Have you ever noticed that when humans try to talk about God, awakening, truth, or the divine we almost never explain it directly?
Instead, we tell stories. We say life is a battlefield. God is a shepherd. The soul is a river returning to the sea. The self is two birds sitting in the same tree.
Across cultures, centuries, and spiritual traditions, mystics don’t simply define the divine, they paint it.
In this episode, I take you on a kind of devotional poetry slam through sacred metaphor. We’ll explore passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Psalms, and yogic philosophy to see how spiritual traditions use image, story, and symbol to help us feel our relationship with the divine.
Because metaphor doesn’t just help the mind understand. It gives the nervous system somewhere to rest.
We’ll explore:
🔹 Why sacred texts use metaphor to describe the divine
🔹 What the Gita, Bible, and Upanishads reveal through images like rivers, shepherds, chariots, and birds
🔹 How metaphor helps us feel spiritual truth instead of just understand it intellectually
🔹 How sacred imagery can support meditation, teaching, and everyday life
This is part one of a two-part episode on sacred metaphor, divine imagery, and why stories may be one of the most powerful spiritual technologies we have.
If you’ve ever felt moved by a line of scripture, a yoga teaching, a poem, or an image you couldn’t fully explain this episode will help you understand why.
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And if you want to understand where the Gita, Upanishads, Yoga Sutras, Tantra, and other sacred yoga texts all fit together, my History of Yoga course is a beautiful next step. Get it here => https://www.brettlarkin.com/history-of-yoga-course/
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🎧 Also Listen to:
#297 – What is Samkhya Philosophy and How is it Different from Yoga?
#358 – Intro to The Bhagavad Gita: How Do You Navigate Moral Dilemmas?
#401 – Who Has Your Attention? Attention Economy vs the Ancient Path
Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
Welcome to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where ancient yogic wisdom meets modern business strategy. I’m Brett Larkin, creator of Uplifted Yoga, where I’ve certified thousands of yoga teachers, built a multi-seven figure business, and guided over half a million students on YouTube. Here’s the truth, you don’t have to choose between embodying deep yogic wisdom and building a thriving, freedom-based business.
This podcast is your space to integrate both, because yoga isn’t just what you do on the mat. It’s how you show up in every part of your life. Whether you’re here to deepen your yoga practice, grow your teaching career, or align your energy with your purpose, you’re in the right place.
Let’s dive in. Have you ever noticed that when humans try to talk about God or the divine or awakening or truth, we almost never explain it directly? Instead, we tell stories. We say life is a battlefield.
We say God is a shepherd. We say the soul is a river returning to the sea. Across cultures and centuries, mystics don’t define the divine, they paint it.
And what’s fascinating is that these metaphors, similar metaphors, show up again and again in the Bhagavad Gita, in the Bible, in the Upanishads, in Tantra, even though these traditions were born worlds apart. In this episode, I want to take you on a kind of devotional poetry slam. We’re going to read sacred passages aloud from the Gita, the Upanishads, from the Psalms, from Tantra, and listen closely to the images they use to describe our relationship with the divine.
We’ll move from the image of God as a shepherd, guiding, nervous, easily distracted sheep, to Krishna as a charioteer holding the reins in the middle of a battlefield, to the Upanishadic image of two birds living in the same tree, one acting, one watching, and then to Tantra’s radical vision of awakening as an intimate love story between consciousness and energy. And as we go, I want you to notice something subtle but powerful. These traditions aren’t trying to explain God.
They’re trying to help you feel your relationship to the divine through guidance, through witnessing, through intimacy. By the end of this episode, my hope is that you won’t just understand these metaphors intellectually, but you’ll feel why the metaphor itself might be its own kind of sacred language. Maybe you’ll even feel inspired to use metaphor in your own life or teaching.
So take a breath, let your mind soften, maybe place a palm on your heart, and let’s begin. As rivers flowing east and west merge in the sea and lose their names and forms, so the knower, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person, higher than the high. So this verse is from the Chand Yoga Upanishad 6.10.1. This is a passage that is part of a teaching on moksha.
