades ago, we humans managed to map the distance between, the earth and the moon. Two hundred and thirty eight or thirty nine thousand miles away is the moon and we bridged that gap but, we have still not been able to bridge the gap, between ourselves and the person standing merely few inches away from us, if they are of a different color. That is very unfortunate. Despite, more than four thousand religions that we human beings have managed to create and propagate. Despite more than fifty thousand universities worldwide, with I don’t know how many countless colleges and institutes, of higher learning that we have managed to establish in our planet and we call ourselves the educated animal and yet we could not understand that we are ONE. That our innocent pigment the melanin ,could cause so much pain, because a brightest animal on this planet is so not bright, that we have allowed, simple, biological parameters to come between us and our hearts. It’s unbelievable and within that same week NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley abort the Space X dragon endeavor arrived at the international space station and yet though we were mapping outer space in that same week, the space in our heart, in the heart of our law enforcement and protection givers heart was so collapsed that is use of uncalled force, unnecessary violence caused for the death of one of the son’s of our land, George Floyd, a father, a grandfather. I wonder did he love latte or chai. What toys was he planning to take for his granddaughter? What did he say to his brother when he would call him and say hey it’s me these are my dreams? We lost someone but this loss will become more bearable, if we gain something.
If we can promise to this gentle giant as he is known George Floyd, that if he were to come back on earth, he would come back to people, who are more awakened, who have been asleep too long despite our thousands of religions, remove them. Our technology what use it is, our space missions, what is the point? But the remembrance, of something more pivotal, that i want to make happen transpire in this podcast, if you are listening to me, is the remembrance that we have a right to get angry. That’s right. You may have thought I am listening to a Vedic teacher and she is going to preach me and tell me and help me be rid of this anger i am feeling and i am not going to do any of that. So if you don’t want to hear me that’s okay! change the channel ,don’t listen to me, because i want to share with you some Vedic deep teachings on when is anger appropriate ,what is the purpose of anger, how it can be expressed appropriately and how do we know if we do have a healthy relationship with anger or not ,because we need to get in touch with our anger, so that we can make a promise to George Floyd, that if he were to come back on Earth, he would not have to lose his life in this painful, ugly, gory way again. That we would make our earth a safer home for him and for everyone who has a skin color, a sexual preference, a spiritual choice, a lifestyle that is not the dominant one.
We are going to make that promise to him and we are going to grow within ourselves and i am going to do my part. My core area of expertise is this wisdom and i find solace in it, but not just the solace that puts me to sleep, in my smugness about my own spirituality and my own heritage. It awakens me, to do what i can and to become an activist in my own way. So to begin with let me tell you, all anger is not the same. This world does not today view all anger with the same lens. It does not allow for everyone to embody anger equally, even if the issues are the same, we know all about this. And that is why the anger of some people is dangerous while for others it is all constructive. But i would like to promise the gentle giant, that, we are going to grow up in our understanding and maturity about anger. Anger is known as ‘Krodha’ in Sanskrit. It is as much a divine emotion as any other emotion. Joy, peace, tranquillity what you may have, it but anger is no different it doesn’t come from some strange planet, you know, deposited here by beings we don’t recognize.
It grows within the soil of our own consciousness and it has a spiritual purpose and its Spiritual purpose is that it helps us register if our boundaries are safe or not. Are we being violated physically, verbally, sexually, emotionally? Are we being asked to put within justice, discrimination, abuse? If we are not in touch with our anger and if our community is in not in touch with anger ,then it can allow an unjust, unfair circumstances to persist. That is why, anger is very important, in your personal as well as your collective ,that alone will ensure your well being. Anger will provide the motivation to constructively correct an injustice. It will urge you to act on an inborn sense of justice. What is this inborn sense of justice because in the eyes of our collective creator there is only one; intelligence from which it is all emerging not just humans but all beings right down to the smallest blade of grass. It all comes from this one common self with the capital S. This is the contribution of the Vedas. They do not allow, they let us have the luxury of a sense of duality but then sorry, they really put it out there for us, that, this duality is only apparent because we all have a common centre.
