Ritam Studio Podcast With Jonni Pollard and Carla Dimattina

Surrendering to Your Spiritual Intelligence: The Art of Doing Nothing to Achieve Everything

• Jonni Pollard

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Exploring the paradoxical wisdom of "do least, achieve most; do nothing, achieve everything" reveals how our deepest human nature flows from spiritual experience rather than materialistic thinking.

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Speaker 1:

So this is in regards to the do less, achieve more, do least, achieve most, do nothing, achieve everything statement.

Speaker 1:

I've been having a direct experience of attempting to you know, what does it mean to feel into all of that, especially the do nothing, achieve, achieve everything. What does that feel like, what does that look like? And what I intuitively feel is like it's doing nothing, is you're not taking any action. You're actually in a state of being so you're not overexerting, so you're not forcing, you're not trying too hard, but you're just allowing that cosmic, not trying too hard, but you're just um allowing that cosmic intelligence to flow through you correct and without any um yeah, without putting any extra force into it.

Speaker 1:

Is there anything else? I'd love to just hear your perspective. Am I on the right path? Is there anything else to? Yeah, so love to just hear your perspective. Am I on the right path?

Speaker 2:

Is there anything else to give back? Yeah, so it's a great subject to kind of flesh out. So there's a famous statement do least, achieve most, do nothing, achieve everything. And it's a statement that emerges out of the Nishkarm Karma yoga tradition. Nishkarm Karma means action hardly done.

Speaker 2:

Yoga is the experience of unifying our sense of individuality with the underlying, abstract, universal consciousness that our individuality is emergent out of, as if a wave out of an ocean. And as human beings, we're generally deeply indoctrinated into a materialistic reduction paradigm of thinking, meaning that everything is as we see it and everything can be reduced down to a fundamental material level and that's all there is to it. And that consciousness, basically, is this epiphenomenon of neurons firing, and we don't really know how it happens. But we don't need to because we can understand everything else. We've been indoctrinated into that, and what that does is it causes a habitual ignoring of the actual experience that we're having as human beings. The actual experience that we're having as human beings, and the actual experience that we're having as human beings is a deep, spontaneous, intelligent response to this moment, and it is filled with richness, meaning and beauty and power that informs us of who we are, what we're becoming, who everybody else is, what they're becoming, what life means, what it is becoming and how best to be with it, be in it. If we only see ourselves as the body and the world is just matter, then we are in danger of disregarding the deeper, abstract spiritual experience that we are all having as human beings.

Speaker 2:

I go as far as saying that what we are essentially is spiritual beings having a human experience. What defines us as humans is our spirituality. What does spirituality mean? The actualization of this deeper, abstract experience that we have as humans that leads us to believe that this life is sacred, it is beautiful, that our existence is magnificent and it should be cherished, cared for, nurtured. We should lead with compassion, love and kindness, and for the most part, most of us feel this, if only fleeting. We feel this to be our deepest nature and we are in conflict with that because of the way in which we've been indoctrinated to understand individuals as a collective, as a world.

Speaker 2:

And when the experience is devoid of that spiritual experience, we start to behave in a way whereby we justify ignoring our humanity for each other and we start behaving terribly towards each other.

Speaker 2:

We use each other for our own hedonistic gains, and so union of the idea of who we think we are and the experience of what we are is what yoga is.

Speaker 2:

We merge the experience of our individuality, which is generally comprised of ideas, notions, and the ideas marry with an experience, and when we gain access to that deeper part of ourself that is abstract, it's non-conceptual, it is an experience, when we allow our mind to sufficiently, when we cultivate the capacity it's more accurate to allow the mind to bow down, to not have an opinion of who we are or who we are not for a moment, and to behold what it is that the self is, and the experience that yields, the mind becomes acquired. The mind then becomes an instrument of this deeper intelligence, and this is why we meditate, and this is why we meditate. It's training the incessant habit of the mind to relinquish control for a moment or for many moments, and we gain access to this deeper intelligence. What we start to notice is that we have a nature and structured within that nature is a profound intelligence that spontaneously prints out the most appropriate response to now.

