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Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community gather for satsang and get real about all the questions we humans want answered. Intimate, courageous, heartfelt spiritual talk about pretty much everything. So happy you are here! A podcast from Satsang with...
Welcome to our weekly Satsang with Shambhavi podcast. Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community gather for intimate, courageous, heartfelt, and often humorous conversations about spirituality, politics, culture, and pretty much everything. Published each Wednesday here and wherever podcasts are found.
Our podcasts are recorded at live satsangs. They are delivered to you each week fresh and new.
You are also invited to join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community LIVE for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or email sayhi@jayakula.org to request the Zoom link for satsang.
Shambhavi Sarasvati is the spiritual director of Jaya Kula, a nonprofit organization offering opportunities to practice in the traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.
Visit https://jayakula.org/ to find out more.
Get Shambhavi’s podcast, teaching schedule, ramblings, and other writings on Substack: https://satsangwithshambhavi.substack.com/
Help others find these teachings! Please rate and review our podcast. Jaya Kula is a community-supported nonprofit organization. You can make a donation at https://jayakula.org/giving. You can also choose to contribute by offering a paid subscription to our podcast at https://satsangwithshambhavi.substack.com/. Subscriptions start at $5/month.
Thanks for listening! And much love to you, wherever and however you are.
Join Shambhavi Sarasvati for a weekly exploration of self-realization, death, love, devotion, and waking up while living in a messy world. Satsang is an ancient spiritual practice from India. It means "being in reality together." During satsang, people gather with a teacher to learn, ask questions, find community, chant and sing. Shambhavi gives satsang in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere. The dharma talks offered here are recordings of the live satsang.
Shambhavi is the spiritual director of Jaya Kula, a nonprofit organization. Her training is in the View and practices of Trika Shaivism from Kashmir and the Dzogchen tradition of Tibet. She is a householder sannyasini and a devotee of Anandamayi Ma. Visit jayakula.org for her full teaching schedule and more information.
Shambhavi's books include Mother Poems and A Crack in Time (2025), The Reality Sutras: Seeking the Heart of Trika Shaivism (2018), Tantra: the Play of Awakening (2012), Pilgrims to Openness: Direct Realization Tantra in Everyday Life (2009), Returning (2015), and No Retreat: Poems on the Way to Waking Up (2016). All of Shambhavi's books are available on Bookshop.org and on Amazon.
Hi, this is Shambhavi.
Welcome to my weekly podcast about spirituality,
love, death, devotion, and waking
up while living in a messy world.
The Satsang with Shambhavi podcast is recorded
live each week with students of our
nonprofit community, Jaya Kula.
For more information and to find out
about attending a satsang, visit jayakula.org.
Thanks for listening.
Much love to you, wherever and however you are.
STUDENT: Could you talk about feeling fullness?
I'm thinking about it
in context of open-eyed practice.
There's often something like neutrality I try
to go into my practice with,
trying to be in that place, but lately I've
been trying to experiment with feeling fullness.
SHAMBHAVI: What do you mean by that?
How do you experiment with feeling fullness?
STUDENT: I think it started with watching
that Palestinian movie with you and
feeling pretty beset by it, and then I thought
I could maybe sit with that.
SHAMBHAVI: So you are misinterpreting
neutrality as if there's some dichotomy between
neutrality and feeling fullness.
When we're sitting for open-eyed non-conceptual
meditation, we are leaving everything
unaltered, including our mind.
So the neutrality is not
a blankness or feelinglessness.
It's a neutrality of preference for what arises.
You're being more like clear water,
letting everything come through,
or clear glass or clearness.
And whatever you're meeting,
you're just there with whatever's happening,
whether it's feelings or discomfort or joy or
boredom or you don't know what's happening,
you don't have any word for it. [laughs]
So when we're doing non-conceptual
meditation, the adjustment isn't to what we're
feeling, it's to how we're
orienting toward what is.
Normally, you have some idea that neutrality is
this thing that you're achieving,
and it has something to do with feelings
and not letting feelings get in the way, right?
That's just a concept.
That has nothing to do
with non-conceptual meditation.
That's not the kind of adjustment
we want to be making.
