Special Edition Conversations With KD April 11, 2020

Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD April 11, 2020

Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond.

“It’s very difficult time. So, it’s a good time to be kind to yourself and allow what is to be for now. This is the moment you have. You don’t have any other moments. Now is what you have. 10 minutes from that will be now… What happens three years from now, you don’t know, but now is the time that you have to try to relax about all these issues that you have in your life and in your emotions, come to peace with them, greet them, get to know them. Stop judging yourself so harshly for feeling these things. Stop judging yourself harshly for not having what you think you should have. ‘Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I don’t have what it takes for this to happen for me.’ This would be a good time to let the sting of all those kinds of stories dissipate a little bit and don’t believe them so strongly every minute of every day. Right now, you can’t do much about anything. We’re stuck at home. We have our minds to deal with, and it’s our minds that all the suffering comes from; our minds, our emotions and our stuff.” – Krishna Das

I’ve been traveling for 25 years, almost nonstop. Which of course I love to do, and I love to sing with people, but I can actually spend a whole day now without worrying what’s going in the suitcase. It’s amazing. Because usually I have to travel, and I’ll go through two or three different climates. Right?

So, I take two suitcases and the harmonium, wherever I go. And if I never came back home again, I’d have everything I need for the rest of my life. Now, having all this space around me, I have time to clean my room. I’ve been cleaning for weeks. I haven’t made a dent.

Well, what do you want to do? What do you want to talk about? You know, trying very hard to achieve some particular kind of state of consciousness or some kind of feeling that we think we’ll be able to hold onto, that’s not really the best, beset plan. What we need to really cultivate is the ability to live with whatever shows up in our, in our life in the moment.

When I was younger, when I was, and I was in India with Maharajji and every day when we’d come out in the afternoon, he would come out to sit with us. I’d take a bath, cold water bucket bath, put on some clean clothes and come out and sit in front of him, and one day I laughed almost out loud because I saw that I was waiting for something to happen, you know? And I realized, every time I sang, every time I meditated, every time I did any kind of practice, there was a program running behind, like waiting for something, waiting for it to happen.

And that moment, sitting with him, I laughed because I realized, wait a minute, it’s already happened. I’m here. And I realized I had this, this idea that liberation, freedom, Nirvana, ultimate bliss was, when I would get that, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be there when that was here. I wouldn’t be there.

And I laughed because I recognize that that moment, there will not be billionth of a second that I will not be here, that you would not be here, but we get washed away and blown around by the winds of this and that, and the waves of this and that. And so, we don’t recognize that we’re always here. It would be like the ocean thinking that it’s a wave only and every time the wave crashes and tries to hold on to that wave and then it crashes and disappears or grabs onto another one.

But the ocean is always there, regardless of how many waves come and go.

Q: Hi everyone.