Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Chandresh Bhardwaj. Chandresh is a seventh-generation lineage holder from a family of Indian gurus practicing the Tantric tradition. He is an internationally acclaimed speaker, having conducted talks in many countries including Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Hong Kong, India, Belgium, Canada, and in the United States. He’s the founder of the Break the Norms movement, with locations in New York, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Amsterdam. With Sounds True, Chandresh has written the book Break the Norms: Questioning Everything You Think You Know About God and Truth, Life and Death, Love and Sex.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Chandresh and I spoke about what norms he inherited from his family line that he felt he needed to break, and the most difficult part of his journey when it came to following his own inner path when it clashed with society’s expectations of him. We also talked about the tantric approach to spirituality and what a tantric way would be to work with anger and also greed and ambition, such that nothing is suppressed and the underlying energy is transformed into a force for good. We talked about the important role of questions on the spiritual path and examples of powerful questions worth asking. Finally, Chandresh shared his understanding of death and how this understanding has changed him. Here’s my conversation on breaking the norms with Chandresh Bhardwaj:
Chandresh, I know that you come from a multi-generational family of traditional Indian gurus. Here at the beginning of our conversation I’d love to know what about coming from your family did you feel inspired you to”break the norms,” and what of your family tradition are you carrying forward, are you bringing forward without breaking any norms?
Chandresh Bhardwaj: I think that’s such an important and beautiful question. I feel what inspired me greatly growing up in India, I was surrounded by not only my own family, which is spiritual, but also I’ve seen so many other spiritual masters. What I witnessed in my father, in my grandfather, in my own family culture was the honest, authentic spirituality, the honest efforts to serve people. That was something, it really inspired me, it really moved me, and I’ve seen my father sacrificing a lot of other stuff just to serve people.
I remember, when I told him this is what I want to do, and I thought he would be very excited, very happy, and he would welcome me, but he told me, “What you are doing right now, which is Wall Street, that’s fun. It’s going to give you a name, fame, glamor, money, all that stuff, which is fun. Go for it. But if you want to come into this spiritual path, you want to serve people, then you have to forget that you have your own life because then you’re serving people. You’re a public servant. The guru, the teacher, is not above the people. They exist to serve the people.”
He said, “Think twice. Think 10 times because once you get in, you have to be selfless. You have to serve them. You cannot be annoyed if people call you at 2 AM. You cannot be angry if they keep telling the same story every single day. You have to just listen to them selflessly and you’ve got to serve them.” That’s one thing, it inspired me. It shifted my whole perspective toward this path. That’s something, Tami, I make a very honest and consistent effort to take forward. I do not want to break any norm there. I want to take it forward exactly as it is—the honesty, the efforts, the consistency that they have in their work. That’s what I hope to maintain. The other question was what’s the norm that I have been trying to break, right?
TS: Yes.
CB: I feel I have seen that; my grandfather had a certain wisdom of spirituality. By the way, he was my grandpa’s brother, but we always called him Grandpa. He never got married. He remained a monk all his life and he’s one of those typical Indian gurus that people read about in books. He lived in temples. He would sleep only for three hours. He wouldn’t come out in public very often. Once in 10 days, he’ll come out and people would line up to see him.
But my father broke that norm. He got married. He had a family. He took that work out in public and he expanded the work to a lot of people in Indian community. I broke that norm further, that I took that work to even more mainstream crowd. I have given lectures in [the] US, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Amsterdam. So, my approach, when I saw him and I saw my grandfather’s works right beside it, that I’m going to take this work even more global. That’s where I want to break the norm.
Another thing I wanted to break was when people approach my father, they approach with a certain perspective that he’s a spiritual guru. So, do we have to wear a certain kind of clothes? Do we have to behave in certain ways? Do we have to stop eating something? Because he is a guru, maybe we need to be qualified to be his student. I want to break that norm in a sense that I want to be a teacher of everyone. I want to be people’s man.
I don’t want to carry on the traditional Indian spirituality ahead. I want to create a spirituality, create a spiritual path that’s for everyone. It’s for homeless, also. It’s for the multimillionaire, also. It’s for someone who’s vegan. It’s also for someone who’s not vegan. So, I want the spiritual path for everyone, that everyone has something to take from it. That’s a norm I, again, try to consistently break, to not make myself so rigid that only a certain kind of people can come to me. Everybody should be able to come to me and I want to be accessible to everyone.
TS: Now, you mentioned that you were working on Wall Street for a period of time and that your father talked to you about that. Are you sure this is a way that you want to be in life versus a life of service? Talk a little bit about your decision, first of all to work on Wall Street and then your decision to leave.
CB: Right. I wish I had a very powerful explanation of working in Wall Street. But the simple explanation was I just followed a blind rat race, Tami. There was nothing more than that. I went to school in India. I did my college in the US, in New York. So, in India, you have to pick your major in 11th grade. I had either option of picking science, or engineering, or business. Three options. I did not like science, did not want to be an engineer, so the only option left was business. So, I blindly picked that option.
