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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.
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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: Could you talk about adult friendship
and what makes friendships distinct from other
kinds of relationships that we have?
SHAMBHAVI: In every tradition that I know of,
the Western philosophical tradition,
all of the religious traditions from Asia,
all the different parts of Asia, all have
profound discourses on, meditations on,
friendship.
In my life, I've been aware
of friendship as something
very special and somehow
related to God since I was a teenager.
And I started writing poems
to someone I called the friend.
It's interesting that you say a distinction
between a romance and an adult friendship because
when I was 13 or 14, when I started writing these
poems to someone I called the friend,
I had this idea, I don't know where it came from,
but this idea that there was
some kind of relationship
that was different from all
of the other relationships that I had,
that was less limited, that was more free,
where nothing needed to be held back.
And anything could be expressed.
And I called that the friend.
So even though I had ordinary friends, and I
wouldn't exactly say I had romances at the age of
13 or 14, I mean I had crushes on people. [laughs]
I guess it was the start
of some kind of romantic life.
None of that felt satisfying to me.
It's almost like I had this imaginary
friend that I was writing to.
The impetus for these poems was the feeling that,
which was a very prominent feeling
in my childhood,
and I'm not saying everybody feels this,
but this feeling that
only a small amount of what I wanted
to communicate could be
communicated,
that somehow I needed this other kind
of relationship to be able to do that,
be able to communicate fully.
Now I understand and know that there's a whole set
of discourses around friendship and the friend
that call God the friend or call Guru the friend.
And that this is really what I was longing for.
This sort of no-holds-barred relationship
that was based in beneficence.
I couldn't have said that then.
I had no idea what I was talking about.
But I had a feeling of yearning.
There are aspects of that relationship
with Guru or God,
which I think are part of the whole
Western and Eastern philosophical traditions,
secular traditions of discussions
around friendship and
basically the elevation of friendship
as the highest form of relationship
above all others,
especially in the Daoist tradition
and the European philosophical traditions.
Friendship is elevated above
all other relationships.
And I think it's because friendship is
a relationship where there's nothing to prove,
nothing to lose or gain,
where you can say nothing or anything.
Many of the discourses on friendship
extol the ability to remain silent
in the presence of the friend,
but yet have a feeling of open communication
even when nothing is being verbalized.
My friend Liu Ming had a large blow-up photograph
of an ink and pen drawing from the Daoist
tradition, and it was a picture of two Daoist
fellows in their Daoist outfits sometime
in ancient times, sitting on a mountainside
overlooking a great vista,
not even turned toward each other,
just sitting next to each other and looking out
almost a little bit even in different
directions and not saying anything.
Ming told me that he felt what this
drawing was portraying was
the highest or the most full relationship he
could imagine, where you would just sit
and enjoy a big view in the presence of another
and nothing needed to be said, but yet
space itself was full and pregnant
with the bonds and love of that friendship.
Do you understand?
STUDENT: I think so.
SHAMBHAVI: Mm-hm.
So this is something that is
somehow woven into human life.
This notion of friendship.
Now, I will say that obviously we have all kinds
of ideas about romantic relationships
that are different than that.
In human history and in different cultures,
romance has really come in and out of favor.
Romance is not the same thing across
all cultures at all times in history.
Sometimes it's considered to be very important.
Sometimes it's considered to be almost irrelevant.
Sometimes the romances that are between
male equals are considered to be more important
than those between husbands and wives.
There's many, many permutations
of kind of what counts as romance.
But certainly, sometimes it's utilitarian.
Sometimes it's impassioned.
Sometimes it's pretty fraught and twisted,
depending on what it is.
But it doesn't have that feeling
of nothing left to do that friendship does.
Toni Morrison, who wrote Beloved, she wrote
another book, the name of which I can't remember,
but basically it's about two women friends,
and how that relationship through all
trials and tribulations endures
beyond all other relationships.
I think that's also a part of friendship,
that romance comes and goes,
it cools and heats up and cools again.
But that friendship,
even when friends are estranged,
never really ends and can always be resurrected.
Or that somehow friendship has this enduring
quality that romance does not necessarily have.
In every culture that I'm familiar with,
friendship is actually something
that's more reliable than romance.
And more valuable,
just more valuable than romance.
And I think that's also not true in all
cultures and all times and spaces.
It's certainly not true at all ages.
If you grow up in this culture
and you're of a certain ilk,
you're trained to think that
finding your romantic partner
is the be-all and the end-all.
Maybe you'll think that when you're 14 or 15 or
16, but you might not think that when you're 40.
You might not still believe
in that when you're 40.
