Community Access Intimacy: Starting From Primordial Equality and Belonging

Join us for a special podcast where we ask the question of how our community can practically embody the primordial equality and belonging that is indestructible and incontrovertible. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi Our podcast is recorded live...

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.

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.

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.

We're a community of practice,
of people practicing.

Even though we're doing a lot of other things
together, the central pole of this community is
doing practice, doing sadhana,

various kinds of sadhana.

And those of you that have been around for a while

know that one of my points of integrity as
a teacher is to try to not behave in such ways or

do such things as would prevent
other people from practicing.

Now, I don't have control over everyone's
responses to everything, but as far as I'm able,
I try to conduct myself and have Jaya Kula conduct

itself in ways that do not discourage
other people from doing practice.

As members of this community—those of you
that consider yourself to be members of this
community and practitioners in this community—you

are practicing for your own liberation.

You are participating in the community for your
own liberation and also
'cause it might be fun sometimes.

You may not have articulated this to yourself,
but in following the kind of life ways
of Jaya Kula, you are also conducting yourself

at least semi-consciously in a way that will
not deter other people from doing practice.

That's what we've always called the crucible.

The crucible is the way that we hold
Jaya Kula so that people can practice here.

Many of us have been involved
in other spiritual communities.

So many of us have these experiences where maybe
some people are nasty
and there's no control on that.

It just runs rampant.

Or they're not welcoming or the teacher's conduct
isn't so great, and then either over time,
people get fed up and leave,

or there's some big brouhaha, upheaval,
and then a lot of people leave.

And when that happens, there's always some people
who don't ever want to practice again, or it
takes them a long time to get back to practice.

So that's what we don't want.

When we talk about holding the crucible,
we mean creating a space where we can practice
and where anyone else who shows up who wants

to practice with us feels comfortable doing so.

Then we have another word which is mandala.

Mandala means how we conceive
of the community more structurally.

A mandala in our tradition, it's a geometric form.

This is a mandala or a yantra.

This yantra's sort of a two-dimensional mandala.

They can be two-dimensional or three-dimensional,
but the word mandala in general often
applies to a three-dimensional figure.

But in any case, it is a map of the cosmos, but
it's often compared in the tradition to a city.

Just like in the city,
you have people who want to live right downtown
close to where the action is,

you have people who want to live a little far away
from the center so they can get away from it when
they want, you have people who want to live

in the space between the city and the suburbs,
and you have people who want to live
in the suburbs, and you have people

who want to live way out there.

Maybe we see you once in a while.

Our idea of the community has always been,
at least my idea of the community has always been,
anyone that comes, they find

their own location in the mandala.

If they want to be close in, they're close in.

If they don't want to be close in,
they're not close in.

But everyone who's positioned on that mandala
somehow, like even people whose only way
of participating is to listen

to the podcast regularly.

Those people are all part of our community in some
way or another, and they're helping
to form the energy body of this community.

So the mandala is the self-chosen hierarchy,
in a sense, the natural hierarchy of people
who want to practice a lot and be closer

to the community and the teacher and the people
who want to practice more lightly or participate
in other ways and maybe

never even met me in person.

A crucible is what we're doing as practitioners
who are more close in on that mandala—to hold
Jaya Kula in such a way that it is a place where

people who want to can practice with us
without fear of harm coming to them.

In 2023, our annual theme was belonging.

We have many ways of talking about belonging
in this community and hosting people
so they feel like they belong.

But in 2023, I wrote a message to the community
about the theme for that year and about natural
belonging or primordial belonging,

this unquestioned,
unconditional belonging that doesn't have to be
proved to anybody, that already

exists for everybody equally.

The question I was asking myself and that I posed
to the community was: we already embody belonging
in a sort of more conventional way through our

hosting and through other means,
but how can we embody natural belonging?

How can we embody this primordial belonging so
there's never any question
in anybody's mind about belonging?

And I never had an answer to that question.

I thought about it and thought about it
and meditated on it, and I really couldn't think
of concrete ways that we could embody that.

So that year went by, and I kind of felt like I
had failed at answering my own question, you know,
what would it look like in a concrete way if

we were embodying that primordial belonging?

