We Are Cracked Open To Let The Light In

In this talk during Easter, Dr. Shefali Tsabary talks about letting go of the ego and letting in the light. We hold space for the pain and the grief currently going on in the world. Inspired and offering this suffering as a portal to a different consciousness, as an opportunity for this rawness and openness to allow in some light.

Transcript

Hi everyone.

Good morning.

I know many are celebrating and celebrating their holiday but in a different way.

And I know for many there's a great loss at this moment and they are in grief and mourning.

So it's an interesting juxtaposition of this holiday season that is both joyous for many and for many very surreal and full of grief.

So I just want to start out with the sensitivity for those who are celebrating this holiday in a surreal way and for those who are grief in grief and grieving because of this holiday.

So just to touchstone on the enormous grief that people must be feeling as they've lost their family members on this family occasion and how holidays like this bring up even more grief because of the point that this was a moment in the year when families got together and it just brings up so much pain when your family is not around you.

So for those of you who are without their family members who are in pain because of it and just sensitive to that grief and just wanting to hold space for that and acknowledge it because a lot of people are going through so much right now.

So welcome everyone.

I just want to share with you that I'm sensitive to the fact that so much is going on.

You know I live in New York just outside the city and I'm very much in touch with the fact that we have over 700 deaths a day right now and there's so many in my beloved place of residence right now who are in pain and just holding space for that.

So I am now on day three of this course that I'm offering called Viral Wisdom where I'm not trying to bypass any of the pain that is currently going on in the world but in fact I'm inspired by the pain that most of us are going through and I'm offering this pain as a portal.

I'm offering this pain as a possible opportunity for us to have a different outlook,

For us to have a different consciousness,

For us to use this birth canal,

To use this enormously difficult period of transition as an opportunity perhaps because we are raw,

Because we are wounded,

Because today is Easter,

Because so many families are not together on this sacred holiday for many,

Because many are dying right now around us,

Because many right now have had their last breath,

Right now are ending their present iteration in this life,

They're ending this moment in this life.

Right now can we use this moment of being open,

Being raw,

Being so sensitive right?

It's actually in these moments of rawness when our head is on the floor cracked open,

The skull is open that it's these moments that we are given an opportunity to perhaps let go of the ego,

Perhaps let in the light,

You know the adage that when things crack the light comes in.

So this is a moment in our humanity where we're all cracking,

We're literally cracked up,

It's cracked,

Finished.

Now we can resurrect the ego,

We can resurrect the old ways,

But right now in this moment in time we are cracked open,

Right?

This is the day especially Easter is symbolically a day of resurrection.

So can we use this moment of pain,

Of tremendous pain where all our past defenses have broken open to allow in some light and maybe my words will allow in some light.

You know the way we most live,

Most of us mostly live is really on this groundhog hamster wheel,

A cycle.

We wake up,

We go to work,

We relate to our children the way we relate to our children and we go to bed.

We have been on a hamster wheel.

We've been on a hamster wheel in our own individual lives,

You know you have,

Complaining,

Whining,

Bitching,

Moaning,

Unhappy,

Disgruntled.

We've been on our own hamster wheel of life and now we are given a pause.

We are forced to stop.

Positivity has been on a hamster wheel.

We've been unconsciously reactive,

Constantly on the same cycle of repetition and repetitivity and reactivity,

Not knowing where the pause button is.

We didn't know how to stop the endless and profound climate change.

We didn't know how to stop destructing our earth.

Most of us were feeling stressed out and anxious,

Otherwise the anxiety statistics would not have been what they are.

They are right now one out of every three American children are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

It would not have been so if we had been on a trajectory toward consciousness.

It would not have been that racism abounds in the United States of America the way it does.

It would not be that we still today have the poverty we have where 80% of the world lives under $10 a day or less,

Right?

Even less like $3 a day in my country,

India.

It would not be that today in this world,

In this moment,

New York City,

One of the wealthiest cities in the world doesn't have supplies to take care of its sick.

And we have to get it from China and get it from India.

It would not be unless things were drastically effed up.

You know in your own personal life,

In your own individual life that you were stressed out.

You know you were stressed out.

You know that you were going through life waiting for the weekend,

Waiting for retirement,

Waiting for tomorrow,

Waiting to lose weight.

So we would know,

We know through our own individual life that we were in a state of duress.

And what is individual is most often global.

What is one is everyone.

We just don't realize it till a pandemic like this hits.

