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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
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: What would you like to hear about?
STUDENT: The words that came to me was memory.
What's memory?
And how does it impact
my expression in the present moment?
Well, in the Hindu traditions at large,
not specifically Trika, memory is considered
to be one of the functions of mind.
It's one of the components of mind.
Another one is the ability to discriminate.
We each have, I think,
a very unique relationship to memory.
We also have more or less access to a bigger
reservoir of memory than just
what's happened to us in this life.
For myself, I have only a sort of schematic
relationship to memory attached to this life.
My memory is a hop and a skip
through greatest hits.
It's not really very continuous.
And at this point in my life, there's a lot
of memories that just have very little charge.
Other people are very much impacted by memory.
And of course, this also relates
to what realms we like to hang out in.
Hungry Ghost is obviously the most
past-looking realm.
The realm for whom memory
and remembering things in a certain
way is most important to sense of self.
I would guess that at a certain stage of life,
it's not really a guess because I've gone through
aging with various people,
my parents and other people,
students, and now I'm in that stage.
There's a certain kind
of assessment that I think happens.
At a certain point people start assessing their
lives and looking back and assessing how they did.
What they're happy about, what they're not
happy about. That involves some memories also.
As we get more open in terms of our perceptions
because of doing sadhana,
I think there's more access to a greater field of,
I don't know if I want to call them memories
because I don't really know if they're
from the past, but there's definitely more access
to a greater field of inputs,
like what went into making this.
I used to call those past life memories,
but then I realized I don't actually know.
If we're talking about maha time or a bigger field
of time, where these things came from is
really not something we could decide.
But our reservoir of experiences,
let's just say experiences,
that goes to make up this incarnation is infinite
and as we do more sadhana we become more open
to those rising to the level of awareness.
I've talked about how
inconsequential most of those memories are.
How they're just sort of these random scenes
that don't seem to have any importance whatsoever.
But it does strike me how very, very different
different people's relationship to memory is.
Some people have a more or less continuous memory
of their lives, and they're very much involved
in that experience of continuous
or near continuous memory.
I've never had anything like that.
STUDENT: I wanted to ask about memory,
but in context of the experience of recognizing our own
nature. In our tradition, it's called recognition.
Sometimes it's called remembering.
How can that be more tangible?
SHAMBHAVI: It's really hard to answer that
because what's going through my mind is
all of those moments we have
when we encounter teachings,
maybe we just read them,
maybe we even just see something random
on the internet, maybe we come to a satsang,
maybe we listen to something online or some music,
maybe we start practicing,
maybe we just go
into an environment and something gets triggered.
But there are all these moments, I think,
in the lives of people who are centering
their life around recognition of some sort.
There are all these moments when we feel this is
it, or we feel a homecoming,
or we feel just weirdly moved.
Yearning just comes out of us.
It's like something that's already in us fully,
fully already there, that we have just
turned away from.
In a natural sense, I mean
not because we're bad or we did
anything wrong, but that's just how we're made.
We come in with a certain amount of what they
would say in Dzogchen,
being distracted from our real self.
But in there, there's just this feeling.
Every single person has this
feeling that something is missing.
We all have that feeling.
It's so uncanny that you could ask any person
on this planet, have you ever had this feeling
that there's just something missing,
but you don't know what it is?
And I bet you anyone who is not like so far off
the extreme end of the spectrum of
mental illness or something,
every single person is going to say yes.
Maybe people who do spiritual practice in the end
feel it more strongly,
but everybody feels the same thing
because we are missing contact with that.
We may be missing it a little.
We may be missing it a lot.
We may not even know what
it is that we're missing.
And so we might put together this laundry list
of things that we got from our cultures
that are going to
hopefully solve the problem of what's missing.
The spouse, the car, the house,
the job, the kids, whatever.
Whatever it is, the bank account,
the retirement account.
There are all these things that people attach
to in these really strong ways, thinking
that that's going to make them feel fulfilled.
It's quite extraordinary that we all have
the same experience to varying degrees.
And what Abhinavagupta says is that that sense
of what's missing and the yearning
to discover what's missing is shaktipat.
That's how he defines shaktipat.
Of course, he's in a Shaivite tradition,
so he says that is the grace of Lord Shiva,
that we feel that something's missing
and the yearning to discover what that is.
It's just such a beautiful thing that we still
have that longing for home
and we still have the home
already in us.
