An edited version of a 2022 Dharma talk by Tara Mulay
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.
Because the world needs people who have come alive.”—Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman
Samvega is often translated as “spiritual urgency.” It’s the sense that what one has been doing to try to be happy in the midst of all these conditions has been going in the wrong direction. And there must be another way. And dharma practice might be the other way.
Bhikkhu Bodhi describes it as, “The inner commotion or shock we experience when we are jolted out of our usual complacency by a stark encounter with truths whose full gravity we normally refuse to face.”
It can arise due to a singular event or the accumulation of them. For me, my initial samvega experience came with my mother’s death when I was 31. That encounter with mortality, that loss, called me to practice.
Samvega can also arise with an initial seeing into the power of mindfulness, an experience of greater clarity that reveals the mechanism of stress and dis-ease in life. We sense that mindfulness and dharma teachings unveil truths we’ve unknowingly been longing to hear, pointing us in the direction of freedom.
Samvega is the sense that freedom is calling the heart.
It’s important to explore samvega, because when we understand our spiritual urgency we can feel more motivation and confidence. Samvega also has a seed of wisdom in it, the beginning of understanding that clinging to changing conditions causes suffering (dukkha). The heart then turns to the promise of liberating insights into impermanence and not-self.
The resulting samvega can at times feel like an agitation and unpleasant. It’s what’s called a wholesome, unpleasant, unworldly feeling leading us away from greed, hatred, and delusion.
You might be wondering about samvega involving a type of wanting, and you might question how it can be wholesome. These feelings that cause us to seek out dharma practice are wholesome when they’re infused with the patience needed for gradually training the heart. Samvega is also ideally balanced with a serene form of faith or confidence called “pasada.” The two in balance can give us a sense of having an internal compass guiding us towards transformation.
It’s important to know that the only thing we need to have confidence in on this path is what teacher Winnie Nazarko calls “running the experiment.” It is enough to run the mindfulness experiment in our own bodies and minds and verify it for ourselves. The Buddha said “ehipassiko” or “come and see for yourself.”
When our faith feels challenged, calling to mind an initial experience of samvega can be one of the ways to boost confidence.
The need for such an infusion of confidence occurred for me years ago when I was heading to my first one-month retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. I had—over the previous couple of years—a problem with my health. I had a foot condition, and I had to have major surgery on it. Before the surgery, I couldn’t walk with the foot in the way it was. After the surgery, I was on crutches for many months.
I was having a really difficult time. And I had been practicing intermittently previous to that. And through the whole intense suffering, I decided for the most part I wasn’t going to practice.
I got angry at life. I fought all the unpleasantness of it. I stewed in my suffering.
Then I remembered that I could practice mindfulness. And I started doing it. And I had this realization that I had to make this the path. Eventually, I decided to do a one-month retreat. I did all the planning. I had the car packed. I was headed off and on the way I was like, “Am I crazy? Have I lost my mind?” I already missed my wife and my dog.
As I got close to Spirit Rock, there was this grocery store, so I stopped. And I was thinking, “Oh my god, what am I doing? I’m nuts to do this.” So, I decided to put my seat back and rest in the car for a little bit. And I reached down and pulled the lever up and I laid back in my seat. And when I did, I saw—on the ceiling of the car—all these crutch marks. All over the ceiling were these marks from my crutches where I had pulled them into the car and hit them against the roof month after month after month.
And all the doubt and questioning vanished.
And I thought, “Oh, that’s why I’m going.”
My doubting mind was out the window.
So sometimes it’s the hardest things that ultimately turn us towards the dharma and that we come to see as vehicles for freedom. As my teacher, Howie Cohn, always said, “We make our difficulties the path.” When we nurture that seed of wisdom, our spiritual urgency, we can transform our challenges into opportunities to come alive through practice.
Tara Mulay was trained and authorized to teach by Insight Meditation Society. She is a Guiding Teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She and Devin Berry will be leading a retreat “Awakening Insight: Breath, Body, and Heart” June 27 to July 2, 2024 at Conception Abbey in Conception, MO