We come forth from that centre, we dwell in that centre, it’s silently, invisibly supporting us and then we return to it and it’s the same and it’s not a person that looks like us or talks like us or dresses like us. It’s a field, it’s an intelligence and therefore, if we are all equal we have an inherent desire, to be treated equally and in fact when we don’t treat each other, with that inherent respect, that we want we ourselves feel guilty, because we know it deep down it’s not a cognitive knowing but it’s an intuitive knowing, that we are one. That is why; the people who are grieving for the death, the cruel death of gentle giant are not just people who belong to his community, the black community. This is across the board and the sorrow, the grief has gone beyond the borders of our nation, the United States. It is touching every part of the world there is an echo why? Because we all know somewhere, that he was our own and we were his. Every, even semi-conscious, semi-sensitive person, feels violated today and the only way to go beyond this violation, is to experience healthy anger. Even animals display anger when they are threatened or encroached upon unexpectedly. Even the most you know peaceful animal will occasionally show anger and we are a whole people, a whole community. How i can contribute in this podcast if someone were listening were that, all we have to do is discern between a healthy and unhealthy version of the anger and express it accordingly. But there is absolutely no reason to suppress the anger or you know feel guilty about it or allow the blame to be deflected back on you because you are angry. No, there is a relationship between the word ‘Dharma’ and ‘Krodha’ anger.
Dharma comes from the root word ‘dhre’ that which angers, ‘dharyante iti dharma’. Dharma is a universal righteousness. It‘s not specific to a person or a community or a culture. It resents higher humane values like truth, fairness and justice. So we want our anger, our Krodha to be aligned with dharma and not; not aligned with it because if it is not aligned with it, our anger may begin at a right place for the right reason but then it can slowly become, a bit of a slippery slope in terms of, we may use that anger to justify, why we are exploiting another now or sometimes that anger if it’s not supported by dharma can also become kind of distorted and we may allow others to abuse us. So we become either too weak or too aggressive, but definitely, not in a healthy sense informed, clear, driven, towards the change that we want to see happen. So when we bring dharma and anger together then our anger will include mindfulness, it will include judiciousness, it will remain cognoscente of the bigger causes, the background causes, the immediate situations, the future scenario. It would not transgress or transgress those boundaries of clarity it would not ever lead to, abusing power or becoming a victim of others power. It would be a true dharmic power that comes from this anger.
That’s why a basic teaching of dharma comes from Bhagavad Gita and there the teacher Krishna says that, you really don’t need to do a PhD on dharma but basically, never do or say that to another which you regard as physically or emotionally harmful to your own self. This in brief is the rule of Dharma. So therefore we all know dharma deep inside. We may all not know anger inside us because it is such a bad rep and you know really ,it’s the privilege of some people to be angry not; not others, but what i am trying to say is that everybody has the right to be angry ,but everybody has an imperative to contextualize their anger with dharma. I hope that’s helping.
So what is this dharmic anger that we can bring together. What is dharma and anger together? i think what it is, is understanding, like right here in this case are the white skinned people are enemies, we know that and i want to underline that NO. It really is always a battle between those who have dharma and those who don’t. That’s why people who have dharma no matter what skin color they have, what sexual preference they have, what gender they are, what culture they belong to ,what cast they belong to ,what class they belong to. If they have dharma, they are standing there, raising their voice against injustice. It’s like really there are two communities on our planets, the dharmic one and the non dharmic one, the awakened one and the sleepwalking one, the responsible one and the entitled one. Which community do you belong to is the question and if you are someone who belongs to the awakened community, to the conscious and responsible community, to the dharmic community then one of your dharmic duties is to experience your anger, because if you don’t get in touch with your anger then you won’t raise the voice, then you will not be able to not cooperate with what has been going on which has been allowed too long. We have somehow become okay with, what we should not be okay with and if we become okay too soon, then movements that begin die down, they peter down or if we don’t bring dharma into our anger, movements that are supposed to lead to policy change, habit change, behavior change, cultural change, perception change and the change of history, only lead to looting or violence or rioting and i am not just saying all rioting is wrong, i am just saying, got dharma? That’s all.