When I came to New York, I just continued that option. I didn’t even look at the other options of writing, psychology, philosophy. I blindly picked Wall Street, finance and accounts. One of the reasons, the motivation that took me to that four years of college was that I’ll make enough money to start my own spiritual mission at one point. Break the Norms, it has been a dream; since I was in middle school, I have been writing notes about breaking the norms. I was hoping that I’ll work in Wall Street for another 10, 20 years. I’ll make enough money to start some sort of organization, which will help people or give them a platform of spirituality that’s for everyone.
But it didn’t take me too long to realize that all the money that I will make in Wall Street will be spent on hiring therapists, gurus, doctors to fix me because I’ll be damaged in those few years of working in Wall Street. So, that realization that this was a blind decision, it did not have any mindfulness, any awareness into it, it was that realization that got me out of Wall Street within one year after working there.
TS: Now, one of the things that I’m really interested in is how we can preserve, if you will, what’s really powerful about the teacher/guru, teacher/student relationship.—whatever word you want to use, teacher or guru—and at the same time, modernize it and empower people in a Western context. I know you have a lot of your own thoughts about this. Your father was a guru. Your father’s father’s father, granduncle was a guru. You don’t call yourself a guru, do you?
CB: I don’t. I feel it’s not for me to label myself as guru. Right? If people see me as guru, that’s their vision, that’s their perspective. I do not call myself a teacher or a guru. I don’t label myself, honestly, with anything. I don’t know what my label is.
TS: OK. So, let’s say we call you a spiritual advisor or guide or spiritual friend to people. What do you think is important about the relationship with people that work with you that you’ve inherited from your Indian background? What do you think needs to be modernized, Americanized, if you will?
CB: I feel surrendering is the most important element in this relationship. I remember, I’ve always had a father. But when my father became my guru, the surrendering was needed. That surrendering didn’t happen very easily because as a father and son, we have our own opinions. We still have our own opinions. We still have our own point of views. But when he became my teacher, when he accepted me as his student, it was a huge honor for me that he has accepted me as a student.
I realized all he wanted, or he still wants from me, is surrender—surrendering of my ego, surrendering of my trust. That trust and surrendering takes you a long way. That’s what I’ve seen in my journey also, [with] people who work with me. I feel if those who can surrender and trust me completely, I feel I’m able to give them a lot. It’s not from me to give them; I feel there’s an energy that channels through me then because I feel who am I to really guide them? Who am I to really heal them?
There’s a higher force, higher than me, higher than you that talks through us, that guides through us. I truly feel when they surrender, when they trust me completely, that higher force, that grand scheme of the universe, it channels through me to guide them. So, I do not take their trust for granted. I do not take their surrendering for granted. If you come across hundred people, there might be only one or two who can surrender to that level because I think I’ve seen that in Eastern culture. It’s a huge problem in Western culture also.
The surrendering comes with a lot of challenges for people. They are not able to surrender because they have been betrayed by their loved one. They have been misused by their closest people in life. That trust does not come easily. I tell them, “Don’t try too hard to trust me, to love me, to surrender to me. Just allow yourself to relax. When you relax enough, hopefully that heart will open and when the heart opens, then you will just know.”
TS: But you know, Chandresh, I don’t think it’s just that people have a hard time trusting because of how they’ve been hurt or betrayed in their family of origin. I think there have been so many stories of how spiritual teachers have betrayed trust in students in various ways through sexual scandals and power and money scandals. That seems very hard to say, “You want me to surrender? How do I know I’m not surrendering to your power trip?”
CB: Right. It’s a very honest problem. It’s a very genuine problem. It doesn’t seem to find any end. Every now and then, you wouldn’t even know the scandals that continue to be in India. As we speak, today, there’s a big court hearing in India about a huge guru who’s going through a rape allegation and he might be convicted today. That’s a problem that just never seems to stop. I feel there’s a responsibility that spiritual gurus obviously need to take.
I feel when you asked me, “Do you call yourself guru?” and I said I do not call myself, it’s not for me to call myself a guru because I feel that title, that label is given to you by others. How you use it or how you abuse it, it’s totally up to you. When people start looking at you as guru, you have to remain so humble. You have to remain so surrendering. It’s for people also to understand one thing, that being spiritual doesn’t mean that you become red carpet for others, including your guru. You have to be careful in that. You have to be so conscious in that moment that, is your guru possessing you? Is your guru trying to control your journey?
In my experience, an attentive guru does not control your journey. Attentive guru does not make you depend on him or her. The attentive guru gives you the wings to fly, to fall, but it doesn’t tell you that you have to depend on me. I remember when I started my journey, my father told me one thing. He said, “If you have a student or a client who’s coming to you for one problem, and if that same client is coming to you for the same problem even two years from today, that means you have failed to heal them and it’s your responsibility to tell him that, ‘I cannot heal you. I cannot guide you. You have to move on from me.’ You have to let go of that follower. That comes with this journey.”
Because of the same reason, I got my first mantra five years after I was initiated as a student. I didn’t know why my father made me wait for so long. I used to complain to my mother that, “I think Dad is just giving me hard time because” [audio cuts out]. But the truth was he wanted me to value this journey so much that I never, ever take it for granted. He made me wait for little thing for so [audio cuts out] that at this point, I feel incredibly honored that people even look at me as a spiritual friend, that people even trust me for their deepest problems.