When a pandemic like this hits,

Then we realize,

Oh,

We're kind of similar.

We're kind of the same.

We're kind of interconnected.

So the question to ask now is how was I living?

Because our illusion is that we were living in a state of utopia and therefore this is a huge disruption to the utopia.

Now there is a huge devastation,

A huge tragedy,

No doubt about it.

But for those of us who are not yet ill or out of the thick of it,

Let us not fall under the lull to think that we were living in a utopia.

We were severely in distress and duress and the earth was palpitating in suffocation.

It could barely breathe.

We could barely breathe.

Our children could barely breathe.

We had constructed a life of nine to five,

Basically nine to nine with a salivation for vacation time,

A salivation for the weekend.

That's not a life.

Most of us were dying already.

Our spirits were dying.

Most of us were besieged by ideas of how we should look,

How we should act,

How we should come across to our loved ones,

How we should be so wealthy,

How we should be so successful.

We were besieged under attack by how we should be.

Most of us were trapped.

Most of us were enslaved.

Most of us were feeling under siege.

And this is a grand pause,

A huge reset.

But with every reset comes death,

Physical death or spiritual death.

Death is always part of our existence.

Sometimes it is just merely emotional and spiritual.

Sometimes it is bigger.

It becomes physical and sometimes it becomes pandemic and climatic and it's on a climate level.

It's atmospheric death.

Every death,

Though,

Is a mirror and reflection of the one before and they build on each other.

So therefore we have to take personal responsibility for our death.

So as the earth was dying and now as the economy dies and as people physically die,

What we,

The ones who are not yet at the brink of death,

Have to ask ourselves is how have I been dying?

And my responsibility when I look in the mirror of what is happening around is to ask,

Well,

Since I am living,

How am I really living?

This is what the mirror of this tragedy,

This pain portal is asking of us.

You see,

Everything in life is a mirror if we choose to look in the mirror.

Every moment is reflecting back to us.

How have I?

How have I?

How have I?

When your teenager slams the door and says,

I hate you,

Our tendency is to react back and say,

I hate you back or what have you done?

Really?

You hate me?

I'm going to tell you what you are like.

But that slam door and the I hate you is actually a mirror.

We just don't realize it.

It's a mirror to look inside and ask,

How have I slammed the door today?

How have I been hateful today?

Now,

When we look at life like that,

Like,

Oh,

A mirror,

Mirror,

Mirror,

Mirror,

Then you know what happens?

Something very miraculous.

Instead of engaging in the chain of reactivity,

We do something else.

We now break the chain of reactivity.

By looking at the moment as a mirror,

We stop our reactivity.

We've broken the chain of reactivity.

We have disrupted a pattern.

And when we look in the mirror and go inward to ask,

How have I,

How does this moment actually reflect me?

How does this moment reflect me?

How is this a message for me?

Then everything becomes a messenger and a pointer.

It becomes a direct indicator for the growth within.

So as the economy collapses,

And it will,

And as people die and they are,

And as the old is shed,

As it is being shed,

You are asked to look at this all as a mirror,

A mirror,

A mirror,

A mirror.

So when you,

Someone you know dies,

Look in the mirror of the death and ask,

How am I dying?

How am I not living?

When the economy collapses,

That is a mirror.

How have I been dependent on this economy?

How am I collapsing now because of it?

And in every moment we look at this virus as a mirror for our own infection,

The inner infection.

There is nothing that exists that is separate from us.

You know,

I once had a client and I won't ever forget this client because it was,

The parents bought this little boy and it was around,

The boy was around five years old.

And I remember,

Because I'm going to tell you why,

And you're never going to forget this if you're paying attention.

So this five year old boy was being bought to me because at school he would take his poop and smear it on the wall,

Literally,

And horrify everybody,

Right?

And then when he would come home,

He would do the same thing,

Smear the poop all over.

And I told the parents,

Well,

It's really hard to miss this message,

Isn't it?

And they were like,

What,

What message?

And I said,

The message is so clear.

The shit is hitting the fan.

That's the message.

The shit is everywhere.

No one wants to see it.

So he's like,

Let me show you.

He's feeling out of control so much so that he needs to do this,

Right?

You know,

And when children are young,

The reason they don't potty train so easily,

Any mother will tell you,

And they won't go poop and pee is because they're holding onto control.

They're holding onto their body.

They're like,

I won't give my poop to anybody.

And they're holding onto their pee.

So this boy,

By doing this,

He was trying to say,

I am out of control.