I think I have finally come
up with an answer to that.

And it started a while back when Matri and Alexa
introduced me to this activist and, and scholar,
Mia Mingus, who wrote about a term

that she coined: *access intimacy*.

I'm going to read you a couple
of quotes about access intimacy.

These are from two different blog posts
that Mia wrote at different times.

"Access intimacy is that elusive,
hard-to-describe feeling when someone else gets
your access needs."

Mia Mingus is writing from the perspective
of a disability activist, and this is part
of her way of expressing that deeper belonging.

"Access intimacy is that elusive,
hard-to-describe feeling when someone else gets
your access needs, the kind of eerie comfort

that your disabled self feels
with someone on a purely access level.

Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers,
disabled or not, or sometimes
it can be built over years.

It could also be the way your body relaxes
and opens up with someone when all your access
needs are being met."

So that was from the first article where
she introduced this idea of access intimacy.

And then a few years later, she wrote this,
and the second thing I'm reading is really what I
used to write something for Jaya Kula,

which I called Community Access Intimacy.

"Access intimacy is critical to disability
justice, because there will never be any work
with disabled people that does

not include accessibility work.

Cultivating access intimacy is a way to directly
challenge ableism and the relentless isolation
that disabled people endure, especially disabled

folks who are part of other oppressed communities.

Access intimacy at once recognizes and understands
the relational and human quality of access,
while simultaneously deepening

the relationships involved.

It moves the work of access out of the realm
of only logistics and into the realm
of relationships and understanding disabled people

as humans, not burdens." That's really beautiful.

"Disabled peoples' liberation cannot be boiled
down to logistics,"
and that could go for all of us.

"Access intimacy is interdependence in action."
So, when we talk about interdependence,
we're talking about a presumed equality.

See, this is the problem with a lot of schemas
for access, or justice, or equality,
or sharing power of some sort,

which is that they presume that there's
an inequality that first and foremost,
uh, has to be rectified.

What happens when you start with an
equality that needs to be expressed?

That was really my question.

And of course, we have to do things to rectify
those more normative forms of inequality.

I'm not saying we're not doing that.

But how can we also get underneath
that to that deeper level where equality is
presumed and unconditional,

and how do we express that?

And this idea of access intimacy, I think,
really gets to it, and that's what I'm gonna talk
about today, and I hope that we

can talk about it together.

This was prompted by a series of events

that happened recently,
where I felt like people were not embodying

the open-door quality to let other people in that
I want to be embodied by people in Jaya Kula .

I started thinking about that series of events,
and I'll talk about that later on.

I'm gonna go to the page that I printed out,
and I'm just gonna read through
the different points that I made.

And this is based on that second
paragraph of Mia Mingus' that I wrote.

It's basically a cover of that with some
words changed and some other things added in.

Community access intimacy is critical to welcoming
and hosting because there will never be any
embodied expression of our primordial belonging

that does not include accessibility, making it
possible for people to access the teachings.

Cultivating community access intimacy is a way
to open the doors wide and challenge
the relentless isolation that people endure,

especially folks who are part
of oppressed communities.

Community access intimacy anticipates the access
needs—and this is the key, anticipates,
and I'm gonna talk about what that involves—not

just of disabled people,
but of people from various cultures, and people
who are very new to this genre of teachings.

Community access intimacy is
for all of us and is ongoing.

It holds the mandala in a way that can be
naturally self-organized,
but never hierarchical in terms

of degrees of belonging.

So, we can have organization and we can have
people who are closer in or further out,
or more involved or less involved,

but that should never imply any difference
in the degree of belonging
on this primordial level, right?

Community access intimacy recognizes our
interdependence and embodies the profoundly
relational, not just logistical,

quality of access.

It strengthens our relationships, encourages
relaxation, and surfaces a deeper belonging.

Community access intimacy is at the core
of hosting and moves us closer
to embodying wisdom virtue.

It is sadhana for us,
as well as supportive of others.

Community access intimacy is one of the main ways
that we hold the crucible and do our part
in making it possible for people

to continue practicing with us.

