Summary: Taking time to look back and move forward. Conversations With KD episodes are derived from the recordings of KD’s online events from his home during the 2020/ 2021 days of social distancing and quarantine from the onset of COVID and beyond.<br> <br> Call and Response Special Edition – Conversations With KD October 24, 2020<br> Hello. Namaste everybody. How are you doing?<br> Let’s take a minute to just calm down and deepen and expand into this heart space that we all share. Everything exists within this vast space, this presence. This is Being, not the verb, but the noun, “Being,” and when we chant, when we repeat the name, we are turning towards this presence. So, here is where we are, and why we do practice is to recognize where we truly are, which is in our own true Being. It’s a vast, vast presence, inside of which we all live. Everything is within this presence. This presence is eternal and spontaneously present, this moment, always. And it’s only our thoughts, our emotions, our attachments and aversions that block our access to who we truly are.<br> So, it all comes back to remembering. At first, we remember to remember to look, and eventually we actually remember this presence. We re-recognize, we re-cognize this presence. It’s like coming home after being away for a long time. When you first get home, after being away, you fall down on the bed or into a chair and everything let’s go, and you’re just happy to be home. You forget where you’ve been. You don’t think about where you’re going. You just relax into yourself.<br> When we do practice, it is not important to be evaluating how we’re doing. We’re simply planting seeds, so to speak. We don’t stand over them to watch and see if they’ve grown yet. We plant the seeds, and then we plant another seed, and another, and then we go about our day, and those seeds grow. That action of coming home again, again, and again, keeps working on us through the day, and the magnetism, or the gravity, of our true nature becomes more and more real to us.<br> All the names that we chant are the names of this place that we live, in which we live, our own true nature. All the different names, all the different traditions, all the different lineages, all the different practices, they’ve only been brought to this world to bring us home. So, whatever you’re attracted to in terms of practice, follow that. See where it takes you. Listen to your heart. If you don’t trust yourself, what will you do? Even if you listen to advice from someone, a teacher, a yogi, a saint, whatever, you’re listening, you’re evaluating, and you’re seeing if you relate to that in your own being. So, if you don’t trust your own feelings, you’ll never be able to trust anything or anyone.<br> It’s not something that’s easy to live in for us at first, but because it is true, because our hearts do know, it’s inevitable that, as we practice, as we live, as we learn, as our hearts are purified of our attachments and aversions, this is where we move into our own self, our true self, which is the self of all, which is the great self of all, this fast presence.<br> Q: HI there, KD. First of all, I want to thank you very much for the email that you sent me. You probably get hundreds of them, so you might not remember.<br> I remember.<br> You did. Yeah, it helped soften a very unquiet mind since I left the hospital from, septicemia is what I had, but what you said in the email about Ram Dass and how he felt through those first, I think you said two years, might not have been, that he just lost all sense of everything, I lost all sense of everything during that time, and that feeling of being lost was, well, it hit me like a train. I thought, wow, I’m a pretty spiritual person, I thought, “Yeah, you know, I can, you know, taken in by ambulance,