So, I feel it’s a mutual conscious call. It’s a call from the guru that you have to honor this role given to you. It’s also for the students who come to the gurus because sometimes students are in such a need for the guru. They are so spiritually depending on that shoulder that it makes them blind. There’s a mantra that Buddha used to have. It’s called appo deepo bhava, which means “Be your own light,” which means take the guidance of gurus, but also nurture your own light. The true guru will help you nurture your own light.
In my experience, that’s what my gurus have give me. They have given me the power to find my own path. That’s what I continue to give to my students. If I come across a teacher or a guru, which I have, by the way, in my journey, I have come across gurus who have tried to control my journey, who have tried to make me depend on them, who have tried to bring fear in my journey. It’s a clear sign that they are trying to just abuse this relationship when they try to bring fear, possessiveness, control. When they tell you you’re not good enough, you’re no strong enough, and, “You need me,” that’s a clear sign that this is not the right guru. I’ve written a whole chapter in the book, by the way, about gurus because I just couldn’t avoid it. It’s such a relevant problem.
TS: Now, in your book, Break the Norms, you talk about questioning everything and seeing what’s really right for you. I know in my own life, there are certain cultural norms that I’ve had to break. Some of them were pretty tough. I’m curious to know, in your experience, when has the most been on the line for you in terms of breaking from social norms? When was there the greatest risk?
CB: Greatest risk.
TS: Or you perceived it to be so. When was it the hardest?
CB: I’ll tell you. I’ll remember there have been couple of moments. But the norm of just sticking to a normal job, that was the norm that my culture wanted me to follow. All my friends, they went to study medical and engineering. My relatives, their kids, all of them were going into very higher studies of medical science and engineering. I remember when I chose this path or when I would even talk about choosing this path, it would bring very angry reactions from everyone. Not from my parents, but from every other person that I knew.
They would completely attack me that, “You cannot be doing this. You have to have a good job. You cannot be damaging your parents’ expectations.” There were people, Tami, whom I considered my heroes, my idols in my life, I grew up watching them, I admired their success, they inspired me to be the person I am today. They were also the ones who would tell me, “You are going into a wrong path. Writing doesn’t bring you money. Spiritual work doesn’t bring you money. How could you just spoil your life like this? You’re not a bad student in school, so you get good grades. You cannot be doing this.”
It was a very harsh attack and I faced a lot of that bashing. There was only one person who stood by me and that was my guru, my father. He continued to give me that hope, that courage. He would tell me, “I warned you. It’s not easy path.” So, this is part of the package. Just breaking that norm of just being myself, that I don’t have to live a life that others do not understand. I could live a life that others don’t understand.
This whole mantra was very difficult for me to process and live because Indian culture is pretty strong when it comes to living up to your society’s expectations. I grew up in that culture. Being this spiritual teacher at the age I started, I started when I was 22, and it wasn’t the age that people were expecting me to do this. So, that has been the greatest risk that what if I fail in this? What if all of this is just infatuation with spirituality? But I’m glad it didn’t turn out to be infatuation and it continues to take my journey into a very meaningful direction.
TS: Thank you for that, Chandresh. You write in Break the Norms that the approach to spirituality that resonates with you the most is the Tantric approach and that there’s a lot of confusion in our contemporary world about what is Tantra? Is it just about having spiritual sex or is there something deeper? You described that it’s, yes, a much deeper and wider path, the Tantric path. What’s your understanding of Tantra?
CB: My understanding from Tantra started when I didn’t even know this was Tantra because my grandfather, he was a very renowned Tantra guru. My father is a very respected Tantra teacher. So, I didn’t even know Tantra is connected to sex until I came to US. I remember in college, my professors would ask me that, “What kind of spirituality you learn?” I would say Tantra and they would just look at me with a gaze that I would find uncomfortable or sometimes too comfortable. But it wasn’t just normal reaction. I remember doing a Google search on Tantra and what I saw was just soft porn and all sexuality stuff would show up. I realized, “Wow. So, everybody here thinks Tantra is all about acrobatic sexuality.”
So, my understanding of Tantra is Tantra is a technique of self-realization. It’s one of the most open, safest, and practical signs of spirituality. Tantra does not tell you to renounce this world and become in a certain way to be spiritual. But Tantra says whatever you are, however you are, that’s enough for you to find your spirituality. We will work with your anger, greed, ego, desires. You don’t have to suppress them. You don’t have to kill them. We will be able to transform whatever you have into higher consciousness. For me, that was very powerful, that I do not have to suppress myself. I do not have to be spiritual or be spiritual in a way that others want me to. I could be whoever I am and still there’s a way to find my spiritual fruit.
I also feel this has a lot to do with the family genes, the DNA. Our whole seven generations have been into Tantra. It was such a natural attraction and love toward Tantra. The more I started learning and the more I started understanding that Tantra is such an important need for today’s spirituality where people constantly feel that in order to be spiritual, I have to behave in a certain way, I have to eat a certain kind of food, or I have to meditate in a certain way.