There's just a subtle adjustment
to hold no view about anything.
That's the neutrality.
Hold no view about anything that's happening.
We're just being open.
That's it.
Receptive, open.
Whatever's going is going.
We're leaving things unaltered,
including our mind and everything around us.
We're not trying to fix anything.
We're not trying to be a certain thing.
We're not trying to achieve anything.
We're just being in a non-directional state.
So maybe non-directional is a better
way of thinking of it than neutrality.
So in that context, any emotion could arise.
It's like, fine. [laughs]
It could arise,
it could go away, it could be anything.
The idea is that we're just being
in life, not altering anything.
If we have the attitude that not having feelings
is better or more spiritual or meditational,
or maybe I'll have some feelings and see if that's
good, that's causes of suffering, when we feel
that we have to alter something like that
in order to be doing the right thing.
So don't alter anything.
We're training to be completely
natural and un-contrived.
So it's contrived to try to achieve neutrality
in the sense that you're describing it.
It's also contrived to say, well,
I'll allow my emotions to happen.
Those are both states of contrivance. [laughs]
STUDENT: I don't feel like there's any refuge
available in ordinary life when the
magnitude of whatever
the power structures that control
our life, they're so big.
Like, I don't know, like,
will that be contrived to think that because
that is our circumstance,
that we look to practice as a refuge?
SHAMBHAVI: Practice is a refuge until we're able
to take that exact same refuge everywhere.
Eating dinner, walking down the street,
watching a science fiction show on TV.
So we're practicing to be
in that uncontrived, natural state.
We are not fixing or controlling.
Life is happening and you're taking it all.
You have no attitude toward it.
No attitude at all.
Eventually, you want that off the cushion, too.
And what happens then?
You just think you're wandering around having no
attitude toward anything,
and so nothing's gonna happen because
you have no attitude toward anything?
I'm not saying you think that,
but just in case you were or anybody was.
That's also a completely individualistic
point of view or perspective or stance.
Like, it's just gonna be me wandering
around having no view or no attitude.
No, because why is non-conceptual meditation,
just sitting in a room having no attitude
toward anything, why is that a refuge?
Why?
Do you know?
STUDENT: A thought occurs to me that
God is paying attention to everything,
and perhaps that experience opened us to, like, a
largess that we don't usually pay attention to.
SHAMBHAVI: That's true.
But remember that God is
there with you in the room.
STUDENT: Yeah, it's kind of like
a handshake moment.
SHAMBHAVI: Yeah. When you're so busy fixing
and fiddling and taking up attitudes and
accepting and not accepting and being emotional
and being neutral and
whatever, all the things that you're doing,
you're not meeting God.
When you just let all the guardrails down,
then you meet that primordial presence.
That's the refuge.
STUDENT: [chuckles] It's very tricky.
SHAMBHAVI: It's not tricky, it's just subtle,
and it's not the habit that we have formed.
We have very strong habits of trying to be
somebody with an attitude and a stance, right?
And we let some things in and don't let other
things in, and we grab onto stuff 'cause
it seems secure, and it's not actually.
So really, we're doing Shamatha to meet that over
and over and over again,
and then we're doing sahaja to train more
deeply in that, in a more unbroken way.
Because Shamatha can be broken.
You know, you're inhaling, then you're exhaling,
and there's a sort of rhythm to it.
But once we have recognized and then we start
doing sahaja, we're just in that oceanic Self.
That's what we're being in.
And then if we were in that all day long,
we would be embodying naturally, without any
effort whatsoever, the virtues of that Self.
We would be very much more compassionate,
much more feelingful in an outward-directed way,
much more skillful and helping in precise ways.
More intelligent i- in the ways that count.
Not like you're gonna get a PhD
in primordial intelligence. [laughter]
STUDENT: Presumably from COVID,
my teeth could fall out.
They're probably not gonna fall out right now,
but up to half of my jaw bone got destroyed
in various places, and it freaks me out a lot.
And I was thinking about how much it kind of shook
me, and how much teeth are related to class also,
and like, the ableism in terms of,
like, teeth too, and-
SHAMBHAVI: I'm sorry.
