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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
non-profit 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 still struggling so much.
Like, it's about impressing people.
I just get so tired of it,
so I wondered if you could talk about it.
SHAMBHAVI: Well, you've already answered your own
question when you say, "I'm so tired of it."
The cure is to just get so incredibly tired of it
that you can't even choose to do it anymore.
These kind of karmas, the first inkling that they
might resolve or dissolve or
go away is when we notice them.
Nothing's really going
to resolve unless we notice it.
And then the second sort of level is we stop
justifying it and we realize how
entrapped we are by it,
and then we just start to get sick of ourselves.
And we start to feel how exhausting the whole
business is, the whole enterprise
of maintaining these things.
And then we feel it's so big,
we'll never get rid of it.
It starts to feel so overwhelming,
we think to ourselves, I'm never going
to get out of this, and we feel desperation.
And then at that point,
or a little after that point, our desperation
becomes so huge that it actually just goes away.
We get so sick of it that our own
tiredness of it cuts the ties to it.
So that's one of the major, not the only, but it's
one of the major ways that karma resolves.
We can just say patterns.
People don't want to use the Sanskrit word.
So you're right in the middle
of that, and it's fantastic.
It will go away because you want it to so
desperately that it simply won't
find any foothold in you anymore.
It's good to cry about it too,
when your tears are heard by the Mother.
All of these things are so good and such
a relief for me as your teacher to see and hear.
We've all been on this train.
We've all been on this track.
We've all experienced this if we're lucky, so
try to stay in touch with how exhausting this is.
'Cause that's really the golden way out of this.
STUDENT: You've been saying it for a long time to me.
SHAMBHAVI: Well, yeah, but everything has its time.
I can say stuff for decades or maybe eons,
but I'm not the only factor.
I'm not in control of people's lives.
Sometimes I say something and it's right
at the right moment when other factors are
also collaborating to make something resolve.
There's always a time and timing for something.
STUDENT: I've been thinking about taking refuge
versus finding comfort, and I'm wondering
if you can talk about that.
SHAMBHAVI: Well, taking refuge it can be comforting.
But if you take refuge, I mean,
we don't do that in this tradition, but
just the equivalent is recognizing
that teacher, teachings, and community
are central in your life,
and that you're going to make them central.
That's like taking refuge in a nutshell.
If you just take refuge, like,
with a Buddhist teacher and then you go home
and that's it, [laughs] nothing else happens,
then it's just like a comforting moment
and maybe something comforting that you think of.
But if you really engage with teacher, teachings,
and presence, and community,
then gets kind of dangerous.
So it can get uncomfortable at times.
It's not always comfortable
if it's actually working.
So being comfortable is good unless
you make it your life's purpose.
[laughs]
I mean, there's nothing wrong with
sometimes being comfortable.
But if we have internalized or defined
discomfort bad, comfortable good,
then we're going to lead a very limited life,
because we're going to shy away from
anything that's uncomfortable.
And the truth is that change is
always uncomfortable at times, always.
And as a matter of fact, life is just always
uncomfortable at times, whether or not we change.
So, in fact, life is very, very,
very uncomfortable at times.
Especially if we're determined to
have more clear seeing about it.
If we're not willing to see
clearly, we cannot change.
Everything's just going to remain the same
if we aren't willing to see clearly.
So the sort of opening of the door to not living
a life that's comfort seeking is take
refuge in what's really happening.
Take refuge in clear seeing.
Take refuge in honesty.
If you want to have realization, if you're here
'cause you want to have realization,
then honesty and clear seeing and courage
to see how things actually are,
you cannot finesse that.
You cannot fake that.
You cannot ignore it.
And that's uncomfortable, right?
It's uncomfortable.
So we don't want to make a thing where discomfort
becomes some badge of how wonderful we are.
Basically, we just want to be uncomfortable when
things are uncomfortable
and we want to be comfortable when it's
appropriate to be comfortable.
They're not mutually exclusive,
and we're not trying to be anything.
So what we're trying to be is honest and real.
That's the basis of waking up.
And refuge, taking refuge, at its root,
if we could say anything,
it's taking refuge in the real,
what's actually happening,
which supposedly Buddha, sangha,
and dharma represent, but, you know, maybe.
[laughs] If we want to say,
what do those things represent?
They represent clear seeing and
taking refuge in what actually is
and dedicating ourselves to that.
And to eventually perceiving things very
differently than we do right now, because
clear seeing isn't just ordinary clear seeing.
It's not just seeing what's happening in the world
or with ourselves, although
that is a great place to start.
