Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 non-profit 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: Could you talk about Ganesha as the
creator and remover of obstacles?
SHAMBHAVI: Ganesha is the deity in Hinduism
that has the head of an elephant
and the body of a human.
Ganesha has many, many different
qualities and different forms.
We had a little mini teaching on
Ganesha a few days ago with some people.
And I was saying that Ganesha
has male forms, female forms,
half-male, half-female forms.
He's a lounger and an eater of sweets,
and he's also a consummate yogi.
He's both celibate and has two wives.
He's a dancer and a writer and a musician.
He's really colorful and
friendly and playful.
In this tradition, we relate to the
deities as mentors or friends or tutors.
We're not trying to become deities like
in some other traditions, that might be
the case, but we relate to the deities
as sort of wisdoms writ large that
we can explore with the help of the
deity and then discover in ourselves.
That's really how we are
doing deity practice.
When we start to do something like
Ganesha sadhana or doing a mantra for Ganesha
or something, we want to start
reading about them and learning about them
so that we can get a sense of
what wisdoms are they embodying that
speak to us most at this point in time.
And when we're trying to figure something
like that out, it's always important,
for instance, if we're reading a book about
Ganesha, what really jumps out at us?
What grabs us? What magnetizes us?
And that's what we want to focus on first.
The deities are aspects of wisdom just
like we are, but they are a little less
encumbered than we are with karmas.
And those wisdoms are aspects of reality.
They're part of the intelligences
and movements of reality.
One of the areas of our life that Lord
Ganesha governs, or actually is,
has to do with obstacles in our lives.
And of course, in our culture we keep
saying that he's the remover of obstacles.
Well, that's really wishful
thinking, because obstacles
are also made of wisdom.
When we have obstacles in our lives,
it's always a possibility whether or
not we take that possibility or have
the awareness to take that possibility,
it's always a possibility to bring
those obstacles onto our path and
try to mine the wisdom, try to learn
the wisdoms that are being communicated
us, to us through those obstacles.
So Lord Ganesha, as one of the aspects
of wisdom that's explicitly trying
to help us to grow and self-realize,
is the lord of obstacles, putting
obstacles on our path that are helpful
to us, and that hopefully we have the
awareness in that moment to recognize.
And then when those obstacles
resolve, that's also an aspect
of the wisdom of Lord Ganesha.
So, we could say he's the lord of
obstacles, but I think it's more
accurate to say that he is the obstacle.
He is the obstacle arising in our path,
and he is the obstacle as it dissipates
or unwinds in some way or another.
And he's instructing us by relating to
a personification of obstacles, like
this is a personification of obstacles.
What does that really get us?
Well, first of all, it's in line
with the View of this tradition
that all of reality is a self.
All of reality is that one Self that
has the power, the shakti, to appear
as many, many, many, many, many selves.
When we have a personification of
all of reality like Lord Shiva, or we
have a personification of an aspect
of reality like Lord Ganesha, we can
then relate to it in a different way.
It's easier for many of us to relate
to a personification of something
than to just some formless, nameless
thing, or some more abstract idea
or philosophy of something or other.
It's easier if we have a
character to relate to.
And we can also feel more
friendly toward that.
For instance, we don't want to feel
that our obstacles are put upon us
in some unfair way that we are just
gonna continually rail against, right?
Every situation has wisdom,
even the most horrible ones.
Now, of course, we have to be
pretty far along in the process
of waking up in order to recognize
the wisdom in something like being
incarcerated in a concentration camp.
You might think, "Wow,
there's just no wisdom there.
That's just torture.
That's just pain and suffering."
But that isn't the case.
There's no situation that is
inherently only one thing to everyone.
There are people on this planet who
have been tortured and incarcerated
unfairly, unjustly, starved, raped,
many, many other things, who
because of who they were and the condition they
were in, they were able to discover the
wisdom and grow in those situations.
Obviously, that's not true for
everybody. But I think it's true
for more people than we think.
And we were talking about this last
week, most people who have some
awareness, some self-reflective
awareness, are able to discern the
wisdom in difficult situations.
You know, many, many
people have illnesses.
I mean, everybody has an illness.
And many people who have serious illnesses
at some point end up feeling,
"Oh, I'm happy I got that illness because
I learned so much, I grew so much. And
I wouldn't have grown like that if I
didn't get that illness, or my house
burnt down," or something like that.
We've talked about this often.
So when you have an obstacle,
first of all, you think of it as Lord Ganesha.
That puts an entirely
different take on it.
Like, you just reorient.
If you have an obstacle in your life,
you don't get a job that you want,
or it's difficult to get a job, or
something you're trying to do isn't
working out, or you have a disaster,
or somebody you know gets hurt, if you
immediately think of that as Lord Ganesha,
what effect is that going to have?
You're going to immediately start
looking for the wisdom in that situation.
