Loneliness, Soloness, and Completion

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.

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Shambhavi Sarasvati is the spiritual director of Jaya Kula, a nonprofit organization offering opportunities to practice in the traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.

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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: I had a thought yesterday related to
something I've talked about a little bit before.

When I was studying with my teachers,
some of the questions I had just felt
like they were not okay to ask in public.

Or they were even questions I had
that scared me, let alone might
upset my teachers in some way.

One of them that I remember was, is God lonely?
The singleness of this reality,
that it is one consciousness,

made me wonder is this reality,
this alive awareness, is it lonely?

And after I had more experience,
I realized that couldn't possibly be true.

But it occurred to me yesterday

that when we're experiencing loneliness,
we're experiencing the singleness,

the one quality, the one-self quality, but without

contact with the nature of the self as continuous.

A lot of my teachings are based on this experience
that everything's on a continuum,

that everything that we find here
is to be found in the whole, right?

It's some stepped down or more contracted or more
limited version of whatever God
is or whatever this reality is.

And I always also wondered that about loneliness.

What continuum is loneliness on?

I didn't have an answer for that,
but I get that now.

Loneliness is soloness, but contracted.

When we experience loneliness, we experience
ourselves as especially gapped, you know?

We feel more isolated.

We feel there's more space around us somehow.

But imagine experiencing oneness that is
a continuity or a completion, a completedness,

where that oneness fills everything
and there's no gap anywhere.

We're missing that experience,
most of us, at least a lot of the time.

When that oneness becomes liberated,
it discovers that it's everywhere
and that there's a fullness everywhere.

So we could think of fullness as just being
everything everywhere,
but that would be not really precise.

Because that oneness is producing,
that creative, alive reality is producing

everything that appears out
of itself, like reflections arising
in a mirror, and even space and time.

So our experience of everywhere is also
conditioned by our sense of ordinary space.

I think it would be more precise to say
that the fullness of this reality that it
discovers, even in its soloness,

is a feeling of completion, of nothing missing,
the feeling of being complete in and of itself.

And in that condition,
you can't really feel loneliness.

So there's the experience of there being
nothing else, but also completeness.

When we think in our contracted,
limited way of there being nothing else but us,
that would be a horrible thought, right?

That would be a thought that would provoke a lot
of fear or suffering if we thought, oh,
I'm the only one here. [laughs]

That would be awful for most of us.

Maybe not for all of us, but most of us.

So we don't have the experience of completeness,
of being complete in and of ourselves
just because of what we are.

We also don't have the experience of pleasure

that is everywhere in the natural state,
and I don't wanna use that word too lightly.

I'm trying to find one word that really
points to a whole lot of different things.

Maybe enjoyment.
We don't have the sense of enjoyment,
is a better word.

Enjoyment shows up as a sense
of wonder at one's own nature.

It shows up as playfulness.

It shows up as taking everything
that it's made as playfulness.

When we have that more contracted experience
of soloness, we're experiencing loneliness,
and everything seems very heavy,

and we often lose our sense of playfulness.

So that sense that everything that's here could be

enjoyed in a playful way,
and that that's part of the completed feeling

or completion feeling of all of reality.

In our contracted condition,
we lose access to those things sometimes.

I mean, not all the time.

Even the most depressed person can be enticed
into a tickle fest every now and then.

But I wanted to share that,

that our loneliness is actually a version
of that soloness of all of reality,

but just in a more contracted way.

This explains why, as we go along,
becoming more perceptive,
and therefore being able to participate more

in the actual wisdom qualities of that whole,
and feeling more integrated, more connected,
it's why we stop feeling so lonely.

It's why that sense of existential
loneliness goes away.

I mean, we might be sitting thinking,
I wish I had someone to do this, that, or
the other thing with.

We might experience that.
We would, of course.

But that sort of underlying sense of desperate
existential loneliness goes away because
that sense of soloness is not aloneness anymore,

or it's not incompletion.

When we feel that desperate sense of loneliness,
we're basically having an insight that there's
something missing, that we feel incomplete.

That's a real insight.

That's actually true.

I mean, on a relative level, right?

And of course, our cultures supply

many, many answers to the question of what
is going to make me feel less lonely,
or what is gonna make me feel more complete.

