FAQs about Adi Da & Adidam > Taking Up the Way of Adidam > Sadhana Hurts

Sadhana Hurts

This talk originally appeared in the book, Hear Me Heart Deep. Sadhana is a Sanskrit word that means "a way of accomplishing something". It typically is used to refer to spiritual practice, often involving a set of disciplines.

ADI DA: The earliest stages of practice are a test of your ability to grow up, to be human, to understand reality and to function in it with a will, and to be transferred to the Great Reality. And if your impulse is strong, you do not waste any time about it. You go to some reality group [a group of fellow devotees who help us see things about ourselves we might not see by ourselves], there are six guys in a room, they point out "blah-blah-blah" about you. "My God! That is completely right. Tough for me. Adios to that. No more! Flat! What do you guys think my discipline ought to be? No, that is not quite precise. What do you say, so-and-so? Oh, that touches everything. Good! That is the best discipline. That is what I am going to do, flat. [Laughter.] And it will cause me great difficulty, no doubt, but that is what I will do."

That is how you grow. You do not grow otherwise.You people are all weakening yourselves, consenting to be identified with your early-life complication, your early-life adaptations, your old adaptations, as if complication is your right. That is nonsense. What about your understanding? Change it, then! Do something else! Suffer the heat of it, and grow. Without heat there is no growth, there is no cooking, there is no alchemy, there is no change; things are not thrown into the pot; nothing happens.

Well — you are all involved in your emotional-sexual problems. How many more gatherings and reality groups do you need to talk about it? You have all been "considering" it in My Company for years on end already. That is it! That is what there is to say about it. Now, where is the discipline? That is what you must do.

It hurts. It definitely hurts. It hurts the body. It hurts the feeling. It hurts the mind. It is just heat. It is just energy. And all the time you are Contemplating Me and feeling beyond it. What a glory. That is how you grow! It is greater than death. It is the domain of love, you see. That is what exceeds limits. Love exceeds limits. Love is not indulgence in desire. It is heat. It is a purifying force. It is a glow. Ultimately it becomes infinitely Radiant and Outshines everything.

The stresses you all suffer are the stresses in your reluctance, your weakness. It is time to start suffering the stress of great commitment, of great strength, of manliness (male or female), of humanness, of understanding, of the will to discipline, such that you do something different. That is it.

And it is difficult, yes. That is why I call the Way of Adidam an ordeal. It is necessarily difficult. In fact, measure it: If it is not difficult today, you are not doing sadhana. Sadhana is difficult. It is heat. It works against motions, energies, impulse, adaptation. It works against them. It confounds them. It frustrates them. If you do not feel so confounded every day, you are not practicing. You are not doing sadhana.

You all think sadhana is a consolation, a matter of feeling good every day. No. Sadhana is about feeling bad every day — in some sense it is true! If you are going to feel good, pay the dues of encountering that and transcending it. If you are doing sadhana, that is how you justify feeling good — not by relaxing into your self-indulgent mode, your weakness. No. Do the sadhana intelligently. Be willed. Do the sadhana. You will inevitably suffer difficulties. It will be an ordeal. You can feel beyond it in any moment through real practice, real sadhana. And even the stresses, the difficulties themselves, may remain, but they will be peripheral. They will be just heat in the pot.

You, conceiving of that process intelligently, will be able to endure it because you understand the necessity of it, the virtue of it. Growth hurts! You must hurt to grow. You must burn to grow. Burning is absolutely necessary. You want to feel good. That is why you remain a seeker, self-indulgent, mediocre, weak-willed, and weak-minded. You are on the teat. You are in bed. You are on the genital. You want to pleasurize yourself. You want anything but the necessary principle of ordeal, which is the only principle that allows growth. There is no growth otherwise.

Look at what a woman goes through to produce a child. It is not just sitting there and knitting booties! Every energy, every chemical in her body is converted to the making of this child. Incredible stresses are in the body. The whole being changes. The whole body-mind changes. It is an imposition. It is a struggle. It is a glory. It is a delight. It is terrible. It is incredible pain in the birth process. That is just one image in life that indicates to you what growth requires, and exactly what you resist. Women eventually want to put kids in a test tube — no stress, only pleasure and intellectual acknowledgement, no work, no pain, no obligation, no commitment. No growth.

DEVOTEE: Beloved, what I am feeling tonight is that the ultimate pain is to sit here while You say there is no change, and yet I know everyone in this room feels there is change. But it does not measure up to what You require.

ADI DA: It does not measure up to what you require. There is no change because you do not accept the ordeal that change requires. You say yes, and then you do nothing. You look for the way out. You will not consistently encounter the discipline your own intelligence proposes. And that is exactly what you must do. You must propose a discipline intelligently and do it. That is sadhana! That is it!