That's why we do so much
practice in the heart space.
But of course, the heart space is everywhere.
It's not really just inside of us.
So I think that in spiritual life,
and I've thought this since I started practicing,
we don't pay enough attention to the small
moments, especially in this tradition and other
like the kundalini yoga tradition and etc.
There's way too much emphasis
on these giant moments of realization.
And that means that we aren't appreciating or
paying attention to or even building on these
very small moments, these moments of grace.
For some reason, when I first started practicing
I just recognized how important these small
moments were
and how we could relax into those small
moments and deepen our sense of longing
or connection if that happened.
Of course, we can have bigger moments
of recognition, but to me,
it's also these little openings in the heart
where the thing that we've been
longing for appears or
we feel that longing really strongly
and we feel that sense of relief
if we can get more deeply into it.
And even if we lose it right away,
it's showing us what we actually care about
and value and what our lives are really about.
Everybody is touched by that.
And those of us who find a method and a path
and some help are very, very, very fortunate.
Consider your life without teachers,
without paths to try, without methods.
Oh my God, this place would just be unbearable.
STUDENT: Can you talk about desire and
fulfilling of it by choice and by happenstance
and then it not being fulfilled.
SHAMBHAVI: Well, the weird thing about
ordinary desires, the myriad, infinite numbers
of ordinary desires that we have,
is that when they are fulfilled is when
we realize they're not fulfilling. [laughs]
Let's say we have some pattern of something
we think is going to be fulfilling.
And for 20 years, we keep going to that thing,
thinking it will be fulfilling one of these times.
And it's not.
We keep going back because we have this very
strong samskara of thinking
that it will be fulfilling.
And, you know, we're just doing it wrong or we
didn't find the right circumstance
and we should try again.
Eventually, we find the right
circumstance and it's fulfilling.
And that's when we realize
it's not all that. [laughs]
It's just part of the hijinks of this
reality that that's how things work.
We complete a karma.
So let's say that this is a karma
of something around romantic love and sex.
This is a very common idea people have
that this is what I need to be fulfilled.
And eventually we have a really great relationship
with really great sex and we realize
it didn't fulfill everything.
We still have longing.
We still want something that we don't have.
And at that moment,
our relationship to romantic love changes.
It doesn't mean we can't have sex and love.
It just means our relation to it changes.
We no longer attach so much to it.
Or let's say we want fame or
acclaim or renown and we get it.
And we keep chasing it because we think we need
more of it because we're not fulfilled somehow.
So we keep chasing more.
But eventually, something feels satisfying.
We feel the satisfaction, and then it's done.
We don't care about it so much anymore.
[laughs] So it's a funny thing.
STUDENT: When we have feelings of angers that
we want to dispel, do you have suggestions
for ways to do so?
SHAMBHAVI: Anger is a feeling, and it's got
an incredible amount of energy behind it.
So there's a kind of anger that just kind
of erupts, clears the air, and then dissipates.
That's healthy anger.
Then there's another kind of anger that we get
stuck with, that kind of loops, that lives in us.
and can be very poisonous to ourselves to have
this kind of chronic resentment or chronic anger.
Your first way of dispelling this is to go
to a Chinese doctor or an Ayurvedic doctor
and get an evaluation of your constitution
and find out if
there's ways you can change your diet,
your lifestyle, maybe herbs, maybe acupuncture,
because a lot of this chronic anger has to do with
imbalances in the five elements showing up in us.
So that's really your first line of defense is
to try to balance yourself more to see
what happens in your level of anger.
Have you ever done that before?
No.
Okay.
So we have what's called a constitution.
And that constitution tends to
provoke certain emotions in us.
People with one kind of constitution,
when they're off balance, they might feel anxiety.
Another kind of constitution,
they might feel sadness or lethargy.
And another kind of constitution,
anger is going to be their go-to.
Frustration, annoyance, anger, that's going
to be where they go when they're out of balance.
If you've never considered these things,
it's likely that that you are eating in certain
ways and doing certain things that are
provoking upsurges of anger in you
that are just constitutional.
They're not really attached to anything that's
happened, although you have stories about it.
But you have anger, it's going
to find a story, basically. [laughs]
So really, your first line of defense was to get
some naturopathic health care from Chinese
doctor or an Ayurvedic doctor.
And then after that, you want to see
what's left, what's really left.
How much of that was dinner and how much
of that is something more chronic and that you
have to deal with in a different way.