Moksha is liberation. And the divine person that’s being referred to in this passage here is Brahma, this idea of infinite being, unconditioned consciousness. So it’s not a deity as we’ll see in some other of the traditions, but it’s a field of existence.
And here we have the metaphor of the river merging into the ocean, and this is a visual that we see over and over again in the Upanishads and different Vedantic texts. The rivers are individual lives, right? Like me, you, different rivers, different currents, different rapids, different angles, challenges, twists and turns. And then the names and the forms are like our personality, our story, our role.
But the ocean that we’re all merging towards is this unified field of consciousness. What’s so beautiful about this water analogy is that difference is included, but it’s not erased, right? Like we each have these unique rivers, but we’re all water. So those of you who’ve taken teacher training with me, I have a slide where I used water to talk about this analogy of Brahman and Atman.
Brahman being the unified field of awareness, out-there-ness, infinite space, consciousness, and Atman being our individual identity. And in that slide, I have Brahman represented by the ocean and Atman, our individual self, represented by a drop. So each drop, kind of like each river, is unique, but we’re made up of the same stuff as the divine.
That’s what these Vedantic texts are teaching us. And if you’re wondering how this relates to samadhi, right, that pinnacle state that we’re aiming towards in the eight-limbed path of yoga, samadhi is identity expansion, right? It’s not like you have to change. It’s either like, you could think of it as peeling back the layers of the onion, peeling back everything that’s shaping and forming the river so it just becomes expansive, like the ocean.
You could think of it as the river realizing that it’s always been water, like underneath maybe the rapids and the currents and the things that are happening on the surface. If you go deep down, there’s stillness, there’s tranquility. This water imagery, the idea of whether it’s a drop or a river merging into the ocean, it gives us this idea of belonging without any boundaries and that the divine isn’t something you have to reach towards, but it’s actually something you relax into and it’s something that’s always available.
We already are it. If Brahman is the ocean and we’re the river, we’re already made up of the same stuff. So there’s this beautiful element or imagery of just like natural belonging, rivers, oceans, water.
These are such beautifully powerful images and you can use this in your own life, like who loves being in water? Me, right? I love taking a bath at night. I love swimming in the lake near my house in the summer. Every time I’m submerged in water, it feels like I’m going back home and our first home in our mother’s womb was water.
We were aquatic, right? We were swimming in amniotic fluid. So there’s also been these studies that like when you splash water on your face or that moment when you first, it’s like a really spiritual moment for me, like when I’m in the lake and I put my head under and I do that first stroke, right, of being completely submerged in water. It feels like what this Upanishadic passage is talking about, this merging, this, you know, obviously not leaving my physical body in total death, but like a little sliver of that, of like losing my ego self, my individual self, my drop, droplet identity or river analogy and kind of just like moving, moving into a larger body of water.
I also started noticing on my walks that when I walked by the water, there was like a particular texture of energy that was very calming, very soothing, a little bit different than when I walked up like higher on the trail near my house. Like if I could actually be next to water, like as close to water as possible, like walking direct, there’s a part near my house where you can walk like directly alongside the lake and that the quality of that walk is different. It’s different than when I do it like higher up, kind of looking down at the lake, being close to a body of water.
It’s like we’re getting closer to that unconditioned consciousness, to that field of existence, that unified awareness. So as we keep exploring these, these metaphors and common analogies that we see, you know, there’s so much power and wisdom in these. That’s why they’ve been used for thousands of years and they can still move our heart.
But they’re also very practical. Like if you’re in a bad mood, get in water, like take a shower, take a bath or go walk near water. For me, there’s also such a distinction too between like swimming in a pool, which is okay, but like compared to swimming in a body of water that is alive, like a lake or like an ocean, I really started to notice a difference to the extent where like I don’t really like swimming in swimming pools anymore.