I can say this having done sadhana, not having merely been born from the forehead of Zeus. Having been born in an ordinary way, having lived the ordinary life, having had to suffer the entire ordeal in every dimension, every stage of life, even in your company, I know what I am talking about. Teaching you has been an ordeal. To teach is an ordeal. to serve others in their growth requires participation in their ordeal. The ordeal is terrible, difficult, painful! But that is what it takes, and if you are not enduring it every day, you are not doing sadhana.

I expect that people who have been associated with Me for a long time have understood this message already, that they have found out that this is what growth requires, that this is what the process requires. You do sadhana. You do tapas. You do renunciation. You do a discipline based on intelligence. You do it every day. You struggle with the limitations that are automaticities in yourself. You feel beyond them. That is what it takes. And you love it. And you move on in the practice, and no nonsense. You know what I mean? None. That is what you do.

People who understand this principle get down to it, handle business, and bring Me signs. They do not wait for all these years and then tell Me to wait more. They do not spend time with Me and change nothing. You people are indulging yourselves in My Company. You are coming to lectures. You are being amused. To practice is to suffer, but it is not egoic suffering, you see. Therefore, it is not called "suffering". It is called "tapas" [heat]. We call it the "ordeal of practice". We call it "renunciation". We call it "self-discipline". It is necessary! That is it. That is the substance of change! That is the alchemy of change. That is fire in the pot. Everything must be thrown into it.

Suffer the heat of this sadhana every day. That is it. Not the heat you think you are suffering because you are failing, but the heat of succeeding, the heat of doing it. That is it! God is not a tit or a genital hanging down out of the top of the universe. God is that which is Realized only through transcending your egoic self. God is the Principle of existence itself, Realizable only when you uncover and release what you superimpose on existence itself. Reality is the principle of sadhana. To be submitted utterly to Reality without superimposing anything on it — that is sadhana. To function in Reality without superimposing anything on it is the great tapas, a great ordeal.

Well — doing that, you do not have time for any silly "household" [man/woman and parent/children] nonsense, any silly emotional-sexual nonsense, any lack of discipline, any vagueness, any conventionalities. You do not have any time for any of that. You cannot afford it. It is not it! You eschew it. You renounce it. You throw it away. You do something else, and consistently. That is the kind of person who should be in My Great Hermitage Ashram. That is the kind of person who should be practicing the Way of Adidam. That is what the Way of Adidam is all about.

Sadhana hurts. It sublimes you. It intensifies and deepens meditation. It moves you into a greater sphere before you indulge in reactivity, before you indulge in self-contraction, before you indulge in the body-mind, before you indulge in conditional identification. There is a Supreme Place of Being Itself. That is Where you "Locate" yourself through sadhana, through discipline, through heat, through ordeal.

That is what it is all for. Therefore, it is all for meditation. It is all for Samadhi — not for life-fulfillment, not for personality changes. It is for Samadhi, the Most Sublime of all realizations, the unique State, the Absolute! God! Truth! Your entire life must be devoted to that Absolute. That is what it is to be a practitioner of some maturity, some advancement, some sort of seriousness, such devotion. Where is your impulse? Where is your discipline? Where is your intelligence? Where is your understanding? Where is your capability to be human, manly (male or female)? Where is your endurance? Where is your use of this great heat of self-frustration? The heat of self-frustration is the energy of meditation. It is the seat of meditation. It is the Heart.

On the other hand, it looks like I am trying to inspire you again. What I am looking for is people who have already responded and are getting on with it, who will give Me the goods, give Me the gifts, and move on. Give Me something to work with. Give Me renunciates orders, give Me a gathering of devotees, give Me a sacred institution, an institution based on the Spiritual Process. Give Me those involved in Ruchira-Avatara-Bhakti Yoga, that concentration, that Spiritual sublimity. Give Me people manly enough to move beyond the difficulties of discipline in the ordinary human context, instead of this weak-willed garbage, indulging in the world, being consumers, being wracked with ordinary life.

What difference does it make how your personality reacts to the discipline? Stand prior to your personality! Understand it, but then do the necessary work of transcending it. Do the meditation. Do it in daily life. Do it in your service. Do it relative to transitions and practice. Do it in your intimate circumstance. Do it as a true man or woman. Do it sexually. Do it everywhere.

Cut it out! It burns! It burns to cut it out. And that burning is the glory that you register in meditation at its depth. It purifies. It releases contraction. It releases limitation. It Outshines it. It burns it off. You want to make use of this Person? You want to make use of My Company? Then meditate in My Company. Come to Me in the right disposition. Come to me disciplined. Come to Me with understanding. Receive My Spiritual Heart-Transmission.

Move! Grow! Awaken!

That is what I am here for.

This talk appears in our sections
Taking Up the Way of Adidam and Readings