So we see this resonance of dharma and that’s why even the Hindu gods and goddesses are never just looking pleased and benefice and holy. They are also holding weapons and those weapons are simply reminders that look, i have this benefice, easy, relaxed form, when there is dharma, in this world but i am going to pick up this sword, when i need to address, the unconsciousness and my sword right now is this podcast. My next sword would be a blog i am planning to write. My next, the next time i move my sword i will be recording an online you know, YouTube based global satsang. I will i am working on a book called ‘roar like a goddesses’ where i am teaching how to roar with righteous inner dharma. So these are my swords. So when i say gods are holding swords so we need to hold our sword, you get it right. I am not asking you to walk with a naked sword in your hand. I mean you, get that right. We are just talking about how can we be activists, how we are, where we are, can we teach our children about oneness, the truth of our common self.
Can we teach our children, if they are feeling afraid, that despite this being a scary planet, you still have to stand up for what it is true and the way we can teach it, is not just by talking to them, but by really going out there, in the way that is possible for us and letting people know that we are not quietly looking the other way while injustice continues. That we don’t live just for ourselves and our collapsed little family and our entitled lives you know no matter what color we are, just because we happen to have a better life so we are okay and we are immune and so we will just shut all our doors and windows and pretend like everything is fine on the planet. No, that doesn’t work, because there is no denying the fact, that we live in a society made up only of a few awakened beings and there are semi awakened. Unfortunately a majority of people are sleepwalking egos that are out to destroy dharma and out to murder innocent people like George Floyd and that is why the Hindu gods Durga ,Krishna, Rama they model super conscious anger in their battles for the protection and restoration of dharma and this alone is the realistic approach.
Vedas thankfully don’t just teach an absolute ideal of Ahimsa, but they teach ahimsa parmo dharma. It is the highest dharma, except when himsa or violence is used for the restoration of dharma. So what violence is Bhagavad Gita talking about? Bhagavad Gita is talking about the kind of violence, that is needed sometimes, to correct something that has just gone beyond diplomacy, gone beyond talks, gone beyond dialogue and it is not my place to say, if one community has gone beyond that options with the other community, i don’t know that. All i know is that i can share a perspective, that while it should be our last imperative and at the same time, if it is a last imperative then we must not pause filled with guilt instilled in us, from all those ideas, floating around on our planet. That haven’t really helped us because here we are our rockets are going in space and our daggers are going in each other’s hearts. People who have skins, that have the color black or brown or yellow are not safe, people who have sexual preferences; that is anything but heterosexual are not safe. People who have religious propensities or spiritual yearnings that are different have to lead pretty different lives you know, besides ,science, which itself is ruthless doesn’t allow for mysticism, spirituality and a greater truth of oneness to thrive. So it’s not like science is the enemy, it is not that the white person is the enemy, it is not that people who are straight are the enemy, it is not that religion itself is the enemy and so we should all become atheists and agnostics but i call on my podcast, that we all embody a dharmic anger, to address this within ourselves and in our community. Let our anger become our motivation.
I will give you an example. When i came to this country two decades ago, some of you know i am a Vedic Acharya, a master teacher. I am the leader of an ancient lineage and i have specialized in the spiritual teachings of the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Ayurveda and Yoga and i was dismayed by the teachings specifically in Ayurveda. I found the teachings of Ayurveda in the West, a bit superficial or let’s just say, very one dimensional. It was not deep and but it was no help that the teachings in its own country of origin India, were absolutely estranged from the deeper truth of Ayurveda. It was following a pharmaceutical biomedical model. After colonization i feel like Indians like started proving a point, that their Vedic heritage was at par with western sciences and then instead of glorifying their own heritage, they started somehow proving, how similar it is to the western heritage you know, these things happen. We lose our own knowingness, when we become colonized and what Indians lost was not just the Kohinoor diamond, to the united kingdom and a lot of its money went to its colonial rulers, but what it lost was its pride and till today you know, Ayurveda is, taught sans its spiritual backbone, it’s almost like just a very watered down and yet scientifically rigorous, you know an apostrophe comma, curriculum which you know just fine with disease management, but i am not sure, how much, because despite, India becoming independent in nineteen forty seven.