You're going to be thrown out
of your normal karmic ways of
relating to difficulties, which is
basically to be upset, or complain,
or say how unfair things are.
And I'm not saying we should not be
sad, or that we should not be scared,
or that we should not feel very,
very deeply about things and very
uncomfortable, deep feelings about
things, but the idea that there's
something wrong is what Lord Ganesha and
other deities show us is not the case.
It may be painful, it may be shattering,
it may be hard for you to digest,
it may be overwhelming, it may make
your life very, very difficult,
but there's nothing actually wrong.
This is just how life is.
And every single thing that we
encounter has wisdom in it, every
single thing, every circumstance,
every other person, everything.
And including our own limitations
are also made of wisdom.
So again, this is not an
opportunity for spiritual bypassing.
Just because we say there's nothing
wrong or there are no actual problems,
or things are not problematic I
guess is a better way of saying that,
that does not mean we don't have the
full range of feelings about them.
Even if we can't stop ourselves from
feeling rage at the machine [laughs]
or whatever we feel, we should still
have in our back pocket,
"This is Lord Ganesha too," or, "This is just
reality expressing itself too," whatever
way you want to say it to yourself,
even if we're swept up in our karmas
or feeling how unjust everything is.
You know, I think about this a lot right
now because there's people on social media
that I'm friends with or that are
following me who are in yogic traditions,
or maybe they're even spiritual teachers,
or somehow they're practitioners, and
some of them are in nondual traditions,
so-called, and because circumstances are
very, very difficult, they are saying
things online about people being evil
and groups of people being evil, and this
kind of talk which is completely outside
of the View of any nondual tradition.
It doesn't mean we can't be upset and
angry about things, but we can't dismiss
anything as evil or inherently wrong
or inherently it shouldn't be this way.
It is this way.
It doesn't make any difference whether
you think it should or shouldn't be. It is.
We're just working with
those circumstances.
And it's interesting that we
often just leave our traditions at
the door when we encounter very,
very difficult circumstances.
I hope that at least the people in
Jaya Kula will remember, at least in
a back-pocket kind of way, that this
isn't the right orientation for us.
We are actually called upon to work
with things, not to dismiss them,
or cordon them off, or put them in a
black box, or consign them to evilness
or demon-ness or something like that.
In the Hindu traditions, demons exist.
Demons actually do exist, and there are
many stories about demons who become great
practitioners and have great realization.
That should tell us something.
STUDENT: I just did an abolitionist workshop,
and I was thinking about in relation to
what we were talking about there, and
the prison-industrial complex, and the
good-versus-evil dichotomy, and I want
to hear what you have to say as, like,
alternatives where someone's in a state
where they are a risk to other people.
SHAMBHAVI: For those who aren't aware, the
abolitionist movement means abolition
of the prison-industrial complex.
The whole concept of punishment,
first of all, makes no sense to me personally,
nor does it make any
sense with regard to this tradition.
And it's important to understand that
that starts at the top because the gods
of this tradition and in Hinduism
in general are not punishing gods.
They're not operating on an axis
of punishment and reward the same
way that the Abrahamic gods are.
So it's a really different
universe in that sense.
And there's a lot of fierceness,
but it is not punishment, and
everyone is always redeemable.
This is just written throughout
the whole Hindu tradition.
I think it's one of the most
beautiful things about it, and
also something very much in keeping
with how I've felt in my life.
So what comes to mind is some kind
of harm reduction model like we have
for people who are using substances,
right, where you're just doing what you
need to do to reduce harm, but it has
nothing to do with locking people up.
I mean, that language
in and of itself, right?
People might have to be sequestered
or taken care of in some way that they
don't get to harm other people. But the
whole idea of prison needs to go away.
If we really want what one other
teacher called vertical change, not just
horizontal change, we have to start caring
about each other more in a real way.
And that means someone needs
to be sequestered because
they're really harmful.
That means they're going to be sequestered
in a really comforting situation.
You know, in some place that makes
them feel good as much as is possible,
giving them as much access
to community as is feasible, and
just being treated with kindness.
I mean, those are really the medicines.
The different karmas that we have,
including karmas that cause us to do great harm,
no one person and no one modality
has the power to cure all those things.
I'm not making any big claim about all
these people could be rehabilitated.
Maybe that's not true, and
I'm sure it isn't true because
everything has its time and place.
But I do know that actual kindness, and
actual care, and actual kind community
can go a long way to ameliorating a
lot of these things that are going on
with people psychologically.
To me, that's a harm reduction model.
And also making sure if someone can't be
around other people in a free way because
they would kill them, then, you know,
how can we make this person feel loved
and feel as comfortable as possible?
The thing about that is that you have
to actually love the person, right? [laughs]
And that, to me, that's the political
question of our entire species.
How can we love people
who do harmful things?
How can we love people who annoy us?
How can we love everyone?
