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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
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've been having a lot of dreams where
I'm trying to buy food and I never get to eat it.
Pastries. Always pastries.
And thinking about how I have a lot
of cravings for chocolate and things like that.
Just seems to be a pattern in my life
of seeking nourishment in the wrong places.
SHAMBHAVI: Our relationship to sweet
foods is really interesting.
If we take, like, a half a step back,
we might wonder why we're all so into sweets.
Why most of our food is predominantly sweet taste,
because most meats are sweet, fish is sweet,
grains are sweet, and then sweets are sweet.
So the mainstay of all the tastes that we have
at our disposal, sweet taste is predominant.
This idea of sweetness is something that I really
connect to since the beginning of my
conscious life
as an inner feeling or something that I'm seeking.
When I was a little girl,
sweetness was the only word I had for it.
I didn't have all the words I have now.
But there was something like a sweetness that I
felt in myself that I was looking for outside
of myself, too.
Both in other people in an ordinary way and in
circumstances. But also in a more cosmic way.
And then later, you know, after I'd already
started getting these teachings, one of my
teachers who had a lot of training in Ayurveda
said that the essential taste of life
is sweet in a more all-encompassing, absolute way,
that there's a sweetness to existence itself,
and that we're seeking that sweetness in all
these different ways, including through pastries.
Are you eating a lot of sweets
in your everyday life?
STUDENT: Just chocolate.
SHAMBHAVI: Just chocolate.
STUDENT: I don't buy anything else so that
I'm not tempted.
SHAMBHAVI: Okay. I would look into the fine
grain of your everyday life
because craving sweets, and having dreams like
that of not being able to get them,
or just eating them continually and not feeling
satisfied, that's kind of the same thing,
you know, whether you ate them or not.
[laughs] There's still
that feeling of dissatisfaction.
To me, it's just a very, very powerful
message that you're craving sweetness,
and there's some way that you feel denied it
in your life right now, or in general,
I don't know.
But I would look to where in your life sweetness
is lacking. Not in your diet, elsewhere.
And try to organize your life or create a life
that has more access to the sweetness
that you're actually craving.
And in the meantime, I would
just let yourself eat sweets.
It's not gonna harm you
for some short period of time.
In a sense, you need to hack your dreams
by actually eating sweets during the day. [laughs]
STUDENT: If you insist. [laughs]
SHAMBHAVI: But that isn't gonna solve the
problem, which is really access to sweetness
on the larger level.
Obviously, love, accompaniment, contact with God,
all of those things on ordinary to the exalted
level, those are all forms of sweetness.
STUDENT: Could you talk about the different
flavors of being competitive. God realm,
titan realm, and human realm?
SHAMBHAVI: God realm, titan realm,
and human realm competitiveness.
For those who haven't had these teachings,
the system of the six realms is about
the different personalities or flavors
in which human beings lose contact
with native intelligence and presence.
And the teachings come out of the Indian teaching
stories and epics, the six beings that
characterize these realms.
God, titan, human, animal,
hungry ghost, and demon.
They were codified into a system of sadhana and
understanding of human life in Tibetan Buddhism.
Three adjacent realms, God realm, titan realm,
and human realm, are all characterized
by competitiveness,
which means that at least half of us,
our lives are governed by competitiveness.
We aren't assigned a realm,
but competitiveness is really dominant
in the realms as a theme in human life.
The thing that characterizes God realm the most is
using some stories that are transcendental,
either spiritually or philosophically,
to construct a persona that is
somehow untouchable.
Either untouchable by death or untouchable
by fault, like escapes being at fault,
or untouchable by illness, or escapes
being insignificant in some way,
or escapes being too small in some way.
All of the God realm manifestations all try
to create a sense of self that's much
larger than ordinary,
that's philosophically larger or
spiritually larger, something like that.
So the competitiveness has to do mainly
with an inoculation against disease,
against smallness, against fear,
against fear of mortality in particular,
and fear of insignificance.
All of those things are being
inoculated by God realm.