Speaker 2:

That's what we are as human beings, and if we're disconnected from that, we experience confusion, anxiety, self-loathing, sadness anger resentment, all kinds of undesirable sensations and emotions and thoughts, and if we experience that from a very early age, for a prolonged period of time, it becomes normalized to the extent that we are unable to detect our spiritual nature, unless you've had the good fortune of encountering somebody that made it a charming proposition for you to inquire as to why they were appearing so happy or something, and they let you in on their secret and you became interested and you began inquiring yourself and started to realize oh my goodness, there is so much nonsense that's going on inside my mind. What's the source of this and who is it that's doing the observing? Who has the opinion that this is nonsense? Who's the knower here? Who's having the experience? It makes us very curious about who and what we are, and there are beautiful techniques, such as the one we practice, that very elegantly leads us beyond the experience of our stories and ideas of who we are to experience directly what we are.

Speaker 2:

It's a non-intellectual process. It happens and then we reflect on it. It doesn't require any intellectual pretext to have the experience. In fact, that is. The only thing that really gets in the road from having the experience is trying to think yourself into it. And so, as we start having this experience, the mind naturally starts to become acquired by this intelligence. We start noticing changes in the way in which we relate to ourself, the world. We find ourselves less reactive, more insightful, perceiving the reality of what's going on more accurately and being able to compassionately lend our attention to others, to assist in unravelling tension and confusion. And doing that, we discover, is probably the most fulfilling thing that we can do Giving our attention compassionately to another and participating in some gentle process of understanding what's going on. And so Nishkam Karma Yoga is the practice of union through least effort, and what it implies is that when we start accessing the intelligence that is inherent in us and we start allowing ourselves to operate from this place, we cease ignoring that it's there, despite all of the noise and the fear, the anxiety of actually surrendering deeply into our knowingness.

Speaker 2:

We do it, and what we start to notice is that life starts to print out frictionless ease, and it doesn't mean that all circumstances are easy, but we notice that we have a repertoire of responses that empower us to not suffer through undesirable experiences, through unmet expectations, artfully able to navigate and utilize the intelligence to see the experience as an opportunity for more growth, more insight, more understanding about myself and yourself. There is always that opportunity, and that opportunity can only be seized through the awareness of it, and so the foundation of Nishikam Karma Yoga is cultivating greater awareness. So do least, achieve most is the warming up. I'm starting to notice that I don't have to try so hard at life in order to have the kinds of experiences that I'm desiring most to have. In fact, if I stop trying to control and just let go and allow things to happen, I'm enjoying myself a lot more. This is doing least to achieve most to achieve most.

Speaker 2:

And as we become masterful at this, there are at first beautiful moments where we are spontaneously in a high state of intelligent response to life. Stuff's coming at us left, right and center, and we're just observing ourselves being utterly unaffected in any way that might distort the experience of that intelligence, and we're joyfully just meeting the demand. And it's not only effortless, it's enjoyable. We start to enjoy things that we would otherwise have been historically terrified by, and this is the promise of this practice the realization that we don't necessarily have to do anything in the way that we might be doing things when we are disconnected from this deeper intelligence, or at least we doubt ourselves.

Speaker 2:

We doubt that we are having that experience. When your intuition is not validated, when it's just relegated over there, that can't be trusted. Don't listen to that. Follow the formula, follow the strategy. When we bring it all together and allow it to happen, the way in which we exist is. It's a paradigm shift. It's a massive leap and, as far as I'm concerned, this is the next phase of human evolution. It's not going to be resolved in the world. All of the world's problems are born of experiences that we're having within ourself our inability to reconcile what we are as human beings, as spiritual beings. The next phase of human evolution is spiritual in nature, meaning becoming deeply acquainted with what's going on inside, understanding it and becoming artful in the way in which we can navigate our internal reality, the internal landscape, with kindness, love, compassion, and then ultimately realize everybody's experiencing the same thing.