But Tantra is such a flexible art of spirituality. It simply accepts you as you are and then it says, “Add meditation with whatever you’re doing.” That’s how we can take you from here to the higher consciousness. Sex is just a 5 percent part of it. Not more than that. The rest of the parts include anger, greed, ego, basically everything that a human being goes through. Tantra could make use of everything that you are. Yes. Sorry. What you were saying?
TS: I wanted to ask you to take a specific example. We could take anger or greed or both. Someone who says, “These are things I experience and I think they’re unspiritual parts of me that I want to somehow change, but then I feel bad about them.” Let’s take greed. That’s one that I’m particularly interested in.
CB: Right. I would say greed and desires, that these were two things I witnessed a lot during my time in Wall Street. There was a huge greed, a huge desire to just be more and more and more successful. I still continue to come across people in LA, in New York, everywhere else who are finding this challenge of greed and desires dominating them. So, I always feel there’s a conscious greed, there’s impulsive greed, there’s a conscious desire, there’s impulsive desire. So, Tantra helps your impulsive desires and impulsive greed into a more conscious and more conscious desire.
For example, I could be having greed 10 years ago to be an author, to be successful, to be ambitious. Probably, there was this ambitiousness that took me into Wall Street also that I want to be popular, I want to have the name and fame. But when I got into meditation, that same impulsive greed, which was arising from society, ego, condition patterns, the same greed started transferring itself into a more conscious greed, into more less aggressive or almost no aggressive greed. It had elements of love and contribution to the society.
There was a greed in me to offer something to the world, which inspired me to create Break the Norms, which inspired me to write the book, Break the Norms. There’s still greed in me to serve more and more people, to take my work to far and wide. I meditate on it consistently that my greed should be able to bring more healing to people. If I write 10 more books, 20 more books, even one more book, it has to come out of that conscious greed of serving people. Does that make sense?
TS: It does. It’s a beautiful example. I wonder if you’d also take us through the same process of moving to consciousness with something like anger.
CB: With anger, I have very close experience with anger because I was a very angry person many years ago. When I was growing up in India, I always had problems with authority. From the local cops to the school principal, I have had problems with everyone. I never had [a] problem with the children of my age because I thought, “They’re not worth fighting. I want to pick bigger fights.” So, I would pick fights with the cops, the principal, the teachers. Anger was something I almost felt proud that I’m angry and I’m proud of it because somehow, it would make me feel powerful.
Something started happening when I got into Tantra, when I got into meditation. I started getting more angry toward the way society was functioning, toward the way society was objectifying women, toward the way society would exploit the weaker, and toward the way we have been dividing the whole world into religion and creating conflicts among the people, that that was of relationships, debt, sex, sex ego. I started getting angry toward all of these things and it was the anger that inspired me to do what I’m doing today.
People ask me, “What inspired you to create Break the Norms? What inspired you to become this teacher? Was it compassion? Was it a certain enlightened moment?” But the truth is, I was just very angry with the way things were working. My anger, it transformed into something higher. It transformed into something higher consciousness. That made me the person I am today. Even now, the articles I write, the next book I’m working on, the Instagram posts I write, eight out of those ten posts are inspired from my anger toward the way things are happening, towards the way gurus are exploiting the world, toward the way people are seeing their life in such a tiny lens.
It makes me angry that this is not normal and why we are not correcting it? When I got into LA, people still asked me, “Why someone like you is living in Hollywood? You should be in a nice mountain area where there’s no one and you could be just in your peace.” I tell them, “LA made me angry when I first came there.” I saw the billboards, the posters of the women there and they are literally being sold in the name of strip clubs and tons of other crazy stuff happening there and no one is doing anything about it. It just seemed so normal.
I was angry and I decided that, “You know what? I’m going to stay here and I hope one day, I can just shut the business of all of these strip clubs because I feel this is taking the sexual energy to its lowest level.” It’s not supposed to be that way. It’s objectifying women in the most ugly and cruel way. That still makes me angry and that’s my effort. I feel what I’m doing today, hopefully one day, it will add up enough that it will give me a voice to shut down all of these conditionings, these brutal things happening out there. So, I’m still [an] angry person, but my anger has gone into different consciousness now and it inspires me every single day to fuel my mission. Yes.
TS: I’m so glad I asked you about that. What I understand from what you’re saying, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that a Tantric approach to working with either anger or greed or anything we’re experiencing would be to find the energy in it and how that energy could be liberated for something good, for something positive for others.
CB: Absolutely. As you start to meditate, there are ways that this energy will transform into something more meaningful. You don’t have to try for it. You cannot try for it, honestly. But as you meditate, it just starts to happen effortlessly. I feel it’s maybe a spiritual law that the universe starts to nurture you. It starts to guide you and it sees that you are working toward your anger. You need that love. You need that support. So, you start getting that support.
TS: Interesting. I’d like you to even take me into that a little bit more, how you would meditate with your anger and how that transformation process felt inside you, how you tracked it inside you.