Someone who's inhabiting that realm sets
themselves apart from others,
and in those specific ways, by saying, you know,
I have a better take on all of this,
a better philosophical or spiritual take than you
do, or, I have special powers, or,
I'm more enlightened, or,
"I'm more transcendental in some way. It's
a very transcendentalist kind of point of view.
It's very hierarchical because then the only way
that you can pump yourself up that way
is by someone else has to be down there.
The need for admiration and validation
of one's point of view is pretty big.
Titan realm competitiveness
is very much more hands-on.
[laughs] So titan realm competitiveness is being
best at things, like someone who follows you
around the kitchen and tells you that they know
the best of everything, the best way to hold
a knife, the best way to grind coffee.
They have the best wine cellar.
They have the best this and the best that.
But it's very much tied to ordinary life.
It doesn't have that transcendental
philosophical feeling to it.
It's more like, I am better at doing things than
you, by far. [laughter]
And everyone else falls short, right?
And then human realm is also much more ordinary
in the sense it doesn't have
that grandiose transcendental flavor to it.
It's much more like the couple who competes over
who finishes the crossword
puzzle first on Sunday mornings.
It's much more about mental competition.
Who's smartest?
So people who are hanging out in the human realm
are very attached to who's smartest,
or being smart is very important to them.
And then being the one who knows
is very, very important.
Having the right answer,
not making an intellectual mistake.
It's a very sort of neck up kind of affair.
Neck up meaning, like, brain-centered.
So there's three.
And they can combine too, obviously.
[laughs] So who thinks fastest,
who gets it first is another kind of human
realm thing, and that, it's overtly competitive.
So is titan realm, overtly competitive.
But God realm can fool you because some
of the competition could be like, I'm the
most compassionate one in the room. [laughs]
My compassion knows no limits. [laughs]
If you're in a certain condition,
you might get fooled by that
and think that this person is loving
and totally not competitive.
But you would never really make that mistake
with someone in titan realm or human realm.
It's much more obvious.
STUDENT: I have a question.
You shared that article on the history of feminist
thought with some of us last week
and I was kind of curious how you,
in your own life, about when you came out
like where in that timeline that was.
SHAMBHAVI: As what?
STUDENT: As a lesbian.
SHAMBHAVI: Oh. [laughs]
You know, the only thing I remember is telling
my mother I was a lesbian and the first words out
of her mouth being,
Maybe I am, too. [laughs]
And then I just kinda went back
into my shell because my mother
was always appropriating everything about me.
[laughs] So it wasn't just,
like, a nice accepting comment.
It was like, Oh, me too. [laughs]
And I don't know how old I was then.
That's kinda interesting.
I had a mad crush on my best friend when I was 13.
I don't know if I had an identity around it,
but that was definitely the case.
I don't really know, but there was something
that took me a while to feel okay with.
It, it's hard for me to remember how I felt,
but I remember seeing The Color Purple, the movie.
Whatever year that came out was the year
that I really just made my peace with it.
For some reason, I wasn't at peace with it when I
was first exploring things and discovering things.
My father was really homophobic, but it wasn't,
like, a daily topic of conversation.
I never told my father I was a lesbian for our
entire lives, only because he did something that I
used to call soft sexual abuse, which was, like,
talking about his sexual life
inappropriately with his kids.
I don't think he ever touched us,
but he definitely shoved his sexuality in our
faces in inappropriate ways,
and it made me really, really uncomfortable.
So I never wanted to talk
about my sexuality with him.
And even towards the end of his life,
he was trying to get me to do that,
and I finally said to him when he was, like, 90,
you know, "This happened.
I don't feel comfortable talking to you
about this." And he kinda took that.
He kinda understood that.
But anyway, whatever year The Color Purple came
out, I don't know, something about
watching that movie
just really sunk into me and
made me feel at peace with it.
But I don't remember, like,
having long conversations about coming out
or long, torturous discussions
with myself about telling anyone.
I don't have a dramatic story about it. [laughs]
STUDENT: Did the politics of feminism influence
you at all at any point in that process?
SHAMBHAVI: Oh, yeah.
Yes.
From a very early age.
Mainly because of the situation I was embedded in.