I want to talk about some very concrete ways that
Anandamayi Ma practiced community access intimacy.

And these are some of the things that always
impressed me a lot about her behavior,
and also are things that I aspire to, and

certainly do not fully embody myself by any means.

So first of all, Ma,
in her extraordinary condition,
was able to adapt to the condition

of other people to an extraordinary degree.

She was not holding onto a set
of statements about who she was.

She never said, "I can't do that because I am
something or other."
There was never this idea that she had to be

a specific thing and then she
couldn't adapt to somebody else.

Right?

So for instance, when I say,
"I just have this natural fierceness,
I can't always be motherly," that is true,

but that's a limitation.

Ma could be motherly when motherly was called for,
and she could be very, very fierce,
much fiercer than me, when that was called for,

and she was never telling someone,
"I can't be motherly because I'm a fierce person."
So when we have these ideas about

ourself, we lose adaptability.

We lose the ability to create the conditions
for someone else to be able
to feel that deeper belonging.

So I'm just saying that because we all
have those limitations, including me.

None of us are gonna be able
to perfectly adapt to everything.

But adapting to other people's conditions is one
of the practical life ways of access intimacy.

Often, when she was with other people,
she was playing a role.

She played the role of a traditional Indian wife,
and then she played the role
of a traditional house guest.

There's one story about she went to somebody's
house and they wanted her to stay a lot longer
than she had in mind, and she acquiesced to them,

because they had invited all their friends over.

They wanted to show her off.

Now, I could imagine that I might think something
like, or even say something like,
"I'm not here to be shown off." Again,

that's like, a sticking point for me.

Ma felt like it was much more important
for people to spend 10 minutes with her.

She felt it was a blessing for them
to spend 10 minutes with her.

She traveled all over India so hundreds
of thousands of people could spend 10 minutes
with her, and however they behaved or whether they

ever did sadhana or not ever
again was of no consequence.

So she had this unbelievable flexibility,
and that has always been kind of a distant
goal for me, [laughs] uh, for sure.

But I'm just saying that we also want to increase
our capacity to adapt to what it is that other
people need to have those conditions so that they

can stay and do practice, and that means
also adjusting to the capacities of others.

So a long while back,
there was somebody in the community who was
neurodivergent, and a lot of their way of relating

to people was to tell you about all
the deep dives they'd been going into.

I happen to be someone who really likes deep
dives, [laughs] so I never minded this at all.

I just felt I was learning about stuff.

Uh, but there was a couple of other people
who were annoyed by it and felt like this
person was showing off their knowledge.

So we have to be able to reflect on when we're
just setting a line between us and somebody
else that doesn't need to be there.

Can we just enjoy the way other people are?

Can we examine what it is that is preventing us
from just enjoying someone sharing something
they're interested in,

something as simple as that?
Right.

So Ma established very strict
Brahminical rules at the ashrams.

First of all, she didn't even want ashrams.

She told everybody not to build
ashrams, and they insisted.

And so when they insisted, she went along with it.

It's like, "Okay, you're not
gonna take the short path.

I'll go the long path with you."
And then she established these very strict
Brahminical rules in the ashrams where no

Westerners could stay there and only Brahmins
could eat there, and a lot
of the Westerners were upset by this.

She did it so that the Brahmins could enjoy
the ashrams that they basically insisted on. [laughs]

And then she went out of her way to host
Westerners in different ways,

to have separate eating facilities for them.

She was constantly talking about how much she
enjoyed having them, which really annoyed
some of the Indian people, [laughs] .

And how much fun Westerners were to play with was
one of the things that she used to talk about.

But there were still some pissed-off Westerners,
because people with fixed ideas about equality
on this very surface level,

we have to be let into this thing.

We have to eat with the Brahmins.

This is unfair.

Not able to see what Ma was doing,

not able to allow there to be that kind
of solution that's not following conventional

Western ideas of justice or equality,
and not being able to give that, in a sense.

Ma was giving that to the Brahmins,
and she didn't eat like they did.

She would drink out of puddles
and she ate fish occasionally.

She was not a strict vegetarian, but when she
was around them, she would do as they did.

