Disease, Dis-ease, and Numbing Out

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.

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: This morning you said something
about disease and dis-ease.

I think basically you were saying
that it's forgetting on a cellular level.

SHAMBHAVI: From the perspective of Ayurveda and also Trika,
every cell in your body has tejas.

It has intelligence and clarity.

Tejas means the fire of intelligence.

The manifestation of tejas is not just intellect.

Because as we know,

there's plenty of people who are smart,
who are really, really, really dumb,
[laughs]

who really have no actual intelligence,
even though they have PhDs and whatever.

The real intelligence, first of all, comes from the heart,
that's where actual intelligence comes from,
but it's always married to clarity.

And fire element is bringing this clarity of purpose,
clarity of understanding of one's self-purpose.

Every cell in the body has some kind
of purpose or another.

Forgetting that purpose or having confused cells
or cells that are lacking in clarity

is one of Ayurveda's
main ways of talking about disease.

The tejas of the cells is impaired.

So you have cells doing things
that they shouldn't be doing,
and not doing things that they should be doing.

They're not producing insulin,
they're not staying where they're supposed to stay.

Just like we lose contact with our purpose,
we forget who we are,
we forget what we're really supposed to be doing,

which is the basic definition
of non-enlightenment,

at a cellular level and an energetic level and a mind level,
we can do the same thing.

Intellect and actual intelligence are not
the same thing, according to these traditions.

Intellect is very much subject to karmas.
But that primordial intelligence,
that intelligence that is going along with wisdom,

that has a sense of wisdom,
that can discern wisdom
and align itself with wisdom,

that's our real intelligence,
and that is coming from the heart.

So the heart space is considered to be
the source of that intelligence
in a human life.

It's coming through from the absolute,
through the heart space and informing everything.

In a person, I think I said this morning, dis-ease
and disease, it's exactly the same process.

We have a sense of dis-ease because we have
a basic experience of separation
that creates uneasiness

from the get-go, the minute we're born.

Unless we're born enlightened, which... who is?
Nobody except for maybe avatars, possibly.

So we have this sense of uneasiness or dis-ease
based on our dualistic experience

that is not informed by
a conscious experience of the absolute.

We have forgotten who we are.

We have forgotten our real purpose.

We have lost a certain amount of skill.

We are lacking a certain amount of clarity.

Just like the cells in our body when they go awry.

So the process of doing spiritual practice
can be seen as a process of reconnecting
with that primordial intelligence

so that we remember what we're doing
and have more clarity and more skill as a result
and feel more unitive rather than separate.

There's only a few principles that are operating
all the way through reality
from the absolute to rocks,

that just recapitulate or reiterate in slightly different ways,
creating a lot of variety.

But once you start to recognize those patterns,
they're not really patterns but protocols,
protocols on these spectrums

from less contracted to more contracted.

Once you start to recognize those,
it becomes easier to understand how things work,
to understand that

what's going on with our cells
is also going on with our lives.
There's a spectrum there.

And that that kind of process of forgetting your
purpose and losing contact with intelligence is
operating at all these different levels,

creating enormous variety,
but also the same in some way, the same process.

Many, many more people in the world now
are feeling the pain of what is happening.

feeling the pain of what is happening,
not only to them, but to other people.

That's the most extraordinary part of this,
to me anyway,

that there's more people in the world
actually feeling care and concern

about what happens to the other person,
people they don't even know.

This is the fruit of bad stop.

Bad stop has a lot of wisdom.

I mean, we would hope that we would
stop before we got to bad stop.

But when we don't, we get a kind of collapse.

It could be a health collapse.

It could be an emotional collapse.

It could be a political collapse.

It could be an environmental collapse.

Whatever it is, bad stop is a collapse.

It forces you to stop.

You cannot keep doing what you've been
doing in the way you've been doing it.

That's what bad stop means.

And of course, that means it's very
painful a lot of the time and intense.

These things are operating at every level.

So in the traditions of spiritual teachings
from the part of the world that Trika is from,

in the traditions of divination from that part of the world,

there is a tradition of using
hyperbolic language when delivering teachings.

"If you do this, you will freeze
in ten cold hells for all eternity.

If you don't listen to this divination,
you'll experience ten years of trauma,
blockage, and disaster."

This is actually part of the reading protocol of
these traditions that hyperbole is built into it.

And you have that understanding that, "Okay,
maybe I'm going to freeze on ten hells for all
eternity, but probably things are

just going to be more difficult.

But if I weren't talked to in that way,
I wouldn't listen."

So this is like another example of how
the traditions themselves understand that force
sometimes needs to be applied

in order to change the momentum of our karmas,
which also have force.

Like our conventions,
our normal, habitual ways of doing things,
sometimes require force to change.

STUDENT: Are you saying that bad stop is
built in or hardwired into us?

SHAMBHAVI: Not hardwired into you.

Hardwired into reality.

STUDENT: In terms of the way that humans respond
to situations where a change is warranted that is
good for us and we don't take that chance.