So when the parents began to see this as a mirror,

Rather than their kid is crazy,

They began realizing,

Yeah,

I have cause,

I've contributed to my kid feeling out of control.

So this all to say,

Whatever is happening in your life right now,

And that you're feeling out of control is because you have been out of control.

And now this virus,

This contagion is showing us is the mirror to many things,

Both profoundly beautiful and profoundly horrific.

So profoundly beautiful.

This contagion is the mirror to show us that we are so formlessly,

Energetically interconnected.

Like,

Hello,

This virus is the mirror to what every spiritual master wants to teach us,

Which is we are interconnected.

It is showing us we are interconnected breath by breath.

Our breath,

The same breath that I breathe is your breath.

And it is so connected.

You know,

So when the Buddha taught to focus on the breath,

The reason it's such a profound technique of meditation is because the breath shows us that what is external and what is internal is the same thing.

Because I'm breathing from the outside into the inside that goes outside that comes back in that goes back out shows us that this form that is the separation is actually an illusion.

So it's so profound.

And now this virus is showing us the same thing,

That we think we're separate through our bodies.

But boy,

Holy moly,

We are not because breath is what has always kept us together.

We didn't know.

We thought it was our religion that kept us together.

We thought it was our family that kept us together.

We thought it was the color of our skin that kept us together.

No.

Oh my goodness,

None of that that we thought was the binding force,

Our nationality,

Our tribe,

Our family,

Our color,

Our race,

Our social status,

Our gender.

No,

That was all an illusion.

That's not what's keeping us together.

What's keeping us together is our interconnectedness that we all breathe the same breath.

Look what this virus is teaching us.

Look in the mirror of this virus and look at it in the face and learn the lesson that is teaching us that we are not separate.

We are interconnected and we're not interconnected by the things we thought we were interconnected.

That is an illusion.

We go to our synagogue,

We go to our church,

We go to our elite men's club and our women's club and our neighborhood and our zip code.

And you know,

I hang out with these friends.

An illusion.

We're not connected because we're all American or all French.

No,

That's limited.

That's separationist.

We're actually only really going to enter global unity when we understand that every other definition of togetherness has been actually separatist.

And the only way to be together is to understand our one humanity as one breath.

And this virus is showing that profoundly.

So the next time you say I'm Catholic or the next time you say I'm celebrating Easter and the next time you say I'm a woman and the next time you say I'm so fancy and the next time you say I'm a model or an author and we authors understand that these are colloquial ways to describe you but so limited.

This virus is showing no.

Go beyond the label.

Go beyond the role.

Go beyond the definite.

Please humanity,

Can you now see that you are not your race,

Not your gender,

Not your religion,

Not your education,

Not your title,

Nothing because I'm showing you I will take everyone down.

I will take the priest,

The rabbi,

The prince and the prime minister down because those roles don't matter.

And at the end of the day what matters is that we are one breath.

The virus is showing us exactly what we need to see.

But we don't want to look in the mirror because it's like no,

It's a virus.

It's an evil enemy out there.

There is no evil enemy.

It's breath to breath to breath.

It's a mutation and mutations abound in life.

Most of the trees you see are mutation of beauties.

It doesn't even exist.

It is on its own.

There is no such thing as a mutation.

A mutation is mutation of something else.

No.

So if it's off something else,

It's connected.

So the virus is showing us that we are all connected.

So there is no more separation.

So the next time you identify as something,

Understand your participation in separation.

The minute I say I'm Indian or I'm American or I'm a woman or I'm Catholic,

Jewish,

Muslim,

Hindu,

It is all participation in separation,

Not togetherness.

The only togetherness will come when we decimate,

Completely dissolve the bullshit illusion of the I am.

I am whatever comes after the I am.

The I am is an illusion.

And only when each one of us rises in our own individual self to the consciousness that we are living in an illusion only then will globally we rise to a different consciousness.

So every spiritual teacher is begging you,

Has been begging you,

Not begging,

But pleading or not even pleading,

Just making a case to realize the illusions we have been living under.

And the reason we are at the level of suffering globally,

Economically,

Racially,

In all levels,

Gender wise,

Is because our consciousness has been majorly asleep.

I was going to say fucked up,

But I shouldn't say that on Easter,

But I just did because we have been asleep.

So today on Easter,

The symbol of Easter,

Of resurrection,

Of rebirth,

Of renewal,

Of spring,

Of coming alive,

What needs to come alive?