And this is actually something that's from all
of our traditions, which is this kind
of invisibility except when it's not needed.

And that we're not asserting ourselves so
insistently in order to actually be in a more
alive, present relationship and be

able to give things to people.

What I'm talking about requires a few things.

It requires thinking ahead,
imagining ahead, feeling ahead.

It requires us to have
a much wider view of things.

I was talking to somebody about the hosting that I
do at my house now, 'cause there's teachings at my
house, and I'm doing various preparatory things.

And this is same that I do for a lot
of things related to Jaya Kula.

And definitely when Jaya Kula was very young,
I was the only person [laughs] doing setup.

Now I have one helper at my house each time,
but any case, there's still
a lot of setup for me to do.

And I've described this before that when
I'm setting up for students to come.

I am imagining students coming.

This is just happening naturally.

And I'm imagining all the things you will need,
and I'm imagining your happiness on receiving
those things, and I'm feeling happy when I imagine

you being happy receiving those things and having
things well-prepared for you,
and taking care of in advance.

This is a pleasure.

This is not a burden.

This is the kind of wide thinking, feeling,
imagining that I'm talking about that community
access intimacy is going to require us to do.

We don't do this, most of us, naturally.

We don't think of the widest sphere of influence.

We don't think of all the people involved when
we're, for instance,
setting up a, a community event.

So this is one of the things
that happened this week.

Someone set up a community event,
invited people to a community event,
but without checking the teaching schedule.

Focus was too narrow.

And then I said something and then,
"Well, I'll move the time back.

I hope you can come." Well you hope I can come?

You actually don't care all
that much is what I got out of that!

We need to widen our view
and be actually welcoming.

I've already looked at everything.

I've already taken your needs into account.

I've already made room for you.

This is what access intimacy looks like.

So thinking ahead, feeling ahead, looking ahead.

Maybe you have to learn some things
about what other people need.

Maybe this is something you don't already know.

You know, you have to do some research.

That might be happening in some case also.

But when someone is really taking care of in
advance, you have been thought of in advance.

This is, I think, the essence,
or the starting point, in any case, the center
of this whole idea of community access intimacy.

And then adapting to welcoming others by giving
up assertion of our preferences and our brand.

Welcoming others.

Giving up our maniacal need to assert

ourselves—what we like, what we don't like,
what we're willing to adapt

to and bend on and what we're not.

Now, I don't think we can do that or need to do
that a hundred percent of the time,
and I'll talk about that.

But we can do it a lot more.

So then something else happened this week
on the livestream, and this has actually
happened before on the livestream.

It's not singling anybody out on the Wednesday
and Saturday morning livestream
when we're doing Gayatri.

First of all, we're doing that for everyone.

This is an offering and a prayer,
and we want more people to participate.

And it's also a place where people who don't
really do anything else with the
community will come to do that.

They will come to chant the Gayatri with us.

They don't know anything about Jaya Kula.

They just saw something on the internet.

This is a very multi-layered thing.

It's very simple, but, you know,
when you really dig into it…

I have a platform that I use where I can have some
people that are on the livestream
with me who are practicing students.

The reason why I love this is because
it helps me give the transmission.

It helps me give the transmission when I can see
your faces and when you're practicing with me.

So that was my initial impulse.

But there's also a way that it helps the other
people who are on YouTube watching the livestream
to feel like they're part of a group.

They're not just looking at me.

They have other people to practice with.

And this past week, somebody was on the livestream
being very distracted, uh, in various ways.

Self-grooming on the [laughs] livestream.

I have no objection to this in some abstract way,
but it's really distracting, and it's not
holding the crucible of that practice, right?

It's not really accompanying me or
the people who are watching the livestream.

But of course, we don't think about that.

We're in our homes,
we're just doing the livestream,
we're maybe not thinking about who else is

watching, right, or how is
this accompanying Shambhavi?

How is this supporting Shambhavi?

Or how is this supporting
the energy of our practice?
This has happened before.

This is not, like, a new thing, but it's an area
where we can really start thinking bigger.

And then somebody else was on the livestream
dressed very scantily, but not indecently.