STUDENT: I want to hear more about
hungry ghost and grief.
I guess it kind of sounded like you were saying
there's more attachment to your
own grief with hungry ghost.
SHAMBHAVI: So hungry ghost realm
vision means you feel something is missing or
has been missed or hasn't gone right.
So that same feeling we all have,
but your identity or your sense of self gets
perpetuated around
cultivating that feeling that something
is missing or lost or that you're blocked
from something.
Hungry ghost doesn't mean that you feel something
is missing and you want to fill that void.
Hungry ghost means you're attached to the void.
So you're perpetuating a feeling
of loss, grief, FOMO, etc. [laughs]
And this becomes a way of forming
relationships with other people.
Many, many different ways.
But if someone's really got a strong pattern
like this, their relationships will be built on
magnetizing people into trying to
fulfill their needs,
which they'll never be good enough at it.
Or they'll form relationships with people
that they're always chasing after who aren't
fulfilling their needs so that they can reenact
the drama of not getting what they need.
So feelings of sadness are the strongest
feelings and they're perpetuated.
All of the realms try to perpetuate themselves.
This is not unique to Hungry Ghost.
STUDENT: I have a question about pouncing
on things when you notice them.
I feel like sometimes I experience some type
of insight or I notice something
and I can see it more clearly.
And then I'm wondering what
are ways to soak that in more?
Like sometimes I wonder if I should book an office
hours just with you just to like tell you
what I'm thinking about or journaling orâ
SHAMBHAVI: Sure, you can do that.
But you know, when you say sometimes you have
insights, that covers a lot of territory. [laugh]
I can't really like give one
answer about what you should do.
But I know that stopping, pausing,
and paying more attention to it is important.
You're not just thinking, oh, I'm busy.
I'll pay attention to that next week.
Because by next week,
you'll have forgotten about it.
So yes, you could make an office hour.
You could do sadhana.
But it's specific to whatever each situation is.
There's not one answer to what you should do.
But please do feel free to share those things.
STUDENT: That gave me a little more
clarity about it.
LIke I think to make an office hours if I'm
having a problem or ask a question if
there's something I feel stuck on.
But if there's something that I'm like, oh,
I'm actually feeling less stuck about this,
but I want to be in that more,
then I like just keep it to myself or something.
SHAMBHAVI: Mmhmm. You don't need to do that.
You don't need to keep it to yourself.
Nobody has ever bugged me as a student
as much as I bugged my teachers.
Nobody. [laughs]
Not even by half.
STUDENT: Did they ever get annoyed
with your teachers, Shambhavi?
SHAMBHAVI: No, not as far as I know.
But maybe they just didn't tell me.
STUDENT: I have a question. I work in tech
and people over at Microsoft and Google
they tell me the executives just see this world
as kind of like managers managing agents
like AI agents
and I'm worried. I'm worried because of the loss
of critical thinking, the loss of collaboration
there's just like this constant renegotiation of
humanity to fit whatever this stupid zeitgeist is
and I don't see the end in sight.
I'm concerned and I'm just wondering what
do you make of this time right now?
SHAMBHAVI: I am troubled but I'm not worried.
I feel angst but I'm not afraid. I don't really
want to go through this but I know that everything
here is wisdom.
Everything here is wisdom.
And we're in a destructive phase.
And what happens when we're in a destructive
phase is we get to see ourselves more clearly.
We get broken down and we get to see
who we really are more clearly.
What is actually being destroyed is all
of our dumb concepts about everything.
What is this forcing most of us who are
involved in this kind of thing to do?
It's forcing us to cleave more to God or to wisdom
or to our own goodness or
whatever way you want to say it.
We're hanging on for dear life. [laughs]
And that's what we're supposed to be doing.
I think we should express ourselves
however we want to in this time.
But I think we should just take extra care
to really talk to each other, inquire after
each other, and be generous with each other.
That's what I think we should be doing.
We really only have one job,
which is to cleave to our goodness.
I don't want to call it humanity
because I just think that's so specious.
Just cleave to our goodness,
which is everyone's goodness.
If you're at work, ask the office admin, you know,
get them into a conversation,
really inquire after how they're doing and
really look at everyone and talk to everyone and
share with everyone and be generous with everyone,
especially strangers
and show everyone your goodness.
That's what you should be doing.
Okay, we're just going to end here.
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.
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