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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: How do we navigate when in conflict
with somebody, where the perspectives that both
people have are so different
that they can't even agree on what's wrong?
I see this playing out
politically and culturally, also.
SHAMBHAVI: Ma said, "Everything is right
from its own perspective."
Anandamayi Ma said that many times.
So if someone says something really racist or
homophobic or misogynist,
from their perspective, that's true.
From your perspective, it's probably not true.
And you have to decide if
there's an opening, or not.
When we're talking about on the world stage,
I think one of the grave mistakes that a lot
of our former Democratic presidents made
is assuming that there's a way to compromise and
make common cause, even with people whose views
are radically different from one's own.
And we're talking about not just their political
views, but their moral views and their
ethical views, and their knowledge of history.
There's no way to talk to someone who doesn't want
to hear what you have to say, and who doesn't want
to move from a position that's not based in fact.
And in that case, you know,
there's nothing to do but walk away.
We have limited energy as human beings,
so we have to put our energy where it's useful.
And you've heard me say that a lot
of times, that I like to be useful.
I've always just wanted to be useful.
And I've gotten better as I get older
at discerning when I cannot be useful.
None of us are useful all the time.
When I first started teaching, I thought, oh I
can be useful to anyone who walks in the door.
You know what? That's not true.
[laughs] I could be useful to a lot of people
who walk in the door, but not everyone.
So these are lessons in humility, right?
And they're also lessons in realism and being
practical and having a practical, humble sense
of what your actual energetic capacity is.
In any situation, I'm going to ask myself,
is my energy being used here in any way that is
in alignment with
what I want to see happen in the world?
Right?
If it isn't, there's no point badgering people.
Someone that was in an old spiritual
community that I was in, who's...
I mean, I knew she was Jewish,
but I didn't know what exactly her background was.
But it turns out she's like the archetypal
Zionist, and she has a lot of relatives who live
in Israel, who are in the IDF, et cetera,
and she's very committed to that view.
And she wrote me well-meaningly within
the first six months after October 7th.
She wrote to me because she
cared about me, I knew that.
But what she wrote to me was,
"Everything you're saying is wrong.
You're spreading false information.
I know because I have relatives who are
serving in the Israeli Armed Forces.
They're telling me what's really happening." Now,
that's sort of a juncture where you
suss out what the energy level...
what's going on with the energy there.
And I realized, there's
absolutely no opening for me here.
None.
At the same time that I realized this person was
actually doing this because they cared about me.
So I dropped it.
It was just, okay, leave them alone,
because my energy, which is limited because I'm
a human being
is going to get used
in a different way, in a more useful way.
And I think the same goes for our
relationships and friendships too.
We have to make tough decisions sometimes, and
maybe there's an opening and maybe there's not.
Then it becomes a matter of making those mature
hard decisions about what you're going to do.
Sometimes we can live with the disjuncts between
us and other people, and we're just like, "Okay,
they think this way, I think that other way."
That even applies sometimes when we think
other people are operating out of fixation.
We can live with other people's fixations
because we know we have them too, right? [laughs]
So unless we have a mental illness,
we're not expecting perfection from other people,
nor are we expecting to agree about everything.
There would be mental illness
involved if we thought that way.
At the same time, there are those junctures
that are non-negotiable or non-navigable.
That just happens.
And sometimes that happens after
we've known people for a long time.
I had a friendship like that, though.
Somebody I knew for years and years,
but we'd never had an argument.
And then something happened.
Basically what happened was I broke up
with someone. She was really mad at me for having
broken up with this person
and treated me really badly
and said some incredibly mean things to me.
And that was it for me.
I saw something that I hadn't seen before,
and it was non-negotiable.
The sort of severe lack of compassion and realism.
I mean, people break up with people.
You really can't get enraged at somebody
for breaking up with somebody
else and be considered reasonable.
