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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.
[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 was talking to someone about how
many different ways we have to come out.
All kinds of people have to come
out in all different kind of ways.
But specifically around the kind of LGBT+
experience, I wanted to just maybe hear your
thoughts around the notion of
when the mind, because I guess it's the mind,
connects with that acknowledgement of the thing
that our society has largely denigrated
or called really evil in some way.
That moment, like the self facing the self,
if you will, is that a moment of the self
facing the self, first of all?
And then is coming out a moment of
shakti entering into your life?
SHAMBHAVI: We live in time
and we have relative experience.
We have a dualistic experience where things
seem a lot more heavy,
and there seems to be a lot more at stake,
like when we come out or when
we first express ourselves.
And of course, in queer communities,
having a very strong identification as something,
as a gay man, as a lesbian, as queer, as trans,
as bisexual, whatever,
those identities can be refuges.
They can be refuge.
It's a place where having identified as something,
we can find community and make community under
the umbrella of that identity,
and it provides some safety and affirmation
and validation, and gives people
the courage to act on their feelings.
Not everyone has the same trajectory.
There's a million different
stories out there, maybe a billion.
But there's ways that that can contribute to our
realization, and there are
ways that it can hold us back.
So one of the main ways that,
at least I will say that it contributed
to my trajectory as a practitioner,
even though I wasn't practicing at that time, was
that it widened my sense of family and community.
I think that's one of the
gems of growing up queer.
Because of oppression and perhaps violence or
disapproval, a lot of us are forced to find bigger
communities, other communities, other family.
I just was reminded the other day,
because somebody was online talking
about why L comes first in LGBTQ.
I was living in San Francisco at the height
of the AIDS epidemic.
And it was recognized that in the absence of birth
families coming to care for men who were dying,
lesbians in the community really stepped up to
provide family-like care for men who were dying.
There was also all kinds of other obstacles
because there was no gay marriage.
Gay spouses or gay partners did not have a right
to be in the hospital with their loved ones.
They had to go through all kinds of horrible,
horrible things, and sometimes
they weren't even given permission.
In any case, it was a very difficult situation,
and lesbians in the community in San Francisco
really stood up and took a lot of care of people.
And so that's why it was decided,
I don't know who it was decided by.
I didn't actually know it was decided
by anybody, but I guess there must have been some
group of people [laughs] who made this happen,
and they decided to put L first because
of that situation, which I think is just really
sweet, and I wish more people knew about that,
because I think it's
an important part of our history.
On the other hand, we can't find refuge
in those identities. Not real refuge.
We can find temporary refuge,
and we can learn important things and get
a lot of fellowship also along with that.
But two things happen if we hold
on too tightly to any identity.
All of these identities that we're so enamored
of right now are all historically
time-limited ways of talking about ourselves.
These things are not written in biblical stone,
handed down to us from God on tablets or anything.
This is not how people thought
of themselves at every point in history.
These were not the ways that we self-defined.
We, people self-defined in other ways,
or maybe they didn't self-define as
strongly because
they were too busy trying to dig
turnips out of the ground or something.
I don't...[laughs]
They didn't have time for all this rigmarole.
But in any case, to recognize the impermanence
of these categories that we're so fond
of and to relate to them more playfully,
which I think is happening more,
and also to recognize that these categories can
limit our actual perceptions
and feelings and sensations.
When we define ourselves very strongly as this
and not that, it's not just a mental thing.
It brings along our body and our energy with it,
and it basically limits us in various ways.
We lose some adaptability,
and we lose some of our perceptivity
and some of our ability to feel
or even to know about ourselves.
So I think, like everything that has to do
with liberation, whether it's political, social,
cultural liberation, or spiritual liberation.
Like everything, there are forms of limitation
that are useful along the way,
but they're not useful forever.
Just like the View teachings where we learn what
our tradition says about everything, [laughs]
that's useful along the way,
but it's not useful forever.
Ultimately, we're here with our body, energies,
and mind, or heart, just being and livingness,
and ultimately we do not need
these identities. Ultimately.