I’m just like, nope, I just, I just want to do the lake, which makes me really weird. But I think it’s because there’s a quality of knowing that that body of water is so interconnected with all things, with this idea of Brahman, an infinite being. And whether you think of this passage as like representing a deep moment in meditation or death itself, it’s very soothing, right? Rivers flowing east and west, they merge into the sea, they lose their names and forms.
So the knower freed from name and form goes to the divine person higher than the high. Nothing is being destroyed. Nothing is being rejected.
Nothing is being lost. It’s just this beautiful identity expansion or absorption. You as a river, you don’t disappear.
You just realize that you are also always water. All right, let’s move on and look at Psalm 23. This is probably one of the most famous psalms of all time.
It’s kind of what inspired this episode because I got really curious about this particular psalm and the analogy that’s used here, which is really beautiful. This idea of the Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
For you are with me, your rod and your staff. They comfort me. The psalm goes on and is a little longer, but this analogy or this metaphor as divinity, as relational guidance through this metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep, I think is really inspiring.
So beautiful. This psalm always moves my heart. So humans, in this analogy, if you’re not familiar, are the sheep and God is the shepherd.
And this choice is extremely intentional. In fact, the word sheep shows up 500 times in the Bible. Like they’re talking about sheep constantly in the Bible.
And I think for us in modern days, it can be like, well, like why? But it would be like as if it were written in modern time. Like we’re talking about cars or the freeway or things that would all easily relate to like in that time and culture. This is like an analogy or a metaphor that someone would instantly understand.
And then the shepherd, obviously, in this analogy is God. If you’re not familiar with the psalms, they’re basically poetic prayers. They’re not laws.
They’re not doctrine. A lot of them are traditionally attributed to King David, who was like literally a shepherd. Psalms are meant to be sung or recited.
There is so much beautiful imagery in this psalm. We see water, what we just talked about, right? The still waters. Notice that the divine is not portrayed as a king who’s issuing commands.
The divine is not portrayed as a judge delivering verdicts. The divine is, in this metaphor, defined as someone who’s walking ahead of you, knows the terrain, is shepherding you, keeping your nervous system calm. So back to sheep.
Sheep are mentioned 500 times in the Bible. And in 200 of those instances, sheep is referring to us. That analogy of like us people being sheep is used 200 times.
So if you’re a little bit curious about sheep, here’s what you need to know. Here are the attributes of sheep. And I got curious about this because it’s like, if this is how we’re being described, like humans are being described in this ancient text, like over and over and over and over again, really, you’re like, oh my gosh, really? There’s another shepherd analogy.
There’s another sheep analogy. It’s like I got curious as to why, right? Why a sheep and not a fox or a dog or a bird, right? Why sheep? So here’s what you need to know about sheep. Sheep are easily distracted, number one.
Number two, sheep are biologically unable to get to their destination independently without a shepherd. See, like some animals, like a dog, are smart enough to find their way back home. But sheep are not.
Sheep are not included in that list. This scripture never talks about humans or gives an analogy where a human is a dog. We’re always sheep, which is telling us so much about the human condition, that we’re easily distracted and that we’re biologically unable to get where we want to go independently.
We need to believe in something. We need a shepherd. We need to believe in something more than just our ego, our identity.
And it was funny because even when I was reading this and doing the research for this, my phone dinged and I checked it and I was easily distracted. I’m like, yep, I’m a sheep, right? Sometimes I wander around my house and I can’t even remember what I’m doing or where I’m going or maybe why I’m rushing. And it’s just like, yeah, I need a shepherd.
Like, I can’t get really where I need to go energetically or physically without, you know, belief in a higher power, without connection to the divine, whether that’s through meditation or prayer or however you choose to do it. So this opening line of like, the Lord is my shepherd. You know, Jesus often called himself the good shepherd.
It’s all about kindness, kindness and leadership of God or the divine in this particular psalm. So the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
I am being taken care of. I am being guided. Verse two, he makes me to lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters. So here we have this imagery of green pastures that represents safety, nourishment, rest, right? Every time I read that line about he makes me to lie down in green pastures, I’m like, oh, the divine God like wants me to rest. He leads me beside the still waters.