But at some point, they put their knees up,
which were almost entirely bare,
and their shoulders were bare,

and their arms were bare,
and they put their knees up in such a way that you
could not really tell whether

they were wearing clothes or not.

[laughs] They were covering over their clothing,
which was scanty, with these nude parts of their
body, and I kept squinting at it thinking, "Okay.

If I were watching this,
would I know that this person was actually wearing
clothes?" So, I took both of those people off

the live stream in the middle of the live
stream 'cause I thought it was distracting.

And then I was also thinking,
when I was practicing in India the various times
I've been there, sometimes I've been

in the homes of very conservative Indians.
They were hosting some retreat or something.

And I would be wearing a short-sleeved shirt that
was like here and they would go, "Ugh." Mm-hmm.

"Put on a long-sleeve shirt." They were very picky
about covering up your body, and I would do that.

Like I didn't go off on a huff thinking, "Oh,
these sexist misogynists." I mean,
maybe they were sexist misogynists, but that's the

kind of thing that we don't always need to assert.

We're there to do the practice.

So, in any case, I do want to say about something
like that— 'cause I thought about this long
and hard—that there are times and circumstances,

and I wrote this down, when wisdom dictates
that we *do not* adapt to what other people need.

And I think learning to discern when it's
important to adapt and when it's important *not*
to adapt is a skill that you

would have to hone for yourselves.

If we have 100 things that we're asserting about
ourselves, maybe only two of those really need
to be asserted, [laughs] but we

can find out what those are.

Just a couple more things and then I'm gonna stop.

These are more concrete elements
of community access intimacy.

Adapting to welcoming others
when it inconveniences you.

This is a big one, and I especially was
thinking of this around masking, right.

There are people, few people in the community
who don't invite people over their homes anymore
if masks have to be worn or testing has to happen.

That's sad to me.

I felt sad about that.

And it isn't holding the crucible, right?

It's an inconvenience.

It is an inconvenience even for those of us
that are masking, [laughs] but
it's an inconvenience that I think people can

adapt to if they're really wanting
to cultivate access intimacy.

It's important.

So, letting yourself be inconvenienced.

And of course, many of you have heard me say
that this was one of Jacques Derrida,
the French philosopher's definitions of

friendship: the willingness to be inconvenienced.

I've always thought that was
very beautiful, right?

Recognizing that learning to adapt
to the circumstances of others in order to surface
this belonging, this deeper belonging is for our

benefit also, not just
for somebody else's benefit.

What is it doing for us?

It's helping us to let go of a lot of dogmatism
about who we are and what we're capable
of and what we're not capable of, and what we're

willing to do and what we're not willing to do.

So, my questions that I ended up with are: How are
we already embodying community access intimacy?

How are we falling short?

And how can we do better?

STUDENT: I was thinking today I had a client
who wanted to use lotion instead of oil
and I was so annoyed for most of the session.

Mm-hmm.
It throws off my whole flow.

SHAMBHAVI: Yeah,
it's in those fine-grain details, right?

This is something I called resistless adaptation,
like resistlessly changing
to host somebody, right?

Not just getting into it and getting over it
and then moving on, but being able to just go
with absolutely no emotional response to the fact

that you need to use lotion instead of oil.

The goal is to be able to, pssh, change on a dime.

STUDENT: Hi, I am really fascinated by the layer of what you're talking about with this

intimacy being relational, not just logistical.
Mm-hmm.

And I was hoping you could speak a little bit
deeper into that relational quality and how
this opens up a new ability to relate.

I've been thinking all day about the way
that that shows up in my work where I deal
with literal accessibility: ADA access

in buildings and spaces, and a lot
of design is around the logistics of access.

SHAMBHAVI: When we're thinking this way,
we're being in touch with the,
I hate to use the word humanness 'cause there's so

much crap said in the name of humanness,
but we're reaching into the beingness,
the humanness of another person

and acknowledging our connection—that
their happiness is our happiness.

Because taking care of them increases
our happiness and our freedom also.

Logistics could be thought
of as burdensome or technical.

But for instance, if you just took one aspect
of what you're required to do by law and then you
extended that so that you incorporated something

that went beyond what the law
requires, how would you feel?