CB: I’ll give you, again, my example.
TS: Sure.
CB: When I still get angry or when I used to be angry before—this was, by the way, a very childhood routine of me. My first experience of anger was that I wanted something from [the]mtoy store and Mom, Dad wouldn’t buy me that stuff. So, what I would do, I would lock myself in the family meditation room and I would start meditating because I had seen the gurus, the masters in real life and in TV and in Indian movies that the gurus just meditate when they’re angry and they just channel their anger into some cosmic meditative vibe.
I didn’t know anything about it as a kid, but it looked very fascinating. So, I started meditating every time I’m angry. I would lock myself, Tami, for hours. My grandma, she would get panicked, she would knock the room, and she would request me to come out. “We will buy you the toy. Please stop meditating.” I thought this is what you do when you’re angry. You just close your eyes and you start taking deep breaths. That innocent, unconscious act, it prepared me for the higher amounts of anger that were coming my way.
As I grew, a teenager and post-teenage and my early 20s, every time I’m angry, I look at my anger as a symptom, that anger is not the problem. The problem is why I’m angry. What is the root of this anger? So, I have to first diagnose the root of my anger. Why? Once the why is answered, then I will just meditate. Where do I feel this anger? Is it on my heart? Is it in my head? Is it in my entire body? Is it in my lower chakras? Where exactly is this fear, this anger coming from? Then I just start digging deeper.
I could use a mantra. If one has a mantra, they could use a mantra. Or if they don’t have mantras, simply breathe in, breathe out. Start to trust your awareness and start trusting that it will point you to the right direction where exactly this anger is stored up. Doing it consistently will start to open up that part of your body, will start to open up that energetic blocked part, and things will start to heal and melt and they will start to transform into something meaningful.
It’s a daily practice, but with the right guidance, with the right discipline, you would transform your anger into something higher. Trust me, Tami. This anger is such a deep part of our conditioning. It does take a while to rewire that conditioning, to break that conditioning. But it’s worth it, totally.
TS: You mentioned the possibility in addition to people working with meditation and breathing, people could work with a mantra. You also talked about how you like to be available as a spiritual friend, a teacher to anyone and everyone. I’m wondering, is there a mantra that you can offer to people for anyone who’s listening, if they want to experiment working with a mantra?
CB: If you’re beginning your journey, I would say stick to what I call bija mantras. Bija means “seed.” So, seed mantras are for everyone. Seed, it’s very little, but it has the potential to become into a big tree. So, there are many seed mantras and one of the seed mantras that I recommend is soham namaha. Soham namaha simply means, “I am.” It’s a mantra to understand and recognize who are you in your consciousness, who are you beyond your labels?
Soham namaha is something I also teach during my talks in LA I do a weekly meditation in LA and I make it a practice that everybody collectively chants “soham namaha,” and then they silently go into it. In my experience, this mantra alone, it has a lot of power to break your labels, to relax your anxiety, and to bring out your true self.
So, yes. If there’s one mantra in Sanskrit, I’ll give soham namaha. For those who don’t want to do Sanskrit mantras and who find it comfortable to do English phrasing, I would say, “Who am I?” That’s another powerful mantra which, in my experience, it has given people a lot of healing. “Who am I?” is a mantra to question your labels, to witness your labels and stories. I feel that it’s pretty powerful as well.
TS: Now, here’s a quote from Break the Norms. You write, “My life’s work is not about finding the answers to questions. It’s about building the courage to question.” So, I really liked that and I wanted to ask you a couple things about that quote. The first is, what do you mean by courage, in terms of what builds courage? What has built courage in you?
CB: I think for me, courage has played a very important role. I always saw myself as a person who didn’t have enough courage. I grew up in a culture around very successful people. It could be my family, could be friends or clients of my father. I wanted to be, I aspired to be one of them. I always felt I do not have enough courage to be one of them. When I started moving into my journey, I always felt a misfit. When my friends would play out, I would meditate. I never felt part of them ever. I never felt comfortable in crowds, in socializing. My love, my passion was always into spirituality.
The courage to just be who I am, it was just too big for me. I couldn’t break that mold that was built around me, that Chandresh, son of this great guru, he has to behave in certain way. He has to be so successful. I tried living their script of life for me. It took me many years to find my courage to just be who I am. I realized I never want to be someone else’s idea of success. I’d rather be my own failure. I’d rather be my own success. I’m still working on that.
There are many things I want to do. There are many layers I want to shed. I feel it will happen in its own time, but I do feel there has been a lot of courage that has come my way. Meditation has been a huge part in building up that willpower, that courage.
Those who are listening, I want to tell this to everyone. Do not think that courage means fearlessness. Courage does not mean the absence of fear. Courage simply means that you continue to walk your talk, you continue to walk your path in spite of having the fears. Fear is natural. You shouldn’t suppress it. You cannot eliminate that from your life. It will always be there. But courage is acting for your path, acting for your truth in spite of having that fear. Does that make sense, Tami?
TS: It does. I think it’s a very important point, that courage has to do with walking forward anyway, even if you’re afraid. Now, what was the connection, Chandresh, in your experience, between your meditation practice and this increase in courage in your life?