Our consciousness,

A global consciousness needs to come alive.

And what is the global consciousness is what this virus is showing us.

The most profound truth of this virus is that we are not our race,

Our gender,

Our religion.

We are something else.

We are not our nationality,

Not our tribe,

Not our family.

We are one,

One,

One is everyone,

One is a million.

So when we individually execute the decimation of separation in our own mind,

Only then will the virus of togetherness become contagious.

Till then,

It will not.

And we will die spiritually as we are dying spiritually.

The not so profound truth that you may want to see,

Or so beautiful truth that you may want to see through the virus,

The not so lovely,

We are all one truth.

The truth,

The truth,

The truth that the virus wants to show us,

Which I think is beautiful,

But people may not,

Is that we are mortal.

We're not only mortal,

We are fragile as a speck of dust.

We're not only fragile as a speck of dust.

We are equal to every other animal and energetic source out there.

We may have thought that we were the top of the food chain and we came after the rest of the earth was created because we're so amazing.

And we may have thought that we have been so evolved because you know,

We are homo sapiens,

We're so wise and that we're not really animals.

And this virus is showing us the not so loving truth that you may not so want to hear,

It's not so welcoming to your ears as fancy humans,

Is that we are not only mortal,

But we are fragile.

And we're not only mortal and fragile,

But we are mortal and fragile like every other animal out there.

Because we are animals.

And we don't want to believe that because we have a higher consciousness.

But do we really?

Do we really have a higher consciousness?

That is what the question is of today.

Do we really have a higher consciousness?

I don't know.

If we're resisting the inevitability of our mortality,

If we're resisting the true fragility of our beings,

And if we are truly believing delusionally that we are greater than animals,

Then are we really greater than animals?

Are we really gaining this lesson?

So the virus is a mirror.

And everything in our life is a mirror to how we have yet to grow our children,

Our partners,

Our illnesses,

Our successes,

Everything is a mirror.

And the ultimate mirror that the moment in life is showing us that any moment in life,

The perpetual mirror is that what we think we are,

Who we think we are,

What we think we have,

Who we think we have are all illusions.

Because what we have and who we have and what we think we have are all transient.

They will all go at some point.

The sooner we realize that,

The sooner we can play in life.

We can live life with abandon.

We can be free because we're not holding on anymore.

So the next time you see wrinkles in your face,

Instead of going,

Oh my God,

I've lost my youth.

You go,

Yeah,

I see the wrinkle.

I accept.

Now I can play.

I can have fun.

The next time your relationship ends,

Instead of crying and mourning the loss,

You accept,

You release,

You go,

I get it.

Now with physical death,

It's different.

Yes.

With physical death,

It's slightly more painful because we love so deeply and we don't want to lose the person in physical,

But we have to understand why we cry,

Why we cry,

Why we cry.

We never stop crying.

Yes,

We can cry.

But we also understand that the time in the physical is always limited.

It's time bound.

And because it's time bound,

The reflection that the death offer us,

That the dead and the death offers us both the dying and the death itself offers us,

The mirror it offers us is how am I dead?

How am I dying?

How am I living or not living right here right now?

That is the question.

And if we don't take the question,

If we don't take the question,

If we don't take the reflection,

If we don't look in the mirror,

But we keep resisting going,

No,

I can't,

I can't,

It's too painful.

I can't look,

I can't look,

I can't look.

Then we just stay the same.

So evolution means to look in the mirror,

Is to turn the face,

Not away,

Not away from your crying child who says,

I don't like you,

But into the mirror to ask why,

What have I done to make the child not like me?

So evolution is stopping the denial,

Stopping the avoidance,

Stopping the resistance and turning toward the light,

Turning toward the mirror and going,

I can see,

I can look and I can learn.

What are you trying to teach me right now?

What can I learn right now?

I'm crying,

I'm crying,

I'm crying,

But I will breathe,

Breathe,

Breathe.

So through the tears,

How can I learn?

And I want to look away because it's too painful.

I can't,

I can't,

I can't.

Evolution means turning that face to lean in,

To lean in.

So when you're a teenager,

When you're a toddler,

When you're a dying one shows you something that's so painful that you feel your ego rising and you want to resist and you want to run away and you want to blame and you want to project and you want to react.

And that moment take a pause and turn toward the mirror and say,

How can I lean in?

It's so painful and I'm crying,

But how can I lean in?

And it is in the leaning in that our consciousness raises.