As far as I'm concerned. [laughs]
You may be disappointed or sad or grieving,
but this person treated this like
I just committed a capital crime.
Anyway, it's going to be
different for different people.
It's not like there's a rule to follow.
The thing that's non-negotiable
for me might be negotiable for you.
You have to decide this personally.
But at some point if you can't agree and you can't
negotiate, you have to say to yourself,
"Okay, can I live with this?
Do I want to live with this?"
And stop talking about it.
Stop processing it.
Like if you decide to stay with somebody who you
have a serious disagreement with about something,
you have to stop talking about it, right?
You have to stop trying to figure it out.
If it's not figureable-out-able, you know?
If it't not resolvable,
that's, I mean, certain things just aren't.
Let's say somebody smoked and they think there's
nothing wrong with it, and they don't believe
that cigarettes cause cancer
'cause they, I don't know why,
'cause they never read anything.
That would be a pretty serious thing.
Like it would involve someone doing
something that smelled up your house [laughs]
that was harmful to their health,
and that they were doing without real
understanding of what it might be doing to them.
But it could be something that you
decide that you could live with, right?
It would be different for different people.
If the person's just adamant,
"I'm gonna keep smoking,
I don't care what you say,"
if that's the case then you have to
stop talking about it.
You either deal with it or you leave.
That's the mature thing.
Making the assumption that if you just keep
working the problem it'll solve, yeah,
relationships aren't engineering. [laughter]
STUDENT: Like a basic question, but I feel
like if I lose my attachments then maybe I won't
achieve the things I want to achieve,
and push myself.
This would just be one example, but what about if
you're like curious about having kids and if you
just let go of that it might never happen?
Or if you wanna write a book and you're just like,
"Well, who cares?" And you might not
never push yourself to do this thing.
SHAMBHAVI: Think about like a little engine,
a cart that's got a little engine on the back,
and it's trying to get uphill.
The engine's trying to push it uphill.
It's pushing, pushing, pushing,
pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing.
Then the cart runs out of gas, it just poops out.
It got three-quarters of the way
up the hill and then it pooped out.
So it achieved something, yay!
But think of that same cart just going along
on a more level path, or even going
downhill in a more easeful way.
It has so much more energy.
It's not wasting its energy,
and so it's moving more smoothly.
It hasn't stopped moving, it's just
moving more smoothly and has more energy.
What happens when you lose your attachment to
achieving is that you have more energy
to do things in a different way,
in a different energetic mode.
So yes, you'll no longer feel the anxious,
competitive, envious energy feeling
of having to achieve. Yeah, you won't feel that.
But you'll have all that energy back that's all
bound up in all those feelings,
and you'll actually be able to do much more.
You just won't have the same feeling about it,
so you'll do things because you want to,
out of a sense of curiosity,
because it's pleasurable, because you enjoy it.
You'll work hard if you wanna work hard.
You'll get so much more done because your energy
isn't tied up in all those repetitive emotions
and feelings, worrying about yourself,
worrying if you're good enough,
trying hard 'cause you don't know if you're good
enough, thinking you're a failure,
celebrating a success in some historical way.
I swear and I promise. [laughs]
Someone was just saying right before satsang
about how much I get done,
but I keep a very minimal to-do list.
In fact, I used to never keep
a to-do list, but now I do.
But it's very minimal and I just go
along doing things as they occur to me. [laughs]
I'm not worrying too much and I'm not
trying to prove anything to anybody,
so all that energy is freed up and more gets done.
STUDENT: I have a friend who I've been friends
for over a decade, and he's caught in the throes
of addiction, alcoholism, and drugs,
and he's not in a good way.
I'm just curious, is there a role for actively
trying to detach with love from people that are no
longer good for you
or just like making the efforts
to really actively detach?
SHAMBHAVI: Sure. You know, if we're talking
about something like Al-Anon or NAR-Anon,
like the whole detach with love,
they invented that, right?