The other thing I would say is that the more
realization you have, the less difference
there is between friendship and romance.
In terms of romance being like a special passion
that you have for a single person or a few people,
that whole construct becomes uninteresting.
And at some point just impossible to even feel
because you have, first of all,
more of a feeling of equal affection for everyone.
And you're not really, well, speaking for myself,
I'm not interested in cultivating romance.
It just seems the opposite
of the direction that I'm going in.
And you could say that having experienced more of
The nature of the self, the nature of reality,
that there's a kind of romance with everything.
So it's not like romance dies and you get some
bland thing because people think
life without romance is bland.
That may or may not be true.
But there is a kind of romance or magic in one's
relationship with everyone
that might not have been there before.
And I certainly feel that about teacher-student
relationships, but not exclusively
about teacher-student relationships.
That there's often just some feeling of
charge or excitement when it's working well
that is like romance in some way or another.
Not exactly like romance, but has some sort of
electricity like that.
STUDENT: I went and visited a really old
friend from high school that
I've known her for 25 years now
And it was a really difficult trip.
We were just talking a lot about how once
you're friends you just stay friends.
Like, just anything goes.
You've just made a commitment to this person.
This sort of openness to who they are
and how they show up that
I don't find in other relationships.
It was an interesting thing to feel when it is
hard, but I'm still willing to go, and wanting
to go be there and be part of their life.
SHAMBHAVI: Yeah, I think that's characteristic
of a lot of writings about
and experiences of friendship,
that even when there's estrangement or difficulty,
the actual existence of the friendship
is not questioned.
There's a lack of questioning the existence of it,
which is really relaxing, right?
It gives everybody a chance to express
themselves or to come and go, even.
STUDENT: I think there's just like
a deepness to it.
I mean, I've been in a relationship
with these women for longer than most,
even like my marriage or my children.
SHAMBHAVI: Lots of people, and especially
lots of women, have spoken about that
and noticed that and drawn nourishment from that.
And then if you think about your relationship
with God or your relationship with Guru,
it's like that a hundred times.
Incontrovertible.
No matter what happens.
STUDENT: That, like, makes me want to cry.
That's so sweet.
SHAMBHAVI: Sometimes if students are newish,
there'll be something that,
some juncture that we get to,
and they'll say they're worried about me
leaving them or abandoning them
or something like that.
To me that's just, like, jaw-droppingly
not understanding what's going on.
I understand where that's coming from in people
because that's their relationship to everything.
They're always worried about
being abandoned by everything, so they just
port that right over to the teacher.
That makes perfect sense.
But in point of fact,
the student is much more likely to abandon the
teacher than the teacher to abandon the student.
Once an actual connection like that has been made,
it's not really possible for the teacher
to completely divorce themselves from the student.
And there's always going to be an open door.
That's just natural law.
STUDENT: I have one friendship question,
maybe about sensitivity also.
As I'm becoming more sensitive,
I can feel someone's resentment or
I can feel that they're not sane.
It's tiring.
I have good relationships where I don't feel that,
so I think it's becoming more poignant when I do.
Like, oh wow, I really feel
that coming towards me.
SHAMBHAVI: You know, unless you have
a regular pervasive pattern of always
thinking people are directing negativity at you,
if that were the case, that's a realm projection.
But if you're just perceiving more and perceiving
more intensely other people's condition.
You're also perceiving just things that are
happening for them and with them
that don't have anything to do with you.
It's not all focused on you.
You have to examine your perceptions to see,
is this an emotional pattern where the only thing
I'm really perceiving is stuff
directed at me that's bothering me?
Or am I actually perceiving in the broader
spectrum more about other people's condition?
Because perceiving more in a broad
spectrum is something to be welcomed.
And it can be very intense.
Absolutely.
The idea is that if it is an enhanced perception,
you want to become acclimatized to it.
Certainly what we're doing here is trying
to open the gates of our perception.
And every time we make a somewhat significant
move in that direction, there is very often
a period where it feels uncomfortable
and we have to sort of take it in
and begin to try to digest it and
make our sensorium actually capable
of holding those new perceptions.
The beautiful thing about those
perceptions about other people
is that they're useful.
When you really feel and see and know how other
people are, you can be much more
skillful in relating to them.
I have this happen to me all the time.
I'll say to somebody, you seem angry.
"I'm not angry."
And then, you know, six months later,
they're like, "Wow, I'm just angry all the time."
Sometimes you might be perceiving things
that other people aren't even perceiving
yet or able to feel about themselves.
And it takes a lot of sensitivity and skill
to know when to keep talking about it and when
to shut up and just wait for them
to come to it on their own.