An interesting other sheep factoid is that sheep refuse to drink from rushing water. So if you take a sheep to like a rushing stream, they ain’t going to drink, right? Calm water is required. Calm water is required to nourish the sheep.
And so this shepherd, the divine in this metaphor is leading the sheep to still waters where they can get nourished. There’s an even deeper layer here because besides this beautiful imagery of the green pastures and the still waters, these lines are telling us also that the shepherd is skilled because in ancient Israel, green pastures, lush green pastures and still waters could be scarce during much of the year, meaning challenging to find like these weren’t abundantly available. It was hard to seek out lush patches of grass and still water.
So the fact that the shepherd is leading you there is also telling us in this analogy that the divine is very skilled like at taking care of you and putting you in the right place. The second stanza talks about walking through the valley of the shadow of death. And obviously we hear this in rap songs.
We hear this in popular culture. This is such a huge concept. And it’s from this psalm.
And what it’s saying here is really that the divine can be found in any circumstance. And in fact, some experiences of the divine actually can only be found in the darkness, can only be found in the valley of the shadow of death. So if you’re going through a dark or hard time right now, this line, like though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.
It can be so comforting. And then your rod and your staff, they comfort me. So again, we in modern culture, it’s like, we don’t know what a shepherd’s rod and staff are.
I thought they were just like a walking stick or accessories. I don’t know. But the rod and staff are actually the shepherd’s tools to defeat enemies, to banish fear, and then also to kind of guide the sheep.
So the rod is really representing like protection from predators. The staff the shepherd is holding is that gentle guidance, pulling the sheep back from danger. So in this metaphor, it’s like the divine is regulating you and protecting you and inviting you to rest.
God or the divine is someone who walks ahead, who knows the terrain, who knows what you need, who knows how to keep your nervous system calm. It’s like this idea that you’re being taken care of. So this shepherd and sheep, such a beautiful metaphor as divinity, that’s like relational guidance and regulation.
Let’s move on to the Bhagavad Gita and the incredible imagery we see there of the charioteer and the battlefield, which is showing us, you know, divinity can guide us in moments of moral conflict. So this is the Gita, book two, verse 47. You have the right to action alone, never to its fruits.
Let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction. And going ahead to chapter 18, verse 66, abandon all varieties of duty and come to me alone for refuge. I will liberate you from all sorrow and wrongdoing.
Do not grieve. So I shared both an earlier passage, an early Gita passage from the second book and a later one from the 18th book. If you haven’t been following along here on the podcast as we’ve been reading the Bhagavad Gita, it is part of the Mahabharata, one of India’s greatest epics.
It’s a dialogue between Arjuna, a warrior who’s frozen on the battlefield and really overwhelmed by moral responsibility and grief and fear of the consequence of the battle he’s about to engage in because it involves killing his cousins. And Krishna, God in this story, doesn’t appear as a king or a god in the sky, but actually as Arjuna’s charioteer. And this is really crucial for this metaphor.
Krishna, God, doesn’t remove the battle. I mean, he’s God. He’s all powerful.
And we see that in certain chapters where he literally like demonstrates how huge and beautiful and bright and glorious he is. And Arjuna can like barely look at him because he’s so spectacular and he can do all that. Yet he doesn’t just solve the problem and make the battle go away.
He doesn’t make the battle go away. Instead, what he does is he takes the reins of Arjuna, the warrior’s charioteer. And if you want to click into this more, the intro episode that I recorded here on the podcast to the Gita talks a lot about this imagery because it is the context in which the entire Bhagavad Gita takes place, this moment on a battlefield.
We have Arjuna, the warrior. He’s standing in his chariot, like facing off with the enemy. The conch shell sounds.
They’re all supposed to rush at and start killing one another. But instead, Arjuna has this kind of panic attack and moral quandary. And he starts asking his charioteer, Krishna, who’s actually God, like what he should do.