Despite the fact that my parents were both artists
and were kind of bohemian,
and I would say even hippies at one point,
and they were pretty politically active and doing
drugs and, I mean, it was
not your typical household.
They were still, in terms of their gender stuff,
extremely unreconstructed, unexcavated.
So in our house, my mom was really a second-class
citizen, and I was very aware of that from a very
young age and incredibly pissed off about it.
That was my feminism,
and then started reading about feminism when I got
older, but from an early age,
like four or five years old, I was pissed.
[laughs] Mainly on behalf of my mother.
STUDENT: I have a question.
It kind of relates to this.
Matri and I were talking about being warm versus
being cold with people
and the gender dynamics of that.
It's gendered to just, like,
be warm kind of, like, compliantly.
SHAMBHAVI: Compliant, yeah, performatively.
STUDENT: yeah.
SHAMBHAVI: We really need to think beyond this
kind of dynamic into what is the flavor of our
incarnation, and whatever it is
that you come to as your reality of this
incarnation, we each need to make, I guess make
our peace is the phrase of the day,
but we need to make
our peace with that and embrace it 100%.
So you are an extremely generous and warm person.
[laughs] You can put all the gender
analysis on that you want.
STUDENT: Yeah, but it's actually why
I'm doing that, yeah.
SHAMBHAVI: [laughs] Yeah, exactly.
And of course, having been socialized as a young
girl, as a girl, you have other stuff
laid on top of that
which has to do with performing a certain thing.
Being more friendly perhaps than you feel at times
or being more nourishing and caretaking than you
actually feel at times, things like that
that are just, like, girl 101. [laughter]
But beyond that, and much,
much more important than that,
is your basic flavor, right?
Your basic flavor is incredibly
warm and nurturing and generous.
If you try to get away from that,
you're just going against your own fate.
STUDENT: I was thinking about that.
Usually, if I'm not actually warm,
I'm being judgmental or something.
There's usually some blockage that I'm creating.
SHAMBHAVI: And that's the austerity
of doing this work, though.
When we have more open access to the heart
in the most cosmic sense,
then the austerity of this practice
is to always go back to that even when
these other karmas are manifesting.
So whatever karmas are giving rise
to that judgmentalness or self-righteousness or
whatever's happening,
those are superficial things.
They're just dancing on the surface,
and yet they're very attractive. [laughs]
The austerity is to go back to that essence
and not always be reenacting this other stuff,
even when you feel,
I have a right to be this way, you know.
No you don't. [laughter]
Or if you wanna settle for that,
if you wanna just go around saying,
I have a right to be this way and that way,
you're just cheating yourself totally,
and totally being outside of the practice.
So there is a lot of austerity and effort that has
to do with getting back to the heart space even
when we're being magnetized by these
other karmas which are very tasty.
[laughs] But getting back to what you asked about
feminism in my life.
This just is a general observation because this
definitely came down in my family this way,
and then I noticed it in a lot of other families.
When we are growing up with what I would call
negative examples,
especially ones that are actually inciting harm,
my father was not only, you know, a standard
issue sexist, but he was also quite narcissistic.
We can take that on board and make that harm part
of our personality structure and really
internalize it a lot
and feel badly about ourselves, start to feel a
lot of shame ourselves or just feel we're not of
value or something like that.
Or we can be much more pissed off about it,
and that's much more external focused, right?
I've always felt like even though I recognize
that the anger that I felt when I was younger was
not serving me anymore at some point,
I do think it saved my life.
I do think it ended up being
vital and self-supporting.
So the trick is, as someone like yourself who has
had to deal with a lot of anger,
how do you start to recognize that it's just
absolutely no longer serving you, even when
it seems like it's righteous anger, right?
Because there's no such thing.
[laughs] You know, righteous anger is just as much
built on stale paradigms
as any other kind of anger.
Of course, there's anger that is that enlightened,
lightning-like anger that just flashes and clears,
but that's not what I'm talking about.
Again, it's a kind of austerity when you recognize
that something that actually saved you or helped
you or aided you or kept you strong,
kept you from internalizing certain things,
are just no longer serving you and you need
to do something
to excavate those things and get rid of them.
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.