Compassion and Embodiment

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.

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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
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.

SHAMBHAVI: Someone wants me to
talk about compassion.

Funny enough, no one has ever asked me
to talk about compassion before in 20 years.
[laughter]

[laughs] Maybe they have and I just forgot,
but it's not very common.
It's not very common.

I just read something
on Facebook a couple of days ago.

Someone had posted a quote from my Dzogchen
teacher, Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche.

It was Namkhai Norbu recounting a time when he was
in a teaching and a student said,
"Why don't you ever talk about compassion?"

In the Buddhist traditions,
there's something called relative
compassion and absolute compassion.

We don't have that distinction in Trika Shaivism,
but we could still use it.

I mean, it kind of makes sense.

So what Namkhai Norbu said was that he
doesn't teach relative compassion.

We could describe that as learning how to think
and act more compassionately, and certain
sorts of Buddhist teachings emphasize that.

He said that when we become more realized,
when we recognize more of the natural state
and what's really happening here, then compassion

arises spontaneously, natural compassion.

When I was much younger,

I was given an insight by my teacher,
a direct insight. And one of the aspects

of that was that compassion is built into reality.

So if we think of what is reality,
we might have lots of different answers for that,
but what my direct perception was at that time

and what continues to be my direct perception is
that compassion is part of the fabric of reality.

It is simply there everywhere, and we experience
it more or less depending on our condition.

When our condition becomes more sensitive,
more receptive, when we
are relieved of some of our tensions,

then that natural compassion is just
expressed by us without any technique.

And so what Namkhai Norbu was saying was
that that's what his teachings were about,
how to experience compassion for reals rather than

something that amounts to kind
of faking it till you make it.

Maybe the reason people haven't asked me about it
more is because I have spoken
about this many, many times.

Since that time when my teacher allowed me to see
all these things, I call this wisdom virtue.

So when I was having this immersion experience,

a kind of transmission,
I understood many things from that.

And one of the things I understood was something

that is also taught in these traditions,
but taught in a kind of way that it's not-- well,

it's not easy to find these teachings, but the
teaching that everything is made of wisdom.

There's nothing solid here.

There's nothing objective here.

Everything is made of a self-aware wisdom or this

vast self-aware intelligence. And that wisdom is
really something that can't be described in words.

If we were to suddenly lose all of our
limitations, we would be embodying that too.

But in any case, that wisdom, that intelligence
is not separate from what we call virtue.

So compassion, mercy, devotion, tenderness,
all of these things are present in everything.

That's what I discovered through this--
I don't want to call it an experience.

It's more like a revelation.

That's why in this kind of tradition,
including my Dzogchen tradition and Trika,
there isn't a lot of talk about how to generate

compassion like there is in some other traditions.
Because our basic understanding
is there's nothing to generate.

Everything is fully generated already,
and our job is to destroy what is
in the way of us embodying that.

We do have precepts, and we do try to get in touch
with whatever natural devotion and natural
compassion we have access to right now.

It's not a free-for-all where everyone
just gets to act out in any way they want.
Not at all.

People are encouraged to make a real effort to get
in touch with whatever forms of devotion
and compassion they can get

in touch with in a real way.

Trika Shaivism is very much heart-focused.

There's a lot of practice that we do in what's
called the heart space or the cave of the heart.
And there's a lot of practices that are meant to

give us access to some kind of direct experience
rather than an experience that's
generated in some way or another.

It's a pretty significant difference
in our orientation to practice.

STUDENT: You were just speaking about
embodiment of wisdom virtues.

I'm curious if it is connected to embodiment
in a more normal sense of just, like, being in the
body, being grounded, feeling through the senses.

SHAMBHAVI: Everything has gross, subtle,
and most subtle forms.

Or more limited, more expansive,
and most expansive forms.

So certainly feeling your body
is on that spectrum somewhere.

But we can feel our embodiment
in many, many different ways.