And Krishna doesn’t solve the problem, but he is holding the reins of this chariot. So the metaphor, or this is the classical breakdown of the metaphor, is that the battlefield, Kurukshetra, is the inner field of ethical conflict that we all face every single day. And again, the intro episode I have on the Gita, which we’ll link up here in the show notes, goes so much deeper into this.
Because when you first approach the Gita, you’re like, why am I reading about this random war? This makes no sense. But when you realize that the war and the battlefield in that story is an analogy for the brain, for our mind, for all the conflicting thoughts and moral quandaries that we have in our head, you’re like, OK, this is actually super relevant to me. So we have the battlefield, which is representing that inner field of ethical conflict that we all have.
The chariot represents the human body. OK, the horses represent the senses, like desire for food, desire for sex, desire for pleasurable things, aversion to something that we don’t want to see on the road. Right.
So the horses without the bridle and the reins are powerful, but actually quite unruly if not controlled. Then the reins in this analogy is the mind, manas, that is harnessing and interpreting the senses. And then the charioteer is divine intelligence or higher discernment, otherwise known as the buddhi.
Those of you who are familiar with that Sanskrit term. And I actually have a really beautiful presentation where I break this down also in the History of Yoga course. So if you if you’re someone who really wants to, like, see the visual of this and go through all of yoga’s ancient texts with me in a course where you also are getting a booklet and slides and things like that, the History of Yoga course is going to be perfect for you because I spend a lot of time on this metaphor and we look at some different depictions of it in that course.
So what’s beautiful about this analogy to me is that the divine role in this framework is guidance. It’s not control. It’s guidance.
It’s like, let me help you steer these horses and let me help you harness these senses. You have the right to act and do what you want. That’s the very first verse we read.
But you don’t have a right to the fruits of your labor. And oh, my gosh, like, don’t even get me started on fruit, because fruit is another, like, along with, like, water and sheep and shepherds, like, fruit is another key analogy that we see across so many texts, like in the Bible, bearing good fruit. Here, the Bhagavad Gita is talking about fruit, like the fruits of your actions.
Often in the Bible, it’s like analogies are to trees that bear fruit. And it’s like God wants you to bear fruit, meaning, like, develop positive qualities and characteristics in your life, in your character. So the Gita says, like, you have free will.
It’s similar to the Yoga Sutras. It’s like you can do whatever you want, but you can’t be attached, right? Remember, in the Yoga Sutras, we learn about practice and non-attachment. So the early chapters of the Gita are really educating on that.
And then the later chapters of the Gita, we see much more of the bhakti yogi style, more devotional, right? This passage that I read from Book 18, Verse 66, Abandon all varieties of duty and come to me alone for refuge. I liberate you from all sorrow and wrongdoing. Do not grieve.
I mean, if you just grab that and shook it up in a comparative religion, like, raffle box and pulled it out, like, that could, that sounds like Jesus to me, right? So very, very similar, this idea of refuge, right? Coming to someone, having refuge, the divine being a place where you can not only be cared for, but actually where you can be liberated from sorrow, wrongdoing, sin. I mean, pick your word. So the Gita is saying, you know, you have karma.
There’s actions, deeds that you need to do on this plane of consciousness to work out, you know, to shape your character, to work out who you are. But you can’t be attached to the fruit, to the result, to the outcome. And that Sanskrit word, I did look it up, phala, the word literally is fruit.
Fruit implies something that ripens in its own time, something organic, something that you can’t force prematurely. Like, have you ever gotten, like, I get like pomegranates or kiwis and it’s like, I want to eat them now, but I can’t. They’re not ripe yet.
Or avocados. Oh my gosh, same thing, right? You like want the fruit to be ripe and ready now, but it’s not yet. And so I think that’s another reason why this phala in Sanskrit or the fruit that we hear about in the Bible, like fruit is something that takes time to come to fruition and then it takes time to ripen.
So so much of what we see here in the Gita is mirroring the Bible fruit imagery exactly. Like, you know, Jesus says, by their fruits, you shall know them. Krishna’s saying don’t cling.