It’s not like Ayurveda is on the world map, it’s become more of a question mark because when you pull something out of it own nature, its own fabric and then kind of like you know put it out of there, as if it never lived and breathed the spiritual Vedic teachings, its own parents ,then you are just deceiving your own self, if you ask me and then in the west it was just becoming, what every other new age Guru wanted it to become. I became angry. I was angry and i didn’t necessarily handle that anger really well that time. I was also twenty years younger or little more maybe twenty four younger. But then i learnt to bring dharma into my anger. I realized this is not about me, this is not about my opinion. I really want people to benefit from the full spectrum promise of Ayurveda. I really want them to experience its spiritual benefits, because it is spiritual benefits, psychological benefits and physical dosha balancing benefits that together make it a complete science. So i, it was this anger that led me to establish my own wisdom school, create like award winning curriculums, so I am not sitting here to gloat about what i did. All i am trying to say is, if i didn’t get in touch with my anger and if i didn’t let that anger become the source of what i did day after day after day create my you know offering so that people could benefit from it, i would have done none of this, because i was so complete in my life. i didn’t need to do this because i didn’t even to do this as a source of income for me.
Everything i was doing was philanthropy and everything was just being done because it had to be done because i had become angry with what i saw and there was no point in just complaining. I had to get my hands in there, till that soil, research and return and reclaim, what had become lost and so if we have to bring a change and if we have to keep our promises, to George Floyd ,so that when he comes back as a little child, he finds this earth safer then you and i have to be in touch with our anger and then allow that anger, to become an instrument of change in our homes ,in our personal thinking, in our family lives, where we don’t hesitate to speak up, teach our children and then even community based social action, whether it is peacefully marching or signing ,collecting signatures, for change of laws whether it is, even perhaps showing our rage. When i say that, i want to say that when i say that we show our rage, this rage cannot be like my guru used to say, dancing on our head making us dizzy you know, this rage should be again a well measured, mindful instrument, where we show that we are not meek.
So our job is to cultivate clarity of what is our dharma in a given situation and be prepared for any necessary battles in this planet. We are still ruled by unconscious people of every race possible, who see women as no more than objects of pleasure, treat people of color as dirt. There are people who don’t hesitate to rape, molest, murder, harm fellow humans just, because they have a sexual you know preference that is not like theirs i can’t believe this, but it is true, right ?and these are people that can be found in every community maybe more so in the more privileged ones, just because there is more money, there more power there. But that doesn’t mean, anyone one of us can say we have not had our own baser, darker motivations. So it’s for all of us, to look in the mirror of our lives and then become prepared to wage a battle against the forces that make us agree, make us bend over backwards or make us look away and be smug with whatever is or just be happy that oh wow ! Look at the freedom we have in the United states of America. We can go shopping whenever we want to, we can go picnicking whenever we want. No, that is not sovereignty. No. How many more deaths, of how many more George Floyds, have we to witness, until we say, it’s not okay. So, therefore i urge you to get in touch with your healthy anger than your false peace.
Today the warfronts we have to face are not the open fields with swords and guns, but inside our own families, communities, corporate meeting rooms, stalk exchanges, hallways of the capital hills and the senate’s in the world and the global and you know national courts of justice. We have to conduct our necessary battles. So what is your anger asking of you? It is asking you to restore balance, but it is asking you to have a clear mind before you go about restoring balance. So how do you do that? Here is what i want to share, before i end this podcast. You can experience anger like the Vedic goddess Durga. We almost always think of anger as if it leads to emotions like violent actions, hitting, screaming, and burning. Yeah, it is happening but is doesn’t always have to be that way. Try and experience anger, Krodha as a pure emotion. When you do that, you know to hit something or to kick something is a secondary choice and you have a choice then and you can decide what you want to do with your anger.
Take purposeful actions with it or you want to vent it. It’s really your choice and when Durga the goddess goes to war, she doesn’t just close her eyes, it’s a blinding anger, she opens it wide, her perceptions, her awareness enhances and that’s what we need to do, if we are going to become, the caretakers of our new era. If we are going to make our planet safe, when George Floyd comes back. When goddess is in the battle, her moves are conscious, tactical. She upholds Dharma. She doesn’t suppress it, she doesn’t swallow it, she doesn’t pretend she is not angry, but she is smart with it .This anger comes it is shun and it is cope up .It doesn’t stay and stay and stay and makes us bitter, but it comes and it just like i said it doesn’t just come to our limbic system, like, for a minute there we see red but it colors our whole consciousness enough, that we can create a whole movement with it. I am so glad that i got angry with the way Ayurveda had become minimized packaged, distorted because i created a whole movement with it and if you too want to be a part of a movement, the contributor to a movement, the creator of a movement that leads to social transformation and restoration of justice and equality for all.