STUDENT: Right. Yeah.
So what they mean by that is don't play
the role of the savior in somebody's life.
At the same time that you aren't berating them,
or blaming them, or disparaging
them because of what they're doing.
That means that if you have to leave you say,
"I still care about you," or,
"I still love you," or, "I still think of you.
I want the best for you, but I can't
be here right now." It's very simple.
It's not complicated.
STUDENT: But not easy.
[v SHAMBHAVI] You know, the reason it's not easy
is because we have embodied and internalized
a lot of feelings about
people should not do that to themselves,
it's their fault, and they should be productive,
and they're causing trouble for everybody,
and they're so self-destructive,
and blah, blah, blah.
But they're trying to solve the same
problem all of us are trying to solve.
It's a burden to be an addict or an alcoholic.
It's such a burden.
The only thing that people in that condition
deserve from us is our sympathy
and our compassion for what
they have to go through.
One of the things about this particular tradition,
and particularly the way that I'm teaching here,
is that we are doing the work to get in touch
with our actual hearts, our actual
compassion, our actual kindness.
We're not having rules about how to behave
and we're not faking it 'til we make it.
We have tools to actually get in touch with the
heart's wisdom and with that flow of compassion.
And that might take a long time,
but when we get into those circumstances where,
like you say, it's hard,
we go into what's called the heart space.
This is a zone, it's like a temple or a cave.
It's sometimes called the cave of the heart.
And we learn to get in touch with that natural
wisdom, and natural devotion,
and natural compassion to whatever extent we can.
That's the work that we're doing.
We're really ...
We're making it real.
We don't have to think in advance
about how to respond to anyone.
We don't have to plan out our responses.
We can be in the moment and actually feel like we
want the best for this person,
feel actual kindness.
That's really what this is about.
So again, that might take a long time,
but it's hard to get into that level
of spontaneity
and to move your learned patterns out of the way.
One of the things also about this
tradition is it's entirely destructive.
We're not cultivating anything because
everything is already there in full measure.
We're just trying to destroy the things that are
in the way of natural devotion,
natural compassion,
natural kindness, natural concern for others.
Those things are already there in full measure.
We can't cultivate them.
We can just remove what's
blocking us from feeling them.
So I think really the essence of why this is
a Shaivite tradition is not because we only relate
to Lord Shiva, 'cause that's not true,
but it's because its focus is on destroying
obstacles and impediments to us being just relaxed
in the natural state
and being able to spontaneously be kind
to people without thinking about it,
without planning it,
"What should I say? What should I do?" You know,
the normal things that people do. [laughs]
I feel really pissed off.
How can I be kind?
You know? [laughs]
STUDENT: I've been
learning a lot about grief recently.
What are your thoughts about grieving?
I mean, it- it's universal, so ...
SHAMBHAVI: Yeah.
Well, one of my thoughts is let it rip.
Let it really express itself fully
and then it kinda cleans everything out.
If we let grief just take its natural course
and we don't try to control it, or we don't
judge ourselves for how long we're grieving,
then it kind of washes
us up on a clean beach at the end.
It does have an end.
It doesn't mean that we might not feel sad if we
think someone's not here, but
that actual grieving part will dissipate
if we really let it have its way with us.
The other thing about grief is,
like you said, it's universal.
And so if we're just letting it happen,
it can really bring us into tremendous
intimacy with other people.
It's something that we can recognize
in the midst of feeling it.
We can recognize that other
people also have this experience.
But it's, it's not even an intellectual process.
There's just something about grieving that makes
us feel more intimate with others
if we really let it happen.
It's a difficult feeling.
It's not really just one feeling,
it's really multi-textured.
Also, there's something very beautiful
about grief too, I've always thought.
STUDENT: That's what I'm finding.
SHAMBHAVI: Yeah, it's a very rich situation.
[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
by making a monthly or one-time donation.
Visit jayakula.org to make a donation
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