He’s not saying don’t care about results. He’s just saying you can’t cling to results. Jesus said the same thing on the cross, right? He was on the cross.
He’s dying. He’s saying, God, oh God, why have you forsaken me? Which is like, I don’t want to die. Like the human part of me doesn’t want to die.
But then he says, let not my will, but your will be done. Ultimately, he’s like non-attachment. So I’m going to practice, pray, you know, to not not have to suffer and die.
But ultimately, I’m going to trust you, God. It’s the same thing that we see, I think, in the sutras, right? Practice and non-attachment. It’s just different.
It’s just like prayer and non-attachment. We’re going to ask for things. We’re going to pray for things.
We’re going to act in the world. We’re going to like do maybe some things that are challenging, like in a metaphorical or physical war. But we’re going to release the fruits of our actions.
We’re not going to be attached to the outcome. We’re going to say, not your will, thy will be done. We’re going to trust in a higher cosmic power, which in the sutras would be that Ishvara, right, which is often defined as God or universal consciousness.
We’re going to trust God. So yeah, I’m getting to talk about my fruit metaphor as well, which is kind of exciting. Let’s move on to the Upanishads.
And in this metaphor, we see divinity as the witness, the witness consciousness. So this is from the Mundaka Upanishad 3.1.1 and 3.1.2. Two birds, inseparable companions, perched on the same tree. One eats the fruit of the tree, the other looks on without eating.
The individual self, deluded and sorrowful, grieves over its helplessness. But when it sees the other, the Lord, the adored, and knows his glory, its sorrow passes away. The Upanishads are the philosophical heart of the Vedic tradition.
The Upanishads, that word Upanishad means like sitting by the feet of the teacher. So they mark a shift from ritual, like when everything was done with like ritual sacrifices. Think of like the Vedas and the rites and the rituals and the equivalent of priests in those times, like the Brahman class who would perform all of these chants and, you know, very ritualistic to inquiry, right? Like Q&A or a more intimate relationship with the divine, right? Upanishad literally means sitting at the feet of the teacher, implying like asking questions and stuff.
And it’s also a shift from, you know, outer action, like animal sacrifice and all that towards like this inner knowing. The Upanishads, just if you’re trying to place this, it predates Patanjali. And it’s actually the Upanishads are setting the foundation for non-dual thought, which we talk a lot about in 300-Hour Teacher Training, as well as the Samkhya Philosophy Podcast, which we can link up here.
Again, if you kind of want to see all these texts on a timeline, the History of Yoga course that I have is going to be perfect for that. Because again, PDF, it’s going to take you, it basically is a timeline from the first cave painting of what we think is a yogi through to today. And it puts all these books and we go through all of them on that timeline.
So in this metaphor, we have a tree. The tree is our life, or maybe we could think of it as our human body. But on this tree, what do we have? We have two birds.
And these two birds are representing two different modes of identity. So one bird acts and desires and consumes and therefore also suffers. So that would be the bird that’s eating the fruit of the tree.
Oh my gosh, there we see fruit again. So the bird who’s eating the fruit is the individual self, deluded and sorrowful, and it grieves over its helplessness. But then the bird looks over and it sees on the same tree, its other counterpart, this other bird.
The bird who’s watching, who knows, who remains untouched. And this second bird who’s watching the other bird eat, who looks on without eating, the passage says, is the one connected to the divine, is the one connected to something deeper. So again, liberation in this story doesn’t come from like one bird telling, like the other bird being like, stop eating, stop suffering, stop doing all this stuff.
How many of us are doing that to people in our lives, like trying to control them? Liberation does not come from stopping the eating bird. It comes from remembering the watching bird. This is like core to tantra.
It’s like we can identify with the part of us that is always moving and always fluctuating, that’s hungry, that’s tired, that’s sad, that wants a sandwich, that wishes my schedule was different today, that everything always changing, all of that physical and mental stuff that’s always changing. We can absolutely identify with that. We can also remember that there’s another part of us that is completely still and observing all of this.