CB: I wouldn’t be even one percent of the person I am if I wasn’t a meditator. I think there are feelings in the world which cannot be put into words. Meditation for me is one of those feelings. I don’t know what really happened. It blocked, probably it blocked, it shed a lot of my conditioning. It unblocked a lot of my fears, a lot of my self-doubts, and it just started bringing me more and more courage because I also realized the truth I was chasing, the happiness I was chasing, the courage I was chasing, it wasn’t somewhere far. It was always within me. But I wasn’t ever able to experience it because of the self-doubt, the fear, the consistent need of seeking approvals from others. Meditation started giving me that strength, that fearlessness, that just ability to just speak my truth.
There’s a particular meditation for that: the third-eye chakra, the chakra between your eyebrows. That’s the central point for your higher consciousness. That’s the point for your willpower, your courage. I highly recommend everyone, those who have problem[s] with speaking your truth, living your truth, and finding your courage, start to meditate more and more on your third eye.
That simply means you breathe in, breathe out for a good few minutes and then take your awareness on third eye and stay there. You could use the mantra that I just recommended, soham namaha, or, “I am.” But [the] third eye does have the ability to bring you more intuition, more courage. In my experience, it transformed my complete existence and it continues to do so.
TS: So, in meditating on the third eye, you’re recommending that people keep their attention right at that center between the brows and breathe in and out at that point, just keep their attention there?
CB: Keep their attention there. After a while, drop the attention. Let’s say if you’re meditating for 20 minutes, for the first 10 minutes, keep attention on the third eye. Then in the last 10 minutes, just drop the attention and let your awareness take you wherever it wants to take you. It’s got to be effortless. The more efforts you make, the more you will miss.
TS: So, you’re saying if you want to spend 10 minutes or so efforting, make sure you spend the second 10 minutes in an effortless way of just being with whatever the energy is.
CB: Absolutely. You have to be just free and raw in your experiences. Even in my talks and in my public meditations, I tell them, “Do not come here every Sunday. Do not see me every week because I do not want you to depend on my meditations. Guided meditation is not what I want you to nurture. I want you to create your own raw and free experience in your spiritual journey. So, practice more and more effortlessness in your meditation.”
TS: OK. I said I wanted to talk to you about both courage and questions. I found an article that you wrote, Chandresh, on 21 questions for a spiritual seeker. I thought, “There are some great questions here.” So, I want to talk to you about a couple of them. One of the questions: “How do I want to be remembered?” When I read that question, I thought, “That is a really good question.” It also inspired me. What’s your answer to that?
CB: I remember that article. I think it’s a pretty old article that you picked, right? It’s something very close to my heart. How do I want to be remembered? You are the second person to ask me this on the same day. Nobody has asked me this question in past one year, I think.
TS: I hope you’re going to live a long, long time and that’s just a weird coincidence.
CB: Right? I’ll give you the answer that I gave to that person. I want to be remembered as a man who lived beyond the labels. I do not want to be remembered as someone who lived his labels, but someone who broke the labels, who broke the norms, and who had the courage to go beyond the labels of society. Labels limit me. That’s what I realized in the last five to seven years, since I’ve started this journey as a professional, I would say. So, I don’t want to be limited in my labels. I want to be remembered as a man of no labels.
TS: Then another question that you recommended for spiritual seekers: “What is my deepest fear?”
CB: Ah. Well, you’re really hitting the very—
TS: These are your questions, Chandresh. You’re the one who wrote the article. You asked them. I’m just putting them back at you. I also thought that was very interesting.
CB: Right. My deepest fear? Let’s see. OK. Let’s see. Deepest fear is that I hope I always remain honest and disciplined in this path. Discipline, I think, has to be the deepest fear, that I want to remain very honest, innocent, and sincere in this path. I do not want to be corrupted by the power that this title gives you. I do not want to be corrupted by the success, then the fame that this path brings you.
I’ve seen many amazing teachers around me who eventually got corrupted. They’ve started finding their attraction toward the name, fame, success, and they lost that first innocent seed that started this journey for them. I’ve just started my journey and I often feel I hope I always remain this innocent, this hardworking, sincere spiritual seeker in my path. I want to maintain that love affair I have with this path. I do not want to make it into a dead-end relationship. It has to remain that consistently evolving affair. I think that’s what I would aspire to. Yes.
TS: Well, when I asked that question of myself, I didn’t think about it too long. I just went with my first gut response and I got dying. Dying is my greatest fear. Whether I think that’s a “spiritual answer” or not, it’s what occurred to me when I looked at the question. Then I also realized in preparing for this conversation that in your book, Break the Norms, you have a chapter called “What About Death?” I thought, “This is a good time for me to talk to Chandresh about death. You write, “The key to acceptance is to understand what death actually is. So, let’s talk about that. Help me understand what death actually is.
CB: Right. I have to tell you something interesting. When I was submitting the book to you guys, I was told to write a simple introduction chapter for the book. But instead, I chose to write that. I wrote the death chapter when I first submitted Break the Norms to you because it is such a close subject to my heart, the topic of death, because death is something—it influenced and inspired my journey in a huge way.