You're an acupuncturist,
and I know this just as a acupuncture patient,
that there's some acupuncturists who are just

sticking the needles in there,
and there's other acupuncturists who have
a feeling for the energetics of it.

I mean, a direct feeling.

And then there's other acupuncturists who seem
to have a really much more nuanced sense
of the points, where they can get other kinds

of information while they're
needling that is very subtle.

So we can have a relationship
to our body that's mostly physical.

Maybe some parts of our body are, like, MIA.

Maybe some people aren't really that sensitive
to what's going on with their body.

Like, I've always noticed people who eat the most
horrible diets, and they are obviously sick,
but they don't feel sick.

They don't know that they're sick,
'cause they're really out of touch
with stuff going on in their body, right?

And then there's people who have more sensory
perceptions, are more in tune with their body.

And then there's people who can access
that in a very nuanced way and who have
experiences of subtle energy.

And then there's people who have access to all
that and also have access to the wisdom
that's giving rise to those experiences.

All of those things are on a spectrum.

It's like something unfolding,
like a fan is closed and then the fan's opening
up, and there's more and more to be experienced.

Or sometimes I think of it like a piano keyboard.

You might only be playing a few notes,
but then you can play more and more
and more and more and more.

Everything operates like that,
all of our ways of relating to life.

I think the principal way of explaining what's
happening with our senses is we're
opening the gates of our perception.

That's what's happening.

And what happens when you open
the gates of your perception?

You start to perceive things that are much more
subtle, until eventually the wisdom that is
inherent in our everyday experience becomes more

apparent, or the wisdom virtues, you could say.

But we have to just start wherever we are.

The only thing I would say is that we're in this
moment in history in this country where a certain
swath of people are extremely fixated on their

personal experience in lots of different ways.
And I'm not blaming that on them.

I mean, they've been trained to be that way.

We've been trained to be hugely individualistic,
and of course, that is no different
in the health and wellness zone, right?

Or the psychology zone,
or any other zone we might be in.

People have fetishized their relationship to,
quote-unquote "somatics" and made
that into their life's goal, basically.

But in this tradition, the goal is to feel other
people and other things, not just ourselves.

[laughs] There's this kind of hothouse atmosphere
around some of these ways that people talk
about embodiment or somatics or groundedness.

You wanna feel grounded, but then what?

What are you gonna do now that you're grounded?

Whatever level we're at in our spiritual practice,
the question's always gonna be,
for me anyway, and now what?

I've told this funny story about when I was…

I might not have even been 20 years old.

I think I might've been, like, 19 or something.
And I was getting my hair cut,
and my hair cutter was also very young.

And for some reason,
this just so stuck in my mind.

He said he was practicing
with this Gurdjieff community.

I don't know how many of you know what that is,
but it was kind of this crazy Russian person
who invented his own system of spiritual

awakening, and it involved dance and some
kind of weird movements, and I don't know.
I don't know that much about it.

But anyway, the way that the hairdresser described
it, and this might not have been what it's
actually about, it just might've been his version

of it, but he described it as,
uh, we're going to achieve perfection.

And I looked at him and I said, "Well,
once you've done that,
then what are you gonna do?" [laughter]

"Are you just gonna spin around in space
being perfect?"

Even when my ideas about things were very
normative, my focus has always been

on the collective, on community and the
collective, and people doing stuff together.

I was never that interested
in just getting grounded. [laughs]

But it's definitely on a spectrum.

I mean, you have to feel your
body in order to do this practice.

As you're doing it,
your connection to your physical experience will
become more nuanced, more rich, more interesting.

But ultimately,
we're opening the gates of the senses because we
want to integrate with the world and with others,

not because we want to become something
in an individualistic way or
protect anything particularly.

So what I would say to someone who was very
interested in getting grounded in their body would
be, okay, do that, but then take the next step.

What's after that?

STUDENT: Is equanimity a concept in
Trika Shaivism that is akin to the Tao and, like,
falling into life as it happens rather

than expecting it to be something it's not?