The bird that’s witnessing has this indwelling divine presence. It’s like implied that it’s connected to Ishvara, to God. And so we have this layered identity, right? So you can think of meditation as like, what part of yourself do you want to connect with? And I talk about this a lot in the trainings, right? It’s like, do you want to connect with the part of you that’s always moving, always changing, always craving more stuff, more food? I mean, that’s the nature of this part of us.
It’s natural, like we’re governed by the gunas. So everything’s always fluctuating. We’re going to want more things.
We’re going to want different things. We’re going to have cravings. We’re going to have aversions.
And culture has us constantly not just connecting with that part of ourselves, but I’d say actually exploiting that part of ourselves in the form of like marketing, advertising. You know, if you buy this, then you’ll be happy. If you’ll buy this other thing, that’s where you’re going to feel great.
You know, it’s like this huge lie and illusion. It’s garbage. But we’re connected with that part of ourselves pretty much all the time as we move through the world because that’s just necessary to function.
So your yoga or meditation practice can be the one time, the only time that you connect with the part of yourself that’s the bird that’s watching. That’s just watching and observing all of this and through that connected to the divine. So the metaphor isn’t saying like one bird’s better than the other.
The birds are together. They’re in harmony on the same tree. The metaphor is not saying that you need to escape your humanity or like completely get rid of your ego.
You need an ego to function and like go pick up your kids from school later today or do your job or feed your pets or whatever you’re going to do. You need an ego to do all those things. So the metaphor is saying you don’t need to escape your humanity, but you need to include awareness inside your humanity.
A practice of awareness, a practice of being the other bird is necessary. Yes, you can connect to everything that’s always moving, changing. But are you also connecting to the part of yourself that’s not changing, that’s still, that’s witnessing everything? So the big takeaway from this one is that like suffering doesn’t end when your life circumstances change.
Suffering ends when you do this identity shift. That’s when things are going to change for you. So we have one more beautiful metaphor that I wanted to touch on today, which is the Shiva Shakti kind of love story.
And I wanted to read from the Radiant Sutras for you for this one, but we’re going to do that in a part two episode. We’re also going to talk about in that part two about why, why metaphor is such a powerful tool for healing, teaching, and regulation. So we’re going to actually, you know, we’ll look at that last text I want to look at, but then we’re also going to take this one step further.
We’re going to be like, why? Why does metaphor work so well? And I know a lot of you who are listening to this are teachers. So it’s like, listen up, right? Because when we can really properly harness metaphors and analogies in our class, and I’ll talk more to that and how I try to do that in the next episode and give you some tips, it’s really powerful because the body understands imagery faster than the mind can understand ideas. So the body, you know how I’m into the body and somatic yoga, right? The body understands images long before the mind understands ideas sometimes.
So imagery can often bypass intellectual thinking mind and speak to maybe our heart in a more direct way. Maybe you felt that in one of the passages we read today. As we’ve moved through these images, right? The shepherd and the sheep, the charioteer and the battlefield, the two birds in the same tree, the rivers returning to the sea.
We’re seeing that across centuries and across cultures and spiritual lineages, not just common themes, right? Guidance instead of control, witnessing instead of judgment, intimacy instead of obedience, belonging instead of transcendence. We’re not just seeing common themes, but we’re seeing common words, common images. And these analogies and these metaphors, you know, they’re not hitting you over the head with what to believe.
They’re literally like giving your nervous system something to rest inside of through like familiar imagery of nature, of animals. So next time we’ll also begin exploring how you can use metaphor more intentionally in your own personal practice, your teaching, and even your self-talk. Because the stories that we’re living inside in our head really do shape how we feel, how we breathe, and how deeply we trust life.
So until next week, let one image stay with you. One story or image or line today that maybe feels like home. If there’s something that you’re remembering or that’s coming to mind right now, there’s a reason.
Think about that. Meditate on it this week. And I will see you in part two of this episode.
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