So, I grew up in a spiritual family, I always had fun with spirituality, I traveled with my father, I got exposed to many different faiths and religions in India. So, spirituality always remained a fun exercise, a fun event, fun activity for me until I lost my sister and my best friend in two separate incidents. I was 16 and my sister died. She was sick and she was 19. She was studying to be a doctor. When she was sick, I was never worried that something would happen to her because I thought, our family is so spiritual. My father heals so many people. My grandfather healed so many people. We are a family of healers. Nothing is going to happen to us.
But when she died, it shattered a lot of my blind beliefs about God, spirituality, and lots of other things that I would take for granted. My journey from [the] next morning onward after she died was just different. I really feel I transformed into a different person from [the] next morning. I started questioning things. I took my life with a more mindfulness, with a more awareness. I did not take things for granted. I thought, this experience is now preparing me for something powerful.
Three years later, my best friend passed away. I still don’t know how he passed away. There are various reasons that are being courted about his death, but still no one knows. It was a more shocking death for me because my sister was sick for a long time, but my friend, he wasn’t sick. I spoke to him a week [before] his death, he was my childhood buddy. He was like my brother. His death shocked me so much that I remember I stopped going to college, I stopped going to my job. I would just sit in Central Park in [the] city and I would just sit there and do nothing. It just made me numb. It made me so scared also.
The room where I heard his noise, where I heard the news of his death, I did not sleep in that room for six months. It shattered me so much. But I remember after I heard the news of his death, he was in India. I was in New York. The first thing I did after I [hung] up the phone, I went to my meditation room, I lit the candle, and I meditated for his soul, that may his soul finds peace. But it wasn’t that easy. His death took me on a very painful journey. But that also inspired me to start questioning even more deeper because I thought my sister’s death has prepared me enough about the whole concept of death. But it was his death that took me even more deeper.
So, it was [that] death that made me realize life is fragile and everything you’re trying to accomplish is going to eventually be here. You’re not taking anything with you. Birth and death, they are two sides of the same coin and you cannot be overexcited about the birth and you cannot be so depressed with death. The fear with death is something that’s not normal and you have to understand that fear. You have to really understand it deeply. In order to live your life fully, you have to understand death fully.
It was these two deaths that took my spiritual journey on a different plane. I literally feel from first floor, I jumped to tenth floor immediately after these two deaths because I wanted to seek higher, I wanted to experience the higher consciousness that, “What the hell is going on? These young people could die and they could die in a family that heals others?” So, it was that realization after seeing death so closely that all of this I’m chasin—the Wall Street, the name, fame, the ambition—it’s useless. It’s irrelevant. It can go away any moment. I need to make the most of my time here. I think that just inspired me to serve others, to leave Wall Street, to break the norms of my own life and help others also to break the norms.
So, I’m constantly fascinated and I find the whole journey of death very interesting. It still keeps me curious. It doesn’t make me that scared anymore, but I’m still curious to experience my own death, the death of others around me. I want to prepare myself that when my time comes, I hope I’m aware enough to not be afraid and to accept it fully. To accept it fully, I have to accept this moment, this life fully as well. Yes.
TS: From your investigation into death, what do you think helped relieve the fear part?
CB: I used to find that scary that people die. What I realized is it’s natural. Death and birth, they are [the] same doors of one room. From one door you enter, and from the other door, you leave, and it’s natural. That’s one word that I’ve learned. It’s just plain natural phenomenon. Our fear of it comes because we haven’t been able to understand it deeply. The society creates such a fear and sadness around it and it creates a very painful vibration around it.
But in reality, the death, it celebrates one’s life. It celebrates the conclusion of their life, so it has to be celebrated. But how many of us live our life in a celebrated way? We don’t do that. So, that’s why our death is not celebrated because our life has never been celebrated. So, in order to celebrate death, I think we’ve got to celebrate our life every day in every way possible because then when the death will come, you will look at it as a welcoming change and it’s not going to look as a depressive event. Does that make sense?
TS: It does, Chandresh. Thank you. You know, I always want our listeners to take away as much of a working lesson in their own life as they can from each one of these conversations. When it comes to breaking the norms, I’m curious, how would you direct someone to investigate in their life? What might be a norm that it’s time for them to break away from? How could they do a self-assessment? “This is what I need to do now.”
CB: Those who are listening, I would recommend, start accepting yourself as you are and understand you’re not moving from imperfection to perfection. You are moving from perfection to perfection. The way you are right now is perfectly fine. You are enough the way you are right now. Accept yourself exactly as you are. Secondly, stop chasing the right answers. Stop chasing the path of spirituality to find the right answers because there are no right answers. But there are right questions. If you ask the right questions, you will come across your answer.
My answer is not going to work for you because you will have your own unique answer to your problem. But all of us may have one common question. It could be, “Who am I? What do I want? How do I serve? What are my desires? What are my deepest fears?” Like, Tami, the article you mentioned, 21 questions to ask. So, I do recommend to break your norms, practice self-acceptance, and start asking the right questions in your meditation. That will shift your journey.