It sounds like more often than not,
we don't make the change.

We need those increasing amounts
of pain in order to change.

SHAMBHAVI: That's not true.

It depends on so many different things.

You're capable of many more
responses other than avoidance.
I hope. [laughs]

But we're all capable of many
different kinds of responses to things.

Sometimes it's easier for reality
to reach us and sometimes it's harder.

And that depends on how entrenched those
karmas are, how much momentum they have.

It depends on what time of life we're in,
or you could say where we are in our astrology,
because there's different times in our life

we're going to have more sensitivity
or less sensitivity.

It depends on how much sadhana we've been doing,
how much we've learned to read the hints, and how
much we know what's coming if we don't listen.

Like after a while, you're hanging around this
reality for a while, getting more sensitized to it
and you start to understand more,

just like what I'm telling you about.
And so you get to understand,

Okay, this was just a light and polite knock at the door.
So if I don't listen to that, you know
the door is going to get kicked in.

And then if I don't listen to that,
the house is going to get
burned down so I'll just listen now. [laughs]

You start to be able to see.
You start to understand
where you are in that spectrum

and maybe self-preservation sets in.
A desire for self-preservation of some sort.

STUDENT: I've been looking at how deeply
I'm avoiding so many big things in my life.
Like I'm avoiding life.

I've been thinking about it like an addiction,
addiction to numbing out.

So I'd like to hear you talk
about sobriety in that kind of context.

SHAMBHAVI: Well, it's actually a really
good moment to avoid things. [laughs]

I think we're all being a little avoidant
at the moment or at moments right now.

But yes, I know what you're talking about.

If you want to think about it in the framework
of addiction, addiction is a super interesting
phenomenon in light of spiritual practice.

Because you can call the goal of addiction numbing out

whatever it is, you know,
hiding alone or social media or games

or drugs or drinking or whatever it is.

You can even be addicted to socializing,
which is kind of a weird phenomenon.

But the purpose of addiction
is the same in a sense
as the purpose of spiritual life.

Which is to be relieved of the burden of the self
or to be relieved of the burden of the small self.

So your urge to do something spiritual and
your urge to numb out or withdraw

in certain ways
are not entirely different.

They aren't entirely different things.

It's just that
doing spiritual practice and being involved
with other practitioners

will lead you to being able to host, accommodate,
and acclimatize to more
sensation and more engagement.

Whereas the other way of losing the burden
of the self will cause more
isolation and loneliness in the end.

They have the same motivation in a sense,
but they have the opposite results,
the opposite fruits.

And they can really work in tandem because

one of the reasons people numb out is because they
have a hard time having sensations about things, or

emotions and sensations are
overwhelming in some way or another.

And it can be even just the emotions and feelings
that you have about yourself,
not necessarily about anybody else,

but people also have experiences of other people
and of environments that can be overwhelming
and numbing out seems like a good idea.

So what spiritual practice does is it opens
the gates of our senses and creates a situation
where we are going to experience

more intimacy with people, not less.

But for most of us, it does
it very, very, very slowly.

And the idea there is that we can become
acclimatized slowly to more engagement
and more sensation and greater actual intimacy.

So the first thing I'd say
is don't berate yourself.

Your heart is good and your motivations are good.

The second thing I would say is you
didn't cause this and it's not your fault.

There's something ancestral and familial going on.

You inherited this.

You didn't make it happen.

It's now landed in your lap,
but it is not your fault
and you didn't create it or cause it

and you're not being punished or anything like that.

Having met spiritual stuff, I mean,
not just from me, but I know you're involved
in other things too, you have an opportunity

to help out your whole family line.

In a sense, you are somewhat charged
with the opportunity to break this pattern.

Somebody on Instagram,
was asking, "What do you feel is your duty?"

I was thinking about it,
and it's not a word that I use very often,
but the thing that I came up with was,

I do feel a duty to try my best to meet
the spiritual opportunity that I've been given.

So instead of thinking of this in all the ways you
do as some sort of personal problem that you have,
which it is not.

It is a collective problem
or a collective limitation.

Think of it as a spiritual opportunity to do some
healing for your whole family

and that your only real job is to
meet that opportunity as best you can.

The blessing is, the mercy is,
that you can do it slowly.

You don't need to do anything super fast,
but luckily for you, your propensity to do
things slowly is completely appropriate here.

And all you need to do is commit yourself
to a daily spiritual practice and just
keep doing it for the rest of your life.

That's all you really need to do.

However fast things happen or however slow
things happen, that's how they'll happen.

That's how they'll happen.

And you will have done your duty if you do that.

You don't really have any other job.

This isn't pie in the sky.

I'm telling you what's absolutely
the rock bottom truth for you.

Take it to heart.
Don't forget it.

There's no urgency about
transforming our experience.

But we do need to have
consistency if we want to do that.

How quickly or slowly it happens is not up to us.

Satsang with Shambhavi
is produced by Jaya Kula,
a non-profit 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.