And it is in the leaning in that we learn the lesson,

The profound lessons that we have to learn in this moment.

And the two profound ones for today are that we are interconnected.

But more than that,

Anytime you participate in an I am with a label,

I am with an adjective,

I am with a qualification or a role or a definition,

You are participating in separation.

So every time you believe that you are that you have participated in a separation and therefore you are resisting the lesson of interconnection.

And the second lesson is that we are mortal.

We are not only mortal,

We are fragile.

We're not only fragile.

We are mortal and fragile like every snail,

Grasshopper,

Butterfly,

Ant,

Horse,

Elk,

Elephant out there.

We are no more,

No less at the end of the day.

And if we are different,

It is only because we have a consciousness.

But we are no different if we don't use our consciousness.

What how are we different if we don't understand life?

So this is what we are being asked to embrace.

And it's difficult and you want to turn your head away,

But we have to turn.

We have to keep turning toward the mirror and looking inward.

So I have been using in this course,

This virtual course that I'm going to be teaching here every day at noon Eastern.

The touch tone principles of the Tao Te Ching.

It's a book called the Tao Te Ching.

And I've been going through the verses.

It's by Lao Tzu.

Somebody will post it here and you can buy it.

The translation that I'm using is by Stephen Mitchell.

It's available online.

You can look it up.

So verse three of the Tao of the Tao.

Verse three says,

If you over esteem great men,

People become powerless.

If you over esteem great men,

People become powerless.

What this means.

If you over esteem great men,

Meaning.

If so,

Great men exist.

OK,

Great.

But when you over esteem them,

Meaning you put them on a pedestal,

What you do is you participate in the powerlessness of the audience.

And many spiritual teachers do this and many religious teachers do it and many states of head do it.

I'm the king,

I'm the queen and the prime minister.

I'm a wisdom teacher.

I'm a teacher.

Any I'm a parent.

When we over esteem these roles of greatness and put the people on the stage on a pedestal,

What that person participates in and what you participate in is a grand stripping of power of those who follow,

Of those who are in the audience.

So never follow anyone.

Never over esteem anyone.

There is no teacher out there,

No head of state out there,

No president,

Prime minister,

Husband,

Wife,

Child,

Parent greater than you.

Not that you're greater than them,

But they're not greater than you.

And the power lies in understanding our mutual interconnectivity.

Never give your power away.

If you over value possessions,

People begin to steal.

Same with possessions.

If you covet a car,

If you covet the Bentley,

The Prada shoes.

Now suddenly people become thieves.

Now suddenly people begin to steal because you've given it a value,

But it never had a value.

Diamonds don't have value till you give it a value till you give it a value.

They're alluvial deposits from Africa in the soil.

The master leads by emptying people's minds.

A true master doesn't need to control the mind of the other.

A true parent doesn't need to control their children.

A true master leads by emptying the other's minds,

By filling their core,

By weakening their ambition,

By toughening their resolve.

The master helps people lose everything they know and everything they desire and creates confusion in who think they know.

See a true master doesn't want to be followed.

A true master doesn't want you to think that he is great.

A true master wants you to empty your own mind,

To leave your own attachments,

To be confused and say,

I don't know because that is a true master.

A true master never says they know because a true master understands you can never know.

Practice not doing and everything will fall in place.

What this means is practice coming from being,

From flow,

From energy,

Not from your mind and doing.

And when you practice from your heart,

Everything falls into place and in space.

So our desire to control and our desire to be an ego is our greatest failure and our doom and our demise.

So when we let go of the ego of wealth and success and beauty and youth and attachments and possessions,

We think we are losing,

But actually we are gaining.

Actually today,

Actually today,

Later in the day,

You'll see a video that I talk about this very thing.

It's just serendipitous as all things are.

It's about how true growth is nothing you add.

Watch the video when it comes out later.

I will be meditating on another page later this afternoon and I will post the link once I share this video.

You can join me on that page for daily parenting advice and for meditation.

I will be on this page every day at 12 Eastern.

Thank you for joining me.

Happy Easter,

Happy resurrection,

Happy rebirth while we cry,

While we cry,

While we cry a lot.

Bye everyone.

Reviews

Exactly where I am! Thank you for succinctly stating the Truth is Cracking the Breath of Light into our awareness💚 Since the pandemic of 2020 I have witnessed the world changing and my prayers are worth the healing 🔔 I am being held accountable and witness to! Thank you 🔺 Mind Body Spirit

Powerful message 🙏🏼