But this is all part of the practice
that we're doing, anyway.
It will open up your perceptions.
It will cause you to feel what
other people are feeling more.
And that will become a very useful way
of navigating life and navigating your
relationships with people
and developing more skill.
When you can see that someone is very angry,
but that just underneath that surface
is sadness and grief,
you can have a completely different
relationship in that moment with that person.
But if all you see is the anger,
you feel it's somehow too harsh for you,
or they shouldn't be angry,
or you have all these other more superficial
narratives going on, then you're much
less skillful in dealing with them.
You try to talk them out of being angry.
Or you get angry at them being angry.
Or you go into some fragility
histrionics because they're angry.
All those things are not helpful to anybody.
But if you're being more skillful and you sense
the moment is there,
sometimes in that you can just
put your hand on somebody's arm
and they'll start feeling what's
underneath their anger.
Or you can say a little word or something.
And then you're much, much more skillful.
But you have to be able to hold those
things and not be blocking them out.
So don't worry if it's a little uncomfortable.
If you keep kind of [breathes in] inhaling it,
you'll eventually be able to hold it.
People have a lot of behaviors
and a lot of feelings that are just easier to feel
and do than the thing that's underneath it,
dealing with the thing that's underneath it.
When people are behaving in certain ways too,
that are not so great, being able to see
more deeply into that is very, very helpful.
But then you're stuck feeling it.
And then you're also stuck now and then
with someone just absolutely 100%
denying that your perceptions are real.
My modus operandus has always been
to just back off at that point.
But that can also be kind of destabilizing.
One thing I realized, because I've had these kind
of perceptions of people since I was very small,
is that when people are not perceiving
what I'm perceiving, yet I'm
perceiving it so clearly,
that there's no way I'm not going to be
perceiving it no matter what anybody says.
I just am like, those are my perceptions.
There's nothing I can do about it.
I don't say that to other people.
I mean, I'd say it to myself.
Right or wrong, that's my perception.
I can't do anything about it.
I'm not going to abandon myself.
It'll either turn out right
or wrong in the long run.
But it's helpful to recognize that if you have
a very strong perception, that is your
perception in the moment, right or wrong.
STUDENT: Thinking about friendships,
I had a friendship with a work colleague
that kind of fell apart last year.
Recently, she just stopped in my office and said
something very general, like, I don't want
things to be weird between us anymore.
And I was kind of like, okay. [laughs]
I don't know.
I have really good friends,
and I feel like one of the key things is
it's someone you can really depend on.
And when I really needed to depend on her,
she repeatedly showed that I
couldn't actually depend on her.
So there's part of me that's just like,
if she wants to make the effort,
then I'm willing to repair,
but I just don't want to put
the energy into it myself.
SHAMBHAVI: That's interesting because
some relationships we have with people
are really in their formative stages.
They're pretty new in a sense.
They could have been around for years,
but there's still some areas that have not been
explored and that make those
relationships not what they seem.
We have these relationships and sometimes we have
extremely warm feelings toward people and feel
we really love them and we're really close.
But a lot of that is based
on not knowing certain things.
And then we get into some new circumstance
with that person where something is tested,
where we find out what the ground
of that relationship really is.
If it turns out that that person cannot be there
for us in those moments, I mean,
this happens to all of us.
This is a pretty common experience.
Our feelings change.
We've become much more sober
about that relationship.
And then we have to decide if we actually want
to keep going with it or not, or whether we just
want to let it be superficial or even walk away.
So for the person who is experiencing
this letdown and sobering process,
even for that person, it's very sad.
It's a loss of fantasy.
It's a loss of companionship,
even though you suddenly realize it wasn't
exactly the intimacy you thought it was.
And it might not have anything to do with you.
I mean, most likely it has nothing to do with you.
Most likely it's just this person's incapacity.
And then you get left with this decision about
whether you want to be friends and how you want to
be friends with someone who has that incapacity.
And you know it's not going to be there for you
down the road if something happens again.
I think for you, maybe it's just kind
of finishing that reckoning process.
You seem to still have a question
about whether it's worth it.
Let's be sober too.
I still feel like there's
a little lack of sobriety there.
Because if someone came by my office and just
said, I don't want things to be weird between us,
that doesn't feel like an overture
of friendship or reconciliation to me.
That just sounds like, I just don't
want to be uncomfortable at work,
you know. [laughs]
And really actually quite uncaring.
I think maybe time to complete
the mourning and move on.
Things won't be weird if you
complete the mourning.
Friendship's such a great topic.
I always love talking about friendship.
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,
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