STUDENT: Thanks.
SHAMBHAVI: There's another aspect of this,
which is something very cross-cultural
where teeth represent or feelâ¦
I don't wanna say represent the rationalistic way,
but your teeth falling out is read
by your system as a loss of power.
And people have dreams about
their teeth falling out.
This is very ancient and very cross-cultural.
Same with hair, like losing your hair also.
Both of those things.
And I don't really know the full history of all
of this or why this is kind of a human karma,
in a sense, that we would associate loss
of teeth with some more primordial loss of power.
And of course, then sort of on top of that are all
those other things,
class definitely being one of them,
and ableism definitely being part of it also.
You will be able to deal with itâ¦
STUDENT: Yeah.
SHAMBHAVI: Because of your class.
STUDENT: See, that I was thinking of that too.
SHAMBHAVI: [laughs] Yeah.
STUDENT: The only reason I can keep paying
for the expensive things that will probably [inaudible]
teeth probably will fall out is because of class.
SHAMBHAVI: You just reminded me of my mom.
You didn't remind me of my mom,
but what you said [laughs] reminded me of my mom.
'Cause she was very fat,
and because of the cruelty of our culture toward
fat people, she very often didn't
go to doctors, including dentists.
I don't know exactly what her thinking was.
It was interesting because I just felt so much
for her about her weight and so much about
the position of fat people in this culture.
We never really talked about it
in a lot of detail or very overtly.
I mean, we would mention it sometimes,
but now I'm recognizing that there was just
so many things that we didn't really get into.
Anyway, she also didn't go to the dentist and had
lots of teeth that were in a state of decay.
I don't know, maybe she was worried she wouldn't
fit in the dentist chair or, I really don't
know why, but those things were happening.
Yeah.
STUDENT: I'm curious about energy bodies
that include groups of people,
and if they have, like, a central channel
and nadis, and if they somehow mirror our own.
SHAMBHAVI: The answer to that question is
right in front of your face.
For instance, you've worked in offices.
You're an acupuncturist,
and you've worked in offices where
there was many people working there also.
And you know that you can walk into a work
situation, and if things aren't going right,
you walk in there and immediately
you feel blugh, right?
You're walking into the energy body of that group,
and you're experiencing it.
Like, it feels heavy or it feels
depressed or it feels fraught in some way.
It immediately affects you.
That's evidence right in front of your eyes.
Or if you come into Jaya Kula,
I hope you come into satsang and you
feel some sense of relaxation.
That's part of the energy body also.
Just pay attention to what you feel.
I think a lot of people have some experience
of that, and they just don't have
the framework to understand what's happening.
In terms of is there a central channel, well,
I was taught that the guru is the central channel
of the community,
and the students are like the chakras. [laughs]
I never really
took it all that seriously.
But certainly when we do certain kinds
of practice, we picture some form of guru,
whether it's Ma or some other guru figure,
above our heads, and their central channel is
coming into our central channel at our crown,
and we're recognizing that continuity between us.
So if there is a central channel,
for instance here, it's for you to recognize
your own enlightened essence nature.
Not just to be a satellite.
Like, I never liked
that description of the satellites.
The students as these satellite chakras.
But I do really love the image of the central
channels that are seamlessly
continuous between guru and disciple.
That's really beautiful.
Everything that gets taught in traditions like
these, even when they're described in very
esoteric ways, maybe at their furthest flower,
they're all available for us to be experienced
in some way or another in our everyday lives.
It's just that we haven't
been trained to notice it.
I'm sure you have already noticed the energetic
qualities when you go into a space
where a group was working.
I mean, you must have.
Whether you ever thought of that as
an energy body or not, I don't know.
But you can kind of play
with that and see how that develops.
And then we also know, for instance,
when a new person comes into a group,
that shifts the energy body of the group,
or when a longstanding person leaves,
that shifts the energy of the group.
If there's been sort of stale aspects
of the energy body and they leave and then someone
else comes, there can be this real
sense of freshening up, right?
And then there can be a real
sense of something's missing.
You're missing something.
And that happens when someone dies too.