If I were in your position—building buildings,
an architect and a builder—if I were in your
position and I had sort of these set

of requirements and I looked over the list and I
found like one thing,
one place in each requirement where I could go

beyond what the requirement was,
I would feel so happy.

It would open my heart.

It would make me feel the sense of contentment
in my heart, and joy even, I would say.

Do you think you might feel the same?

STUDENT: I totally know what you're talking
about, especially when my understanding
of the building is so,

is very deep and nuanced in ways that people
can't even understand the building themselves.

SHAMBHAVI: Yes,
imagine a person coming into that space
for the first time, and all the hundreds of things

that you've done to make that space cleaner
and safer and more accessible and more beautiful.

Even the things they don't notice
or don't know anything about.
Mm-hmm.

That's really the best thing we can do against all
the cruelty that's happening in the world,
to take care of each other in this way.

STUDENT: Sometimes taking care
of each other means asking first.

I often think the gold standard of access intimacy
is, as you're saying, think ahead and anticipate,
which means, in my mind, don't ask.

But actually, I want people to ask.

I like it when people ask.

SHAMBHAVI: There's a little weird area we get
into sometimes where we want to be
the person who helps other people.

And then we start doing stuff for other people
that they don't actually want done or
they don't want it done in that way.

[laughs] There's a lot of times when
we have to ask, "I'd like to do this.

Is this okay?" Or, "How would you like this done?"
Or, "Would this help you
or not?" Yeah, absolutely.

The pre-thought is that we even thought of it.
Like…
Yeah.

Right?
Right.

But if we get into this thing where we're
the helper and we're gonna be admired and loved
for this, then it gets really cringey.

Mm-hmm.
We have to understand that we're
doing this as a devotional practice.

This is not something we're doing
for the greater glory of us.

STUDENT: When we talk about opening our senses in this practice, I've been feeling cut off
from that in a way from my sleep issues.

Reading about this was just making me think about
that in maybe a more expansive way,
that I still can sense what's going on with other

people and relationships,
and that maybe I was like stuck in a more
superficial idea of opening the senses as only

being more alert to little
things that are happening.
Mm-hmm.

There's still so much I can do and cultivate
to work towards access intimacy as a goal.

Mm-hmm.
I'm curious if that sounds true to you,
or if there's something.

yeah, absolutely.

i’m not seeing about that.

SHAMBHAVI: Absolutely.
We're not trying to pin ourselves
to obvious sensory inputs in the present.

There's a much more oceanic
kind of sensing that's going on of much more
subtle things, including other people's feelings.

Absolutely.
It's a full volume thing.

It's happening in the volume of life, and it's
happening on levels of body and energy and heart.

STUDENT:
I can feel myself relishing this idea and seeing
how there's lots of ways where it would support me

if I was to receive that access
intimacy in.

[laughs]
And then I was just noticing,
I can see the slippery way that diminishing my own

needs without realizing it 'cause I'm
trying to support others' access needs.
Mm-hmm.

Trying to be like really accommodating
and supportive to those I'm in relationship with,
and how I actually need to maybe

do that a little bit less.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

SHAMBHAVI: I agree. There's a difference between

something that's sort
of bordering on codependence
and what we're talking about here.

I think that's a really good place for you
to think on and meditate on— where that difference
lies and how you can discern that in real time.

For sure.

STUDENT: I wanted to put my two cents
in the bucket, but, uh, the idea about not having
our preferences and brand be the separator

speaks to me, and I would like to work on that.

SHAMBHAVI: We spend a lot of time at this
point in this, in history and our culture
defining ourselves in various ways.

With our, our various identities and our
politics and who we are and how we are.

Wow, there's just so much stamping going on.

And, and then there's just ways in which human
beings have always tried to self-define and stick
to some version of themselves and insist on it,

but I think it's much worse now.

We all have a lot of work to do
in that area, including me. [laughs]

STUDENT:
Just being curious and listening to another person
talk about things that one may not be interested

in, that I may not be interested in,
that, that is a nice welcome.

SHAMBHAVI: Maybe you're not interested in what
they're talking about, but you're interested
in having them feel welcomed, right?

