Our Traditions, Up and Down, and Translation

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...

Show Notes

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 [e-mail] 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.

What is Satsang with Shambhavi?

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.

[music] 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: I'm a seeker and person who's doing
a lot spiritually, but I seek around all over
the place. So what is this?

SHAMBHAVI: Yeah. This is [laughter]
a community that is practicing
in two related traditions.

The main tradition is called
Trika Shaivism or Kashmir Shaivism.

It's from Northwest India.

And then the secondary tradition is Dzogchen,
pretty much the same genre of tradition,
which is called a direct realization tradition.

And that means that there is an assumption
that using your own senses and your mind,
as a sense organ

that you can discover for yourself what is going
on here, what reality is, what the self is.
That you can perceive that directly.

And so he whole arc of the seated practices
that we do, and other practices,
is to basically clear away or destroy

perceptual impediments to you seeing for yourself
what's really happening here
and who you really are.

Kashmir Shaivism or Trika Shaivism is
part of the Tantrik traditions of India.

And Dzogchen is nominally Buddhist.

They're both oppositional traditions in the sense
that they were more egalitarian than other
traditions in their countries,

having women teachers and people of different
castes and et cetera practicing, and having a view
that really doesn't require belief of any sort.

It doesn't really require faith.

It's more based on seeing how things actually
are and the natural arising of devotion.

The teachings can be a little more fierce.

It's a little more confrontational than some other
traditions where you just sit around
for years and meditate and no one bothers you.

[laughs] So that's not for everybody,
but the relationship with the teacher
could be a little more rough and tumble.

One thing that's specific to this community
is that it's focused on doing seated practice.

This is a little more traditional.

But you could just come and drink tea and show
up and not do any practice, that's fine.

But if you decided you really wanted to study
with me, then you would be asked to do
a good amount of seated practice.

STUDENT: Can you talk about devotion
to a form versus the formless?

SHAMBHAVI: Well, the form and the formless
are the same.

It's just a matter of what attracts us.

And for most people,
some form is needed, and appreciated and enjoyed,
not just needed in the utilitarian sense.

There's really no difference.

Our conception of the formless
is as contrived as anything else.

So in the end, there's just this livingness.

And whether it appears in a form or whether we're
just relating to it in some other way,
it makes no difference whatsoever.

But in the beginning, you need to be magnetized,
need to have something to open
the doors and the gates for you.

And usually, that is something with form.

You could have form and formless or more
abstract on your altar at the same time.

Just don't have a hierarchical approach to it.

It's all the same thing.

STUDENT: I have kind of a related question
about non-hierarchicalness and like up and down.

And I was thinking the other day with the practice
of Ma above our heads and like breathing into our
central channel from that,

and that it's not like Ma is in the ground
and we're breathing up from our feet.

And just the fact that we do a lot of practices
where gods or beings are above and we breathe
them in, but up's not better than down.

And I just had some sort of question about that.

SHAMBHAVI: Well, we live vertically.
STUDENT: Yeah.

SHAMBHAVI: For the most part.
And our channels reflect that.

So it's more of like an anatomy.

And there's something about an image of Ma,
of an avatar, is an incarnation that's
more expansive and subtle than we are.

So it could just indicate more
subtlety and more access to wisdom.

But we're all made of the same thing.
That's the difference.

In a more transcendental tradition, it would be,
well, of course, they're better than we are,
you know? They're just better.

And that would be, even in
a lot of traditions that call themselves non-dual,

they still have this attitude that something
higher or better or something or other.

These are all relative ways
of experiencing things.

The idea is we wanna recover from that.

And we wanna discover that we are of the same
essence as even the most rarefied being.

Doesn't mean we have the same access to wisdom,
and we're not embodied in the same way,

but we are made of the same enlightened
essence nature in full measure.

The thing with the deities above our head is that
we have on the top of our head that soft spot,

and that is an opening to our central channel.

It's called brahmarandhra,
which I'm sure you remember.

The central channel of Ma is continuous with ours,
and so it's indicating something is being shared
with us, but it's only what we already are.

There's no sense that we're missing something.

We're having an experience of missing something.

And so now we're being given all of these
experiences of getting what we're missing.

But in the end, we're gonna discover
that we weren't missing it ever anyway.

We go through all this to discover that we already
were the thing that we thought we were missing.

Perfect from the beginning,
that's what this means.

Perfect from the beginning means you already
are perfectly enlightened essence nature.

You have just forgotten that and you need
to relearn it, and these are all the tools
that we have for relearning that.

STUDENT: Just curious your thoughts
on translation.

What's lost in, like, my own need to translate
into something that I can understand more
or resonate with?

First of all, the idea of translation in Tibet
and really a lot in India,
it's just a very loose idea of translation.

And having wildly different versions
of things is not considered wrong. It's fine.

That being said, just as a person who's read a lot
of things in translation, what the crux of it is,
is how much realization does somebody have?