But it's also seeing through all
of our received concepts about reality.
Then we get into a more
extraordinary form of seeing.
But start with honesty.
That's just so important.
STUDENT: ...just talked about intimacy
and I'm curious what that means,
intimacy between people.
If you can share some thoughts,
I'd really appreciate that.
SHAMBHAVI: Sure.
I think the first experience of someone doing this
kind of practice, if they don't already have this
experience, 'cause I'm not saying that you need
to do this practice to experience intimacy.
I'm just saying, that's what it's about.
That that would be one way of
describing what it's for.
For almost everybody,
it will deepen your experience of intimacy,
if not be your first experience of it.
On a sort of ordinary level,
it means that there's nothing interfering
between you and your interactions with others.
There's a sense of openness and spontaneity and
lack of planning or presupposing or projecting.
It's like you're looking at another
person through totally open space.
There's none of your usual emotions and thought
patterns dragged along from other parts of your
life or lifetimes,
and there's a sense of freshness.
It's just this feeling of freshness and surprise
and curiosity that would be unmediated by any
of the usual things that we
mediate relationships with.
In the Hindu traditions,
they have these levels of everything.
So there's usually, like, three levels.
Low, medium or ordinary, and exalted.
And each of the three levels has three levels.
So there's low low, medium low, and high low.
Then there's low ordinary, medium ordinary,
and extraordinary ordinary.
And then there's low exalted,
medium exalted, and very exalted.
This would be like extraordinary
ordinary, what I'm describing.
Once you get into the top tier
[laughs]
we're talking about actually seeing
how things are on a level of their existence.
When that happens, you are experiencing something
of what's called the equality of all phenomena.
You're experiencing that everything,
including space itself,
is made of the same living awareness.
And in that zone, you do not feel any
space between you and anything else.
And the sense of intimacy is absolutely,
like, everything is an aspect of yourself.
I can say those words, but I'm not expecting
you to actually know what I'm talking about.
The idea in the middle level is more to get
to the point where your relationships are
uncontrived and unmediated
and have the sense of freshness
and possibility and openness.
STUDENT: I was wondering if you could tell us
about the feeling of just the tiredness
of being a cobbled-together person.
SHAMBHAVI: What I think you're talking about is
when you feel this isn't your place or you're
in a alien environment in some way or another.
That could be your family,
or it could be a culture.
It could be a work environment.
It could be anything.
Or it could just be, like, Earth.
[laughs]
Some people's response to that sort of
not knowing how to be here is to
look and see what other people are doing
or try to conform to what other people are doing
and just kind of like, oh, I'll do what...
Oh, okay, I like Tejas' smile.
I'll borrow that.
And that sounds cool, what Somi's doing.
I'll just borrow that.
And then cobbling together
a persona or a way to be in the world just to make
your way through, and it's basically like a mask
that's got parts from all different people.
Do you remember, or do you feel now,
a time when you felt, this isn't my place, or
I'm in a hostile, alien environment, or
I don't know what I'm doing here?
STUDENT: I feel like this isn't my place
is just, like, what I felt my whole life,
and it's a very familiar feeling to me.
SHAMBHAVI: When you feel like this isn't your place,
then the ways of the place don't feel comfortable.
Back in the day, back in my teens,
when we used to do psychedelics
and it wasn't medicinal.
I remember the few times that I did LSD,
I had the same experience, which is,
I totally forgot how to participate
in the normative formulaic ways of relating,
like how to go into a store and ask for something
and say please and thank you,
and I just forgot how to do those things.
And I think because the formulaic quality
of everything never sat well with me,
and so that just kind of fell away,
and then I just was like,
I don't even know how to go to the store.
But in any case, what I'd say is if you're just
tired of it and it's making you tired
and it's draining you,
if you can sense the artificiality of any
way that you're relating, just pick
anything and stop doing it.
You don't have to come up with a new
thing to put in its place.
But if there's any particular aspect of how you
are relating to others or getting by in life,
it might be a way you say things,
or a way you emote,
or a way you present yourself,
I don't know, it could be anything,
and it's not necessarily negative things.
It could be things that seem enjoyable too,
but when you sense the artificiality
of them and that...
Artificiality means we're
pushing out too much energy.
This is why it feels tiring.
It takes a lot less energy to just be natural and
authentic than it does to push out a personality.
It's like we're constantly in the factory
of making up our personality
and we never get time off.
If you can even find small moments or
chunks of that person that you've made up,
that you could just stop doing
that performance and just see how it feels.
Try it out and let me know how it goes.
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
and explore more of our offerings.