And I wanna say at the same time, we should never,
ever fault anyone for
all of the different phases of things that
happen to people and that they feel.
I've very often hadâ¦
Not very often, that's hyperbole,
but at times [laughs]
I've been taken to the carpet by newer students
for encouraging people to be angry or letting
people express anger in satsang,
especially people that are members
of historically oppressed groups.
Because anger is a very important part
of recovery and regaining our power.
It's not ultimately where we wanna end up,
like being enraged with everyone and everything,
but it's absolutely an important aspect
of regaining our energy, regaining our power,
so it's gotta be made room for.
So I think all of these things,
even what I would consider to be like
over-identification with an identity,
they all need to be made room for.
And of course, as a teacher in this tradition,
I hope that people will be able to let go sooner
rather than later,
but if they don't, that's fine, too.
Shakti, the second part of your question,
shakti is everywhere at all times doing
everything and not doing everything.
Whether you're a 13-year-old biting your nails
and worrying about yourself,
but not doing anything externally,
feeling your raging hormones or whatever you were
doing at the time, or whether you're a 15-year-old
acting on those feelings,
those are all shakti. All of it is shakti.
Now, when we organize our energy and express
ourselves more authentically without so many
guardrails and concepts, then of course that helps
us to relax and feel better about
ourselves, and that's always good.
[laughs] It's much better to have our shakti be
flowing in a natural direction for us
than to have it all tied up and twisted in some
other configuration that
takes an enormous amount of energy to maintain.
We have a unique dimension,
and our sexuality is part of our unique dimension.
The more that we can express that in a natural,
healthy way, in a way that we're not hurting
ourselves, I think that that is also part of our
path and part of our maturation.
It's just not the end of it. It's just part of it.
As a former teacher of mine said,
A person is an infinite event.
And in this tradition we're trying
to discover more of that infinity.
We're not trying to be something.
We're trying to experience whatever it is that we
are, and it's much more than we normally think.
The tighter our self-definitions are,
the less we're gonna be able to experience that.
The more we hold that with intensity
and seriousness and earnestness,
the less we're gonna experience of ourselves.
They have this phrase now
in whatever gen we're in.
I'm so old I've forgotten what gen we're in now,
but [laughs] where they say so-and-so is making
that their whole personality,
you know, X, Y, or Z, whatever it is.
We never wanna make something our whole
personality, because our whole personality can't
be contained in any identity or category
or look or activity or anything.
So that's always a mistake, or hopefully just
something that you grow out of or get over
so that we can just be in the world
with less definition, not more.
But this era of obsession with defining ourselves
in these categories, wow, I'll be glad
when this part of history moves on.
[laughs] I used to be pretty
attached to it, but not anymore.
SHAMBHAVI: I'm wondering if you can speak
about joy and not really feeling joy in the
moment, but feeling joy afterward.
An example of this is I went on a bike ride last
night and went to a beach,
and I kind of felt a bit indifferent
as I was doing it and experiencing it.
But then when I got home,
I felt a lot of joy that I did it, and I find
that it, this is a reoccurring thing in my life.
SHAMBHAVI: Joy because of something
is different than joy because of nothing.
It's not that they're unrelated,
but joy because of something is
definitely a smaller version of joy.
I do know you a little bit now, and I would guess,
correct me if I'm wrong,
that you really feel a lot of pain,
and that going to the beach and riding your
bike is almost like in defiance of that pain.
And when you get home, you feel,
I can beat this. You feel good about yourself.
You feel like you have some power over the other
kinds of feelings that you have,
and it feels good.
Like it's an affirmation of yourself.
I think a lot of us feel similar things,
like we're having a really hard day, but we
managed to clean our house, [laughs] you know?
Or just that things are hard and we managed to do
something that's good for us and self-affirming.
We can feel more relaxed and feel a sense
of our own goodness in spite of it all.
STUDENT: I was thinking about how pragmatic
you are, but like also how much enjoyment
you get from solving our problems.
[laughter] Sometimes I'll come to you with an
issue and I'll complain, and then you solve it
in, like, 30 seconds or less.
