No One Can Make You Feel Anything
When someone takes a jab at you they are trying to put you in a particular room of your mind and tell you how to feel, and you can decline to walk in.
Dandapani explains his guru's phrase, where awareness goes, energy flows, using water and a mansion of a hundred rooms as analogies. He shows how repeatedly visiting one room strengthens it, and how understanding that you are awareness rather than the mind gives you the choice not to follow someone into the room they are pointing to.
What this talk covers
- Energy behaves like water from a watering can, which cannot discriminate between the weeds and the flowers, so whatever you put energy into grows.
- Picture the mind as a mansion with a hundred rooms, one room anger, one jealousy, one happiness, one technology, and yourself as a ball of light moving between them.
- The room you visit constantly is where your energy is deposited, which is why a person whose awareness has gone to the anger room for decades defaults there in an instant, so you have to decide consciously which places in your mind you visit, because that is what you are nurturing.
- When someone teases or jabs you, they are taking you to a room and saying this is how I want you to feel, and going along with them is a choice.
- The one thing he would teach his daughter across every area of life is that she is not the mind, she is pure awareness, and she chooses where in the mind she goes.
But you choose to go along with the person and enter the room when you don't have to.Dandapani
Questions
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Wherever you put your attention in your mind, your energy is flowing there and strengthening that area. Dandapani compares it to watering a garden bed, where weeds and flowers grow alike because the water cannot discriminate.
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Recognise that they are inviting you into a room of your mind and telling you how to feel there. You can see that their reaction comes from their state of consciousness, let it come to you, and not do anything with it.
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Because their awareness has been going to that area of the mind for decades, creating a path and a rut. Each visit deposits energy there, so it becomes the default place to go.
Transcript
934 words · 4:47
where awareness goes, energy glows. And we've talked about this in the past, and this is a theme of something you talk about regularly, and it's such a valuable, simple concept
to get your arms around, but it also takes practice. Can you explain that phrase for our listeners? I think the best way to understand the phrase is to understand energy, and the simplest way
to understand energy is to look at energy as the same way we look at water. So if I took a watering can and I watered a garden bed, both the weeds and the flowers would grow.
Water couldn't discriminate between the weeds and flowers. Whatever I water will grow. Energy is no different is what I tell people. Whatever you put energy into,
whether it's positive or negative, will start to develop and grow in your life. I put energy into a negative relationship. It just becomes more negative and just grows.
So wherever I move my awareness, my attention in my mind, that's where my energy is flowing. Now, if I look at my mind in a very simple analogy as a giant mansion with a hundred rooms and each room is a different part of my mind.
So one room is anger, one room is jealousy, one room is happiness, one room is yachts, another room is McLarens, another room is technology, HR, whatever it is, AI. Which room I go into all the time, that's where my energy is flowing. And that particular area of the mind is getting strengthened and strengthened and strengthened.
Have you ever met anybody Dave in your life that you know who's just so quick to get angry and you could see it in their face and no matter what you say that's the default? It's because their awareness has been going there for decades creating a path, a rut and every time awareness goes to the angrier of the mind, it deposits a little bit of energy,
that place becomes really strengthened. So it's a default to go there. So understanding where awareness goes, energy flows allows you to say, okay, wherever my attention goes in my mind, wherever my awareness goes in my mind, that's the
area my energy is flowing and that area is going to be strengthened. So I need to make conscious decisions what are the places in my mind that I'm frequently visiting because that's what I'm nurturing. That's it. So the first thing I thought of when you said, well gosh, I want to go in two directions here. One
direction is all about me, which is I tend to be more reactive to people than I want to be. Somebody says something jabby or maybe teasing me a little, like, kind of, like, react. So that's the first thing I thought of. But the more important point, and I'm aware of that, and very, very aware of that, which is the first step, I think.
And I would say, you know, with regards to that, let's understand the concept of, you know, the mind being a mansion, and you being awareness, this ball of light moving within the mansion. When someone says something to you, like, having a jab at you or teasing Essentially what they're doing is they're taking you to a room in the mansion and putting you in that room and saying,
this is how I want you to feel. But you choose to go along with the person and enter the room when you don't have to. So your ability to control your awareness, your ball of light in the mind and choosing where you go in the mind is ultimately the goal in life. You know, when my daughter was born, I asked myself if there was one thing I could teach my daughter across every vertical in life,
life, what would it be? Yeah. And what is it? Understanding the difference between awareness and the mind that she's not
the mind that she's pure awareness. And she always has the choice to choose when the mind, she wants to go. Because as soon as you can master that you have complete freedom. No one can make you feel bad.
No one can make you feel sad or angry, upset because you have a choice to decide if you want to go there or not. I've had people come up to me and say mean things are horrible things. So just take a jab at me at events or whatever it may be.
Is it because you dress funny? I dress funny as stripes on my head and that makes people uncomfortable. It really does.
Some people just don't look at me and they don't know what to do with it. I'm not like your regular guy. I've got all this stuff I got bling on.
I've got this shawl. I've got stripes. Maybe I'm holding a glass of wine in my hand. They go, like, you see a monk, why is he drinking?
And they just don't know what to do. You can see their inability to know what to do sometimes results in them taking a jab or attacking. But I have a choice to allow them to take me to a room
that makes me feel bad or upset or say, you know what, I can see where he's coming from, from his state of consciousness, that's the only reaction he knows how to give.
And I can just gracefully, you know, let that come to me and not do anything with it.