I remember the first person I ever knew who died
of HIV was the administrative person at this
low-income housing organization
I worked in, in New York.
And I don't know, I just felt that for weeks
and weeks and weeks, that missing
part of the energy of the group.
Yeah.
STUDENT: I had a question about desire.
I realize that most of my desires have been
defined by the culture I grew up in,
about success, and I get confused
about what do I actually desire?
How do I shuffle out some of the cultural
stuff and get to what I desire for myself?
SHAMBHAVI: That's a great question to
answer before you die.
A really great question.
First of all, you're already expressing
the central desire of your life as far as I know,
which is to be closer to God.
You've been involved,
very deeply involved in spiritual life,
spiritual practice, spiritual
communities your entire adult life.
I don't know what was happening when you were
a kid, but at some point it became voluntary.
[laughter]
STUDENT: Yeah.
SHAMBHAVI: And then you made this unbelievably
bold move when you jumped ship from Lutheranism
to Trika Shaivism. [laughs]
[laughter]
How old were you when that happened?
STUDENT: Let's not talk about that. [laughter]
SHAMBHAVI: Older than many
of us are gonna live to be, right?
So it's clear that you have
longing in that direction.
STUDENT: I think it did get submerged under
all the cultural stuff that-
SHAMBHAVI: Yeah.
Absolutely.
That's true of everybody, mostly. Right?
I mean, it would be a very unusual
person who didn't feel that tension.
And then there's just the desire
to have a happy, ordinary life.
That's not necessarily unspiritual or not of value
to just be living in a way that is
fulfilling or brings contentment.
That's also a desire that's
shared by a lot of people.
Now, sometimes people do get into a lot of tension
between a desire that is leading them
to relaxation and maybe more contact with God,
because if we have a form of everyday life
that feels right to us, that is hugely relaxing.
But there's a lot of people who are always chasing
something, and that chasing can really
get in the way of contentment, right?
And when we have that feeling,
that chugging engine of chasing something,
that's what really interrupts people figuring out
what it is they actually desire,
because often what people actually desire isn't
what they were trained to desire or
isn't what their culture expects of them.
Sometimes it is, but a lot of times it's not.
So I would just look there to your
spiritual life and just your everyday life.
You love your new apartment.
That's a source of contentment
and peacefulness, right?
When we have an everyday ordinary life that suits
us, I call that having a habitable life.
We don't have to be too worried
about our everyday lives.
Doesn't mean we have to have a lot
of money or anything like that.
Just means that however we set it up,
we're not worrying about it too much,
and we can just look around and we feel a sense
of quiet joy or quiet contentment
in our everyday lives.
And then we have spiritual life.
Like, I mean, what else is there really?
Especially at our age.
I mean, you've done the things.
You've been married twice.
You have kids.
You've had a career. And you have this other
thing that you've been doing your whole life.
So it might be you already know.
But you just think it should be something else.
[laughs]
To sit in your house and just look around
and feel a sense of contentment, that's gold.
There might be other things too.
We each have some karmic knots,
things that we come into this particular
incarnation to work out,
and we can feel a lot of longing
in that direction to work those things out.
I can feel that in you also.
So you just do as much as you can in those areas.
You just feel that longing, just let it lead you.
You don't have to know in advance
where you're going with that.
Sometimes these questions are a lot about just
recognizing what's already happening,
and then most everyone feels loneliness also,
and that can be a big direction of longing.
Ultimately, discovering our real nature
and feeling integrated into life as a whole is the
only thing that will fully answer our loneliness.
But we can have ordinary answers
to our loneliness too along the way.
Doesn't have to all be about
non-dual encounters with God.
[laughter] It could be about going out
for a meal with a friend too, right? [laughs]
But in that case, like,
when we're talking about answering our loneliness,
which is ubiquitous,
with friends and lovers and kids and whatever we
answer it with, those things
are all part of impermanence.
They can be satisfying,
but only temporarily. Which is fine.
Better to have temporary satisfaction than none.
[laughs]
[upbeat music] Satsang with Shambhavi is
produced by Jaya Kula,
a nonprofit community offering opportunities
to learn and practice in the direct realization
traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.
If you enjoyed listening,
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