Then you have to understand and truly embody what it means to be led by, guided by, conscious anger versus tormented by unconscious anger. Little bits and bytes of unconscious anger are totally fine because we all begin there. There is no option. But, then it is up to us then, to slowly understand what our goal is? This road is not a short road, we have to go a long race and one way that you can really start processing your anger, this gut level feeling of injustice, is first by letting it be with you. Truly experiencing it in your body. Go to a closed room or somewhere where you won’t scare children or frighten anybody and then scream, if you need to, cry if you want to. Allow that anger that fear that grief, that sense of feeling really repulsed, with the indignity, to your humanity that has happened with the cruel and reprehensible murder of George Floyd. It’s a reality and you need to allow that, to do what it needs to do to your body. But don’t let that happen when you are on the road, when you are on the street, when you are feeding your kids. Do this by yourself because you are a spiritual warrior.
You are choosing, to embody super conscious rage to help yourself. Maybe this is your community that you want to stand up for, maybe it is not your community but you are a dharmic being so, every oppressed community is your community. It’s your opportunity, to extend you deepest core value, which is solidarity and oneness with all beings and so whether it does not matter who are you ,what’s your class what’s your country, what’s your culture ,what’s your skin color but if you are now willing to embody this unconscious rage for the benefit of the collective ,to wake up the sleepwalking ones and to help nurture and pick up, the injured ones, then get ready, first feel it and then give it some space, give it some breathe, spend some time with it. You don’t necessarily have to go into an all night rage roam and vent because just venting alone is not necessarily ,the way forward, because sometimes we may think we wrote this really raging message online or we you know threw a couple of stones maybe even ,but maybe then we will think we are done but we are not done. We are not done because if we think that we have come to a quick resolution because we have expressed this energy, this Shakti that was building in us and we expressed it, then we relax and we go back to normal life. Then, that Maya, that shadow, that collective shadow, that allows us to live in non respectful, nonworthy, nonspiritually ascended superior, circumstances will come to stay and we will once again, start slumbering until another George Floyd is killed just like that. Just like that, without a President who apologizes to us. With gas and arson and more suffering going on, we will fall asleep on the wheel, that’s what’s going to happen. So feel it fully, own it, it’s yours. It’s not George Floyd. It’s not another community. It’s ours. It’s how we have damaged ourselves. It’s where we are.
We are as a collective humanity; we are still crawling, in the puss of the shadow. It’s stinking, it’s foul. It’s not even enough to say they did it, because we let that happen to ourselves. Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that co-conspirator, the abusers and the abused, why did you allow that abuse to happen? Where have i contributed? Where have i been complacent with it? Why have i never recorded a podcast on this subject before in the fifty three years of my life? Another way to be a soldier embodying conscious rage is to take care of yourself, sleep on time and eat on time, join rallies, protest. Maybe it is an online post that you do, to spread awareness and a sankalpa, a soul decision to not be silent, to not be complacent anymore. For different people it may mean different things. It could be participation in a formal way. It could be participation in a private informal way, but whether it is through ritual, whether it is through religion, whether it is through private meditation and whether it is through social, political activism we have to take that decision, that we are going to see this through. We are going to make this earth a safer place, for George Floyd to come back. We are fortunate and thanks to technology that this world is not as divided or as difficult to conquer, as it once was and we want to conquer it with consciousness.