TS: OK. I’m going to take it a little further. Let’s say someone’s listening and saying, “But I don’t accept this thing in myself. I don’t accept this part of my current condition. I don’t like it. I don’t accept it.”
CB: So, you’re saying if someone says, let’s take example of anger, right? So, you’re saying, “I do not accept my anger.” Is that right?
TS: Yeah, or, “I don’t accept the fact that I’m in this job that I don’t like and it’s my current situation or I don’t accept this or that about my life.” You’re saying you’re not moving from imperfection to perfection, but somebody says, “Well, it sure feels imperfect to me.”
CB: So, when I say you are moving from perfection to perfection, and let’s say if the person is saying, “This job doesn’t feel perfect to me,” so I would simply say your job is not your journey. It’s just a tiny part of your journey. Do not define your life through your job. If you feel this job is not giving you happiness, of course, leave that job. But do not let that job diminish your self-image. If you’re feeling you are imperfect in this job, that means you’re letting this job or this story define you. But you have a story, but you are not your story. Do not let your labels define you.
By self-acceptance, I mean accept your anger, accept your ego, accept your desires, accept every single element in your journey. When you practice complete acceptance, then even the elements that are causing you trouble, they will start to transform because you cannot change your enemy. You can only change your friends. I cannot change you if you are my enemy, but if I make you my friend, I can change you. I can inspire you. So, these energies of you—it could be your anger, could be your inability to love, could be anything that you feel is not helping you anymore—be friends with it. Work with your demons. Then they will start to transform themselves. But you cannot hate them. You cannot be angry with them. That’s not going to change them. Does that make sense?
TS: That does. Now, Chandresh, the foreword to your book was written by His Holiness, Dalai Lama.
CB: Right.
TS: I’m curious as a final question, how did His Holiness, the Dalai Lama come to write the foreword to your book?
CB: I’m incredibly grateful to His Holiness, obviously. I remember when I was working with Jennifer, the editor from Sounds True, she told me, she said, “Chandresh, now this is the time you make your dream list for the people you want in your book, the people that you want to write the foreword or to write anything else.” I had this list of people in my mind, but when she said dream list, I remember I spoke to my father and I said, “She mentioned [my] dream list,” and he said, “Who’s in your dream list?” I said, “Dalai Lama. He’s in my dream list.” He said, “Chandresh, you’re writing your first book. You are inspiring people to break the norm, you’re inspiring people to live their purpose. So, you have to take your own medication now. Use your energy, use your passion to manifest this. This will be a good test if you can manifest the Dalai Lama for your book.”
I feel it’s a complete blessing and gift that he wrote the foreword. He hasn’t written a foreword in many, many years. But I grew up in his hometown. My hometown and his hometown in India is just an hour away. So, I’ve been there many times. I’ve played there as a kid.
I remember when I reached out to his office; they did not reject it, the idea. They accepted the idea that I want him to just bless my book. That’s the word I’ve always used, that, “I want you to bless this book.” They said, “Send us whatever you have written so far.” I used to write for Times of India and his articles also used to come in Times of India. There was a column called “Speaking Free.” It had only 140 spiritual teachers. He was one of them. I was also in those. I was honored to be in those 140 spiritual teachers. So, that was a great reference point.
He knew about my lineage. The office knew about my spiritual lineage. That helped. When they saw the book, I remember—and he wrote that in the book also that what I’m doing is what Buddha did in his time. He broke the norms. He taught people to question rightly. When I saw this in my foreword, I was numb for many days that he compared my journey to that of Buddha’s journey. It’s his choice that he chose to write the foreword. I didn’t ask for that. I asked for just one line on the book and that line could have been, “Great book. Buy this book. Great guy.” Anything. Anything that he wanted to write. Who am I to force him to write a foreword or one-liner? I got the news that, “He’s going to write the foreword and when do you need it?” I told them, “I can delay the book for three years if he wants to write it in next three years.”
But it just happened, I guess. It gave me so much strength, so much encouragement that my work is honored by such a great teacher. This is the reason I’m taking my time to write the next book because I do not want to just start the next book because I, again, would want blessings of Dalai Lama or other teachers in the second book. I want to be as honest, as passionate as I was in the first book. I feel that the honesty, the passion for Break the Norms, that’s what attracted and got me blessings of Dalai Lama.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Chandresh Bhardwaj. He’s the author of book, Break the Norms: Questioning Everything You Think You Know About God and Truth, Life and Death, Love and Sex. Chandresh, I’ve enjoyed talking to you so much. I love your passion, your good heart, and your spirit of service. It’s really been an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much.
CB: Thank you, Tami. I have done so many podcasts in last two years, but this was one of the most heartwarming experiences. I was expecting something like this, honestly, from you. When I see you, you remind me of my schoolteachers from India. It’s just your aura. It’s an aura of kind and of teacher, which makes me think of my teachers from India. But I was expecting that this will be one of the most heartwarming experiences. But thank you for taking me there.
TS: Thank you. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