That's what's gonna make you
understand Tantrik language,

something like the Song of the Vajra,
is how much realization you have,

how much insight,
how much direct insight you have
into what the import of these words is.

And you might be able to say it
in a number of different ways.

But if you don't have a level of realization,
then your translation is never gonna be good.

I'll give you an example of the Song of the Vajra.

If I can find it again quickly.

I sourced this both from Rinpoche's translation
and from somebody else's translation.

And I looked at somebody else's translation first
and they translated this line as,
blissful dharma sublime and unmoving.

And I thought to myself, that's not correct.
This is not correct. First of all,
it isn't unmoving.

Living presence isn't unmoving.

So, this must be an incorrect translation.

And I looked at Rinpoche's translation.

It didn't say anything like that.

I have a book that he wrote about the Song
of the Vajra and the different sections of it.

And in the section related to this statement,
he said that the word that is
in Tibetan means movement beyond moving.

What that meant was that there's always movement
happening, but we're not conditioned by it in the
same way that we would be by ordinary movement.

So all of us, we do different things and we're
conditioned by the things that happen

and how we move through the world,
or it expresses our conditioning.

But if you're more realized, you're moving through
the world, but you're not conditioned by it.

So it's movement beyond moving
or moving beyond movement.

I don't think it matters which way you say it,
but in no way does it mean unmoving, in no sense.

But the person who translated this,
I have no idea why they translated it this way.

I could say on the one hand
they're a student of Dzogchen.

Clearly from the translation, I can tell
they're a student of Dzogchen and maybe even
a student of Rinpoche's, I'm not sure.

There was a couple little phrases in here
that made me think that,
just characteristic language that he used.

But that's like an instance where somebody wrote
something that's sort of like dharmic cliché.

You know, that the ultimate is unmoving
in some way or un- even unmoved.

This is like a cliché
in Buddhist and Hindu traditions.

And whatever limited contact I have with living
presence, I can tell you it is
not unmoving or unmoved, neither.

But what Rinpoche explains, it's always full
of movement, but that movement is not
an expression of being conditioned

or nor is it conditioning.

It doesn't create limitation.

It's not expressive of limitation.

So it's a different kind of movement,
an unconditioned movement.

Only someone who hasn't had a certain level
of contact with living presence would say
anything like that, would translate it like that.

So that's really the crux of the matter to me,
is how much realization does somebody have?

Do they actually know firsthand
what's being talked about?

And then you can translate really, really well.

Or you can do a literal translation,
which very rarely happens.

I mean, literal translations
are just almost never available.

I always give this example of unconditioned-ness.

I studied Alexander Technique for a while,
and my teacher gave me this book that had
a picture of a man

holding a toddler, or maybe like
a six-month-old baby.

I don't know, maybe younger, I'm not sure.

But this man had really big hands
and he was holding this baby.

The baby was sitting upright.

You know how babies just sit in this
unbelievably beautiful posture?

[laughs] So the baby was like sitting in this
guy's hand and the baby was sort of like poised
like this in air and just like completely relaxed.

[laughs] You got the feeling that the baby
could just move in any direction.

Like, the baby was so supple and unconditioned
by whatever life was gonna happen next.

It could move 360 degrees with equal ease and be
completely fine and feel completely
relaxed being held this way.

So this is an example of being less conditioned.

Whereas if you or I were in that position,
we'd be like, oh my God! And we'd be fearful
and scrambling to go in a particular

direction, like down and [laughs]

And that's an example of conditioning.

When we want to go in a certain direction,
or we want to move in a certain way,

we want to speak in a certain way,
we want to feel a certain way,

we want to go towards a certain goal because we
are conditioned to think that's the right way,

the best way, or the only good way to go,
that is an expression of limited movement or
karmically impacted movement, or karma.

What we want to be able to do is to be in the
circumstances of life with our senses wide open,

just feeling the whole circumstance that we're
immersed in, and responding to it spontaneously
without any conceptual impediments

or habits standing in our way.

So even if this direction is best given
the circumstance that we're in, we want
to have been able to move in any direction.

We don't want to be compelled
to go in this direction.

We want this direction to be a skillful
spontaneous response to our real circumstance

not a karmically bound response that says,
This direction's always the best. [laughs]

We anticipate all kinds of things based on our
karmas, and we move in certain ways

and make certain choices based on our anticipation
of how things are going to be.

This is imprisonment.

We want to just be in our circumstance immersed
in living presence, feeling, perceiving
with clarity, and responding in a spontaneous way.

That spontaneous way may have
a lot of precision to it.

It's not like, well, I could do this,
or I could do that. It's not like that.

We're responding with instantaneous precision
to a circumstance, but we're
not bound to do that habitually.

I don't know how I got off on that,
but anyway, translation. [laughs]

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,
please help us keep this podcast and many other
teachings open to all

by making a monthly or one-time donation.

Visit jayakula.org to make a donation
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