The only answer I've ever found to that
question is doing some kind of spiritual practice
because, done to its completion,
that's what it leads to, loving everyone.
Aside from that grand goal, we could
still have an education system and a
culture and a way of being together
that fosters more kindness toward each
other that's genuine, even if it doesn't
amount to universal love and compassion.
[laughs] That might be
too tall of an order.
But I do think that's where justice
really falls on its face and where
it becomes, you know, it's good if
we had more justice, but is that...
It, to me, that feels very horizontal
because then this other stuff can
just erupt at any moment if we don't
actually care about each other and
care about the world that we live in.
Those of you who've been around
for a while have heard me rant
about this many, many times. [laughs]
But that's what we're trying to do.
It... That's what I'm trying to do in
my life, is give people vehicles and
tools for actually caring about each
other, and then everything just kind of
flows from that because compassion and
caring and kindness are not protocols.
You can't just read a self-help
book and become more compassionate.
Actually, compassion is everywhere.
It's built into the fabric of reality,
and we have to find some way to tap
into that, and then compassion can
be real and kindness can be real.
It's a completely
different orientation.
Unfortunately, you know, it's
bigger than any revolution and
it's bigger than any justice
movement, but this is what we need.
We have these aspirations in
human beings and other animals.
There is this aspiration to real kindness
because we're made of that, even if
it's blocked, even to the point of being
a mass murderer, it's still in there.
So, somehow we have to reorient over time
or maybe millennia, who knows,
toward that, and then we can have real change.
Maybe that's a new uga.
But slowly, slowly,
we'll try to get there.
I've sometimes talked about communities
like this, where we're really trying
to open to that and discover that for
reals, not just fake it or, you know,
have some sort of way we're behaving.
STUDENT: To follow up on what you were
saying before about the obstacles that
we receive,
in the Judeo-Christian
model, there's this idea of,
like, you reap what you sow.
The things that happen to
you are very specific to you.
Is it the View of this tradition
that the specific obstacles that
I have are sort of designed to help me
through my specific karmic problems,
or is it just that, you know-
SHAMBHAVI: You randomly bump into stuff.
STUDENT: Yeah, you're just throwing the
obstacles out there [laughs] randomly.
Obstacle hits us.
SHAMBHAVI: Obstacle-generating machine!
STUDENT: Yeah.
It's like, you know, any
of those can help us.
It's just random which one we get.
SHAMBHAVI: There's nothing random and
there's also nothing determined.
Everything is a conversation.
You are doing stuff and you are speaking
and you are acting and you are being
responded to in a very specific way,
just like in a regular conversation.
So the regular conversation that we're
having right now is on a spectrum with the
conversation that God is having with you.
It's on a spectrum with the conversation
that all of reality is having with you.
So it's very, very specific,
but it's call and response.
So it's not action and reaction,
it's not punishment and reward.
What's the other phrase people use?
STUDENT: Cause and effect?
SHAMBHAVI: Cause and effect.
It's not cause and effect.
We are having a conversation, and if we
tried to describe this conversation as
cause and effect, and I said,
"Well, I spoke, so Avi spoke,
and then I spoke because Avi spoke,
and then Avi spoke because I spoke"â
I mean, we really would not be
saying much about that situation.
[laughs] So the language of cause
and effect is not very useful
I don't think, and it gives a very
wrong impression because we are
an aspect of a vast intelligence.
Everything here is vastly intelligent
beyond any of our imagining.
We can encounter that intelligence, but we
can't wrap our minds around it [laughs].
It is responding intelligently.
We can say that.
It's responding specifically,
just like in a conversation.
It's also everywhere and that wisdom is
everywhere and we are always constantly
encountering it in everything, but we
just don't notice it in everything.
In its vast intelligence, one of the
mechanisms that this alive aware reality
has set up to get your attention is to
have this, like, weird person sitting in
a chair talking to you about this stuff.
Like, that's a mechanism, because
if this didn't exist, you might not
be paying attention in the same way.
There are circumstances being orchestrated
to get you in the conversation more
but then there's other conversations happening
that you are just not noticing. At all.
As you go along and as you do the enormous
amount of practice you're doing... [laughs]
your perceptions are gonna
become more subtle and you're gonna
notice more aspects of the conversation.
I've sometimes talked about the time,
I guess I was in my 40s,
so long ago, unbelievable! But I had just
started noticing this bigger feeling
of constantly being communicated to,
and I just felt like I was in some
sort of panopticon, where that's like
this, you know, a society where I was
being watched all the time [laughs].
And I really freaked out.
There was, like, no escape from
the eye of this cosmic guru.
I remember talking to a friend of
mine who's a Buddhist practitioner
and I was actually crying, like, it
was so intense, and he just thought
I was, I was being ridiculous.
He said, "You can't expect me to feel
sorry for you about this, can you?"
[laughter]
so you have that to look forward to.
STUDENT: Yay.
SHAMBHAVI: 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 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.