We want to make networks of communities across gender, religious, culture, sexual and of course skin divides. We want to make networks of dharmic people, are you with me? We want to ask and reassure each other. Make your own George Floyd clubs, to keep each other on the toes. Let this man’s death, become an emblem, for humanity’s awakening. I have my own skills. My own ways to contribute and one way i will embody this conscious rage, is by promising to be vulnerable. Promising to be one with you in this pain. Not being on this spiritual you know, better than you, i am coping better than you or i am just going to be diplomatically silent. No, none of that. This is disrespect, to our human hood and what is even more shocking do you know? What is even really, really amazing is that, the oppressors often want and recommend and suggest peaceful rallies in a grotesquely, unpeaceful shockingly, reprehensible, inexcusably, unfair system, that defies human dignity. It’s as if it’s up to the oppressed, it’s up to us now, if you are oppressed and if you are feeling indignant and if you are unhappy where you don’t get to really express it right because this is where you have to know that the advantage group in every society has the rights over anger and rage and the subordinate groups always have to live with their anger being colored as illegitimate, hysterical, irrational, downright dangerous, unneeded, unlawful, unwanted, you have to call the national guards to put the people who dare to be angry behind the prisons okay. We make this conscious anger is going to make a lot of the oppressors very very angry. They will demand of us to be very peaceful. They are going to tell us all the rhetoric about ahimsa, that we should be peaceful but peace is not just in whether we make noise or not. Peace is an invitation, that cannot exist without offering respect. Peace cannot be only a one way transaction. The black community alone cannot be responsible, for keeping up the ideologies, on which this nation has been built. It’s not possible and that is why we are going to decide, within the cave of our own heart, that we are not going to take this judgement call of whether there should be a peaceful lawful protest or whether there should be a angry rioting protest, because this is exactly what the oppressors want, for the oppressed to devalidate their own rage. We are murdered, we have dealt with massacres, genocide, xenophobia and yet we are told take it easy now, be peaceful, walk right, walk left, walk straight, turn right, turn left, follow the rules while, we break all the rules.
So this is what happens, when we are not in touch with our collective rage. We start denouncing each other but what we have to understand is that ,when it’s a war ,there may be times, we have to go peaceful, there are times we have to go not so peaceful, there are times we have to go diplomatic and there are times we have to be upfront in the face and say we are done, it’s enough we are done with your daily slaughter, we are done with your daily murder, we are done with your daily disrespect, we are done with your daily racial profiling ,we are done with the pain and suffering you are giving us on a daily basis and excuse me, excuse me if my rage makes you uncomfortable ,but this is how it looks today. So what i am really trying to say is not that pick up a rock and throw it, i hope you understand that what i am trying to say is, stop being so apologetic and let’s stop judging each other. The collective rage comes from understanding, the purpose of the collective and the purpose of the collective is not anger. The purpose of the collective is to bring about a change when, you are not being heard, when the narrative of how we should be angry, is being produced by our own oppressors. Then we have to take the narrative of how we want to be angry in our own hands.
Please listen carefully. The way to be angry, is the way of the truth teller, The truth lever and the way to be part of this movement is to accept your truth that you are feeling broken, you are angry, you feel ashamed whether you belong to this community or that community ,x y z community. You are feeling ashamed because you could not be part of this illusion and our silence or our complacency; a lot made us the part of the problem. Fact of the matter is, George Floyd is dead and he died in a brutal way because he was seen as a nobody, as a subordinate, as an object because this is what happens, when there is unconsciousness. This is the collective shadow which comes from conceit, from entitlement, where the color of the skin is a bigger divide than the divide of the miles between the moon and the earth.
Where is the true self? Where is that atma? That boundless true loving self, that dwells in all of us? It’s nowhere to be seen .Our planet today dear friends, is besieged by the shadow, completely besieged. We are in trouble. But these troubling times cannot be fixed by anyone, only we can do that, only we can sit quietly in inquiry with our own soul, our own self and question what can i do to transform my anger into a dharmic action? What are those steps that i can take? Can i pick up the phone and talk to a few people? Can i make some donations to worthy causes that are supporting this movement? Can i become initiator of or participator of signature campaigns like i mentioned before to bring about legislative changes or maybe i just simply blog or journal in my own journal or praying or chant mantra LOKAH SAMASTAH SUKHINO BHAVANTU, may all beings be truly peaceful. This is no ordinary peace; this is not peace that you get after eating cheesecake. This is peace because you no longer have hatred for another and you no longer have fear of another and you no longer live on a planet that is as divisive as ours. This is a shameful moment for humanity. I don’t know about you but i feel, not just angry with the oppressors, because it’s so easy to say its them, i just feel sorry for all of us that we are putting up with this. I want to be part of this solution. I am recording this podcast for me, so my dharma comes from knowing that my anger is needed, number one.