Mm-hmm.

STUDENT: So I was thinking about when I get
kind of like zzz vata-ed out and then
I miss details that often do it.

So it feels like motivation to be more settled so
that I can catch them,
'cause sometimes I don't have that much motivation

to be more settled, but this
feels like good motivation.

SHAMBHAVI: See if you can go along that path
of including to the point where you feel enjoyment
at how those people are gonna feel

when you make those offerings.
Mm-hmm.

'Cause for me, that's the end point.

And I'm not doing this like
deliberately or anything.
Yeah.

This is sort of just all happening in a moment.
Mm-hmm.

It's like tasting food.

I'm tasting people's feeling of joy,
or relaxation, or comfort or being cared for.

So see if you can get to that
point and then you've gone.

mm-hmm.

as far as you need to go, I think.

STUDENT: Well, it's more like Charandas’
birthday last year, where I actually thought about
people that wouldn't be able to walk that far

to where we wanted to have a thing,
and I was like, "We can do a little carpool
with my trike." But then I just

didn't actually write that [down] .

SHAMBHAVI: There are a couple of people in
the community, at least, who have ADHD diagnoses.

And there are definitely people in the community
who get annoyed with those people when they forget
something, or they don't complete something,

or they're chronically scatterbrained.

So we wanna make room for those people.

We wanna make room for those people to be able
to function and feel the value of their
contributions to this community whether or not

they're causing a little
extra work for other people.

STUDENT: What you said about ADHD makes me

wonder if there are kinds of access that are less
intimate in this community than, than some others.

Things that we're maybe not
thinking about in this way- Uh-huh.
…

that we should start thinking about in this way.
I don't have one in mind.

'Cause I feel like a lot of the kind of physical
energy, accessibility things, a lot of us are
more in the habit now of considering- Mm-hmm.

…
more than we were a couple years ago.

SHAMBHAVI: Yeah, absolutely.

STUDENT: I was holding what you were
talking about, that it's not equal.

You started to talk about that and I loved.

.
.
how we can work with that more skillfully?

SHAMBHAVI: Yeah, I was talking about the sort
of two levels of talking about belonging.

And obviously, in a day-to-day way on the level
of culture, and politics,
and justice, there is not equality.

There is not equal belonging.

And that we have to do very concrete things
together to correct that, ameliorate that.

But underneath that,
there is total belonging and equality
from the beginning, uninterrupted,

unacknowledged a lot of the time.

And how can we adjust our approaches so that we
assume primordial equality first rather
than continually marking inequality?

That was my question to myself a few years
ago that I never really was able to answer.

And I think this is the first
start of me answering that.

But what I was saying in the talk that I was
giving was that we have to do both,
and we have to address inequality.

But then I almost feel like there's something that
essentializes that inequality if we're never
addressing the fact that

you already come with belonging.

You already come with total equality.

How can we start from there, right?

STUDENT: I just wanted to say thank you
to Matri, and Alexa, and Nirmana,
and everyone else in the room who's like been

the people there in Portland who have made
Jaya Kula the accessible community that it
at least seems to be from across the country.

Knowing that you all mask and test,
and that when I would be physically able,
that I could come there and feel

safe is so special to me.

And just like knowing that that exists and even
anecdotally having shared it with other friends
who are also ill, just like knowing that there's

a place that honors that and it's
important to the community is just…

I don't know.

It like means a lot to me and like helps me go
through my day knowing that a lot of people put
in the work to make that happen

and that I get to benefit from it.

Just knowing that, I feel like
really, really deep gratitude.

SHAMBHAVI:
I just think it's so, so,
so important right now especially that we all try

in every way we possibly can individually and as
communities and organizations
to create zones of care—zones where

we're just deeply caring for each other.

Because we're just surrounded by lack of care.

Frankly, I think this is
why so many people are sick.

There's lots of illnesses and lots of breakdown
of people's immune systems, and there's
lots of things being caused environmentally.

And who knows what caused COVID,
but all of it was caused by lack of care.
All of it.

Lack of care for each other and lack
of care for our environment.

The real counteracting on that is
to actually insist on caring for each other.

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