So we have many answers supplied to us,
and then we buy into those answers,
of course, because there's no alternatives.

Most of us grow up in some kind of culture of some
sort, whether it's our family, or religion,

or larger culture, some philosophical something
or other, some approach that basically leaves us

feeling that the answer to that existential
loneliness is something quite ordinary.

I don't know how many parents tell their toddlers,
you'll feel less lonely when you realize you're
all of reality. [laughs]

Maybe there's some, but you know, not that many.

So what is the point of sharing this?

STUDENT: At this moment in time,
I think there's a lot of people feeling lonely
because of what's going on in the world.

SHAMBHAVI: Do you think there's any effect
of reframing loneliness this way?

STUDENT: Yeah.
Having something else outside of me as
a touchstone or something to point to.

Even just calling it soloness versus loneliness.

Having a bigger view always helps.

SHAMBHAVI: Right. There is a soloness that is
the enlightened version of loneliness.

Anything smaller is impermanent.

People try to take refuge, and particularly
they try to take refuge in relationships.

You have some idea that there's gonna be
a relationship that's gonna complete you or that's
going to ameliorate that loneliness forever.

It might ameliorate some
of the loneliness for some time.

But if you're a sensitive person,
even if you have a wonderful family
or a wonderful set of relationships,

at some point you're gonna
notice that you still feel wanting,
if you're a sensitive person.

And that's a good thing to notice.

That's a very good thing to notice.

STUDENT: I think I relate to this topic because
the word completeness speaks to me more
than being everywhere all at once.

So the soloness that you're talking about,
the enlightened form of it, like,
I feel it's refreshing that I can experience

some flavor of it when I feel complete.

Which reminds me of the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra.
SHAMBHAVI: Absolutely.
Good point.

The experiences of completeness or repleteness
is available to us now in a smaller way.

Obviously, it's not available
to us in some giant cosmic way.

Not very many of us, anyway.

But in the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra,
it gives instructions for ways to experience
completeness, contentment in ordinary life.

And for some of those dharanas,
it says at the end, "And now you will be more like
Lord Shiva."

So you're kind of practicing being
more like Lord Shiva.

For example, after listening to a beautiful piece
of music, relax and meditate
on the feeling of contentment.

After eating a satisfying meal,
relax after the meal and meditate on the feeling
of fullness or completion or contentment.

After having sex, good sex,
relax afterwards and meditate on the feeling
of completeness or satisfaction.

The tantra says, "And now you will be more like
Lord Shiva, who is always resting
in that contented state."

It's part of the beauty of this tradition
and the mercy of this reality

that those kinds of experiences that are in full
measure in the enlightened state are also
available to us in our cranky, crabby state.

[laughs]

Or fearful state,
whatever state we happen to be in.

We have to remember that, though.

If we separate spiritual life from ordinary life,
we lose a lot of that.

We don't remember to approach
ordinary life that way.

If we think there's some difference between
spiritual life and regular old life,
then we might lose a bunch of opportunities.

This thing about being ubiquitous,
being everywhere, I don't think
I've articulated this before, but

I have sometimes said
the experience of space
and time are relative experiences.

But that also means
that there's no ubiquitousness.

There is completion or there's a fullness
that includes all those possibilities.

But whether there's actually any
literal space or not, I doubt it.

There's just an experience of that.

STUDENT: There's a flashiness to how
the blue sky after sunset is, like
on a moonlit night like last night.

Even though it is far and distant,
like, it's so alive.

I don't know.
The color.

The dark is so active, like alive.

SHAMBHAVI: The dark is very alive.
STUDENT: Yeah.
SHAMBHAVI: Absolutely.

STUDENT: But it causes you to feel
complete in your soloness.

The feeling is over here.
SHAMBHAVI: Mm-hmm.

STUDENT: So the feeling is never far away.

SHAMBHAVI: No. We just have to remember to let
ourselves pause to feel it. That's the trick.

We're often just distracted by all of our ideas
about life, and what's important,
and what's a priority.

Or we're just on autopilot a lot,
doing things that seem normal and right.

But we're really just on autopilot.

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by Jaya Kula, a nonprofit community offering
opportunities to learn and practice

in the direct realization traditions
of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.

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