[laughter] And it's so frustrating because
I think I get some enjoyment from complaining.
You're so fast on the draw.
I was wondering if you could talk about the role
of pragmatism in a practitioner's
life and problem-solving.
SHAMBHAVI: Our bottom line assumption should
be that every situation is workable.
Not that every situation is going to work out as
we want it to, or not work out as we want it to.
[laughter] Every circumstance is workable in that
there's some way that we can move
in every circumstance
that will get a better result than
some other ways we could move.
That better result might be very, very limited.
Like, instead of losing all our money
to a fraudster, we only lost 85% of it, you know?
[laughter] But we still have 15% of our
money left to buy groceries or something.
The idea is that in every situation there's some
kind of an open door, even if
it's only open a little crack.
And as practitioners,
we should be looking for that.
We should be looking for how can I work with this
arising situation in the best possible way,
and we shouldn't have a specific goal.
Cause another thing that people do to themselves
is they think there's only one positive result
that a situation could have
or a problem could have, and if they can't get
that result, then they just bail on the situation
and say that they failed in some way or another.
This goes on in relationships a lot too.
People can be together in a relationship for 25
years, and 15 of those years were reasonably
happy, and then when they split up,
they say they failed.
It's our definitions of success and failure are
much narrower than what
reality's actually offering us.
If we have the bottom line assumption that every
circumstance is workable, and we're not bringing
all our preconceived ideas into it
then we have a lot of room to move,
to think about what workable
solutions there might be.
And that's really why the phenomenon that you've
noticed with me is there, because I'm just having
that attitude, Okay, how can I work with this?
How can this be worked with? And then
the universe of pragmatic,
practical things is very, very large.
But if I'm thinking, let's say in the situation
of, like, the lights in your
workspace that flicker and are horrible.
If I had in my mind, Oh,
only the building owner can fix that.
They must fix that, then we're off on some other
trajectory that's really unworkable,
cause that guy's not gonna do that.
He rented it to you that way.
He didn't promise you the lights.
So that would be a concept I would have.
You like to get sad about stuff.
I like to get frustrated and angry about stuff.
I could just come up with that just to, like,
take my sense of outrage out for a walk. [laughs]
But if I'm not doing that, then it's like,
Oh, yeah, there's light bulbs like that.
Just go buy them. [laughs]
STUDENT: I have a question about
global anxiety.
I feel like on a big scale where it just feels
like the rug has been ripped out from underneath
us so many times
that it's like I know it's going to get ripped out
again but just having kind of a constant anxiety.
SHAMBHAVI: You have a rug? [laughter]
You still have a rug left?
STUDENT: No. [laughter] It's scraps, it's
shreds. Just the tassels. Yeah.
But just anxiety of what's gonna happen.
SHAMBHAVI: I don't think any of us can
avoid that.
Every aspect of our environment is in turmoil,
chaos, and there's any number of possible futures
and non-futures that could happen
for each of us individually and for our world.
Our world is in crisis. So it, it's just
a time when it's appropriate to feel some fear.
You'd be an automaton if you didn't feel that.
And I think the most important thing is to be able
to keep in touch with your own sense of sweetness
and goodness.
And surround yourself with things and people
that remind you of that.
At the same time that I'm not
suggesting anybody sequester themselves.
We should all participate
in whatever way we're able.
But we also need to not get
thrown completely off center.
This is an opportunity really to learn to take
refuge in your own goodness and sweetness,
and the essence of things that is still that.
How can you evoke that more in your everyday life
is really the only way that we can somewhat
mitigate that fear that everybody is feeling.
But it's not appropriate to not feel fear or not
feel anxiety when you're
in this kind of situation.
But we can mitigate it in some way, and
use that to help us to dig deeper, to find
that wellspring of life inside of ourselves.
And then have that be showing up
around us in the food that we eat and the things
that are around us and
the people that we hang out with.
I don't know that anyone who's
not feeling some version of that.
That's realism.
That's not paranoia.
[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,
please help us keep this podcast and many other
teachings open to all
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