My anger is not a bad thing ,number 2.Dharma comes from my regulation of my anger so it doesn’t lead to me unconsciously, screaming ,hitting another ,unless there is a clear intention of what i am doing, i have clear permission of what i am doing because ,you know, irrational violence is not necessarily fixed by irrational violence. Dharma also comes from taking care of myself, eating, sleeping, staying away from mind altering substances because that would hamper my judgement, i want to become an asset to my community, i am not an energy sucker, i want to rise beyond my own fears that is dharma because now it’s not about you, it’s about what is true, what is worthy, what is right and finally dharma comes from not letting people dictate to you, as to what you should do with your collective rage. So let’s not judge each other. For some of us right now it is taking a more violent turn and for some of us it is sobbing in bed, for others it is a peaceful rally and for yet others it is you know recording on truthful, deep, meaningful podcast, meaningful to me at least and finally at the end of it remembering, that hatred can never be dharma. If at the end of this whole movement, we just come up with a little bit of hatred towards the people who don’t look like us and due to no special effort it was just karma, that they were born with a different color, a fairer color, a lighter color than ours ,yours or mine, so we end up hating them or disliking them, then our movement would have failed. All of us dharmic people have to come together, bend together and preach the gospel of equality and oneness. That is why the great Vedas said EKAM SAT VIPRAH BAHUDHA VADANTI. There is only truth that the different pundits call it by different names but they can give it any name, any description, but it is really only one truth that exists. That is why the Vedas said VASUDHAIVA KUTUMBAKAM; the whole world is one family. I am fortunate that from very young age itself, growing up in my lineage, growing up in my Vedic family, I learnt to see my same self in the cow that came to my home asking for food at midday, i saw the same self in the snakes that dwelled in the river Sarayu near my home in Ayodhya, i saw the same self in the people of a lower cast back then India was very divided up on cast not so much now, but very much back in the nineteen sixties and i remember my guru calling the person from the most lowest cast ,hugging him, lovingly bathing him, offering him his own clothes and saying come stay with us, I will teach your children, you can find a job at our home just being with us, we will look after you and you can stay with us and do little things, they became part of the family.
When the women in my house, who were not as progressive as my baba, at least one of them said, oh! But they are of a lower cast, baba said, huh, what are you talking about? We have the same self. I remember laughing and joking in the lap of these people, who were my people. We need more role models like baba ,that is why, i have always felt so comfortable with people, with different cultures, religious beliefs, sexual preferences and the whole nature can live with so much eco diversity. In fact diversity is its strength. Whenever we try to grow mono crops, we hurt nature and those mono crops don’t know how to grow, they can’t help each other out. But wherever there is diversity, that piece of nature, that forest, that land, that farm thrives. Have you forgotten to hold a hand out to each other? Fight on my brave men and women, fight on. Fight on for the dignity of George Floyd, fight on for the dignity of the human being. May there be light; in your souls. May you be guided from within, may your tears not be falling in vain. May the oppressors do wake up and realize, that they were hurting none but their own selves. In false egotistic shadows we hold on to but few waves, thinking that is me, when we are the entire ocean. In the false chase of the shadow we create so many divisions; we become estranged from our own divine nature. George Floyd you did not die in vain, you died to awaken humanity.
Until next time, this is Acharya Shunya and remember i am going to continue talking to you and helping you, process your emotions, feel your feelings and, through my blogs that you can find everywhere on my website, through my private face book page or group rather, guide your rage towards constructive, transformative community action, through my global satsang which you can find on YouTube you can find it by the name Vedic contemplations by Acharya Shunya. On all my social platforms i am super active, especially right now, because i join you in the pain and i join you in the hope. Take care my beloveds, Bye Bye for now.
Acharya Shunya is a globally-recognized spiritual teacher and Vedic lineage-holder who awakens health and consciousness through the Vedic sciences of Ayurveda, Vedanta and Yoga. She is the driving force behind an online wisdom school and worldwide spiritual community, and the author of best-selling book on the Vedic art of mind + body + soul well-being and health, Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom (Sounds True, 2017) and forthcoming second book with Sounds True to be released in 2020, Sovereign Self. Acharya Shunya is a keynote speaker at national and international conferences, and serves as an advisor to the Indian Government in matters pertaining to global integration and cultivation of Ayurveda and Yoga. Receive her free online teachings and browse her current eCourse offerings here or see more about her on Facebook and follow her on Instagram. Subscribe to her YouTube Channel where she holds live Global Satsangs once per month. Study Ayurveda with Acharya Shunya in her online course, Alchemy through Ayurveda.