SHAMBHAVI: Yes, but I'm not
familiar enough with Taoism to
make a comparison that I would feel confident in.

But I will say just sort of in general-- There's
a range of ideas about equanimity
around the spiritual water cooler.

You see some people trying to embody something
that they think is equanimity just by being
impassive, and that's t-- obviously

not what's being talked about.

That what you just expressed about just being
in life without trying to fix anything
particularly, I would say that that isn't

really what is being talked about here.

We aren't trying to fix anything in the sense
of having a mission and trying to make everything
go our way, and we're not trying to fix things

in the sense of we have a set list of all the
things that are wrong that have to be corrected.

For sure, that's not part of this.

But there is a more active sense
of working with circumstances.

We're in a scene and things are happening,
and we're being in touch with the wisdom
of that, and we're just acting.

It's a call and response situation.

There's definitely in the Tantrik traditions,
and with my Dzogchen teacher,
I don't know about other teachers, there's

a kind of gusto about participating in life.

Equanimity means if we're talking about it
in the most profound sense in this kind
of tradition, it means that you have recognized

what's called the equality of all phenomena.

You have recognized that good or bad,
horrifying or wonderful, ugly or beautiful,
all phenomena, all beings,

all circumstances have total equality because they

are made of and are all being produced as
experiences by this alive, aware Reality.

Everything is being produced by that subjectivity
as experiences, not as objects. And everything
as an experience has total equality.

That means that as you're in life and you're
participating in whatever way you want
to participate, you're having

a more game-like relationship to it.

You know, do you ever play games?

You know how, like, things are just kind of coming
at you and you're responding and using your skill.

That's kind of the feeling.

You're in a big scene and you're just kind
of responding to things with as much wisdom
and feeling as you can muster,

but there's an enjoyment to it.

There's a enjoyment to participating in life.

There's a Maharashtran 14th century poet called
Jñanadeva who said something
that kind of expresses this.

He said, "The non-dual one returns to play
in the courtyard of duality." So in this
tradition, there's always that sense of a return,

which is expressed in the concept of jivanmukti,
liberated in life-- in life,
not on a mountaintop, right?

The courtyard in ancient life was
a space between the house and the street.

So you're in a liminal space,
but you're playing with everything,
and that's really the sense that even in the midst

of life, you're in this liminal space and you
have more freedom to play with things.

That's what equanimity means in this tradition.

STUDENT: I was wondering if you could
clarify what is compassion.

SHAMBHAVI: I don't know that I can create
a definition of it like a sentence, but it means
something like feeling with others.

This alive, aware reality created all these
circumstances, including all the nasty ones,
and is feeling compassion for all of the people

who, who really don't exist,
but who are embodying emotions of suffering.

So sometimes people think that because in this
tradition and in Dzogchen and in some of the other
Tibetan Buddhist traditions,

the ultimate teaching is none of this is actually
happening in the way that we think it is.

Why are we then still feeling
so much about everything?

We could look to many,
many teaching stories in our traditions about
deities, embodiments of reality like Lord Shiva

and other deities in Tibetan Buddhism
also, crying, weeping at the condition
of humans and other beings.

But they created those other beings and those
conditions, so why are they weeping?

Compassion is a rich and magical,

magnificent feeling of being-- feeling for others,
feeling with others, feeling what others feel.

One way that we experience compassion,
I think pretty regularly,
is some cheesy thing you might cry at on TV, like

in a movie or on a TV show, and you think,
"Why did I cry about that?"
Or even crying during commercials.

[laughs] When I still used to watch TV
with commercials when I was younger,
if anyone did anything nice for anyone

on a commercial, I would cry.

[laughter]
That's compassion.
Feeling what others feel and feeling for others.

And it's a very sweet experience.

[drumming music] Satsang with Shambhavi is
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to learn and practice in the direct realization
traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.

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