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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.
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, Jayakula.
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: I wanted to ask you to talk about
being prepared and the energy to bring to being
ready for an escalation of violence.
SHAMBHAVI: if you're being a practitioner,
your number one preparedness is that you
are going to protect your practice.
I was thinking about this just the other day
that especially in these traditions where
they tend to be a little rough and tumble
and there's lots of stories about
extraordinary spiritual awakenings of sorts,
there's always a subset of people in these traditions,
usually young men but not exclusively,
who are very excited about
personal spiritual accomplishment.
They're very excited about
having esoteric experiences.
They're very excited about
being a great spiritual person.
There's always that element in these traditions.
It's not the fault of contemporary culture either.
It's the fault of these traditions.
Because if you go back and read the literature,
when I say literature,
I mean scripture and commentaries and things like that,
especially as we move forward in time,
but starting a long time ago,
There is a protagonist that is often talked about
in these traditions,
and that protagonist is called veera, hero.
That's definitely a male protagonist and someone
who has great spiritual accomplishment.
And that is in terms of powers that they have.
So that figure of the veera,
the heroic practitioner, has been in these
kinds of traditions for a very long time.
And there's some subset of people practicing in
these traditions for whom that's why they're here.
That's what they want.
Unfortunately for them and many other people
who buy into that, what these traditions
are actually for is being more like God.
being more like the natural state,
being more like Lord Shiva,
being more unencumbered and unconditioned.
And when you are more like Lord Shiva,
you are less for yourself and more for others.
The fruit of the practice is not to have
a self-image as a great practitioner or to be
known for spiritual powers or
to be blithering on about one's spiritual
experiences and all the things.
My Kundalini rose.
I healed somebody.
I did this.
I did that.
I did the other.
I heard this teacher talking the other day about
them achieving realization
and their mind is free of thoughts.
And I was like, who cares?
Really? [laugh]
If that was what this was about,
I would have been out of here a few decades ago. [laugh]
In any case, not to diss the tradition,
because there are also many other scriptures
and writings and commentaries
where devotion and being for others
is the main point.
But we don't have to read it in a book.
When we have contact with the
natural state, we learn this.
That's what we learn.
That there is a fundamental beneficence
and compassion built into reality.
And if we are actually in touch with that,
that's what we are caring about.
So whether you withdraw or go sit on a mountain or
move to Costa Rica, [laugh]
Or whether you get more involved
or make your house into a sanctuary
for people running from ice.
Whatever you do,
as long as you are being in the state of your
practice and you're able to do that,
and that whatever you're doing is helping you
to grow in your practice,
that's what you should be doing.
Because that's what will lead you to be
of the most benefit going forward.
We think of benefit in very narrow ways.
We have to help in these very specific ways.
But that's not true.
That's really not true.
There are many, many ways that we can
give and be of assistance and help others.
But we really can't know what's the best thing
to do in any particular circumstance
unless we're more awake.
Otherwise, we're sort of more or less following
a pro forma or some concept that we have, which we
should do until we have more direct knowledge.
But the point is to get more direct knowledge.
Each person's going to have
to decide that for themselves.
STUDENT: I think I'm most scared of this stuff when I
imagine going through it alone and actually
imagining going through it with all of you.
That's something different.
SHAMBHAVI: I agree with that 100%.
Community is paramount.
And also lack of community is part of what
is enabling all of what's happening.
So when we are relying on each other and forming
community and centralizing community in our lives,
That is medicine.
What if it looks like there
could be a nuclear war?
What if the bombs start dropping?
What should we do?
And definitely the first thing
that comes to my mind is gather.
If we're going to die,
let's just do that together.
I want to make a video about honesty and how
much more important honesty is right now.
Those of you that have studied with me
for a while, you know that in Ayurveda,
honesty is a protector of and builder of ojas.
ojas is both the essence of kapha dosha and also
the essence of all the dhatus
of all the tissues in our body.
And it is related to our immune
system on a bunch of different levels.
So our actual immune system,
like we would think of it normally in medical
terms,
but also our subtle immune system
and our subtle immune system.
In other words, for that would be resiliency.
and the ability to maintain some sense of value
and even cheerfulness in the face of
difficult circumstances and our ability to
roll through difficult circumstances without
being completely depleted and destroyed by them.
Honesty is number one in medicine
that helps to preserve and build our ojas.
Right now, we're living in a sea of dishonesty.
We're basically suffocating
or drowning in dishonesty.
And that is hurting our immunity.
That is hurting our resilience.
That is hurting our optimism.
It's hurting our ability to feel like
we can do anything about anything.
And to what degree it's hurting that being
in the sea of lies and gaslighting
It depends on our doshas.
If we're more balanced, we're more able to go
through this without being utterly depleted by it.
But if we're not, or if we have certain dosha
combinations, it's going
to affect us more severely.
We can do a very powerful thing to prepare,
but I think not just prepare,
but move through is more what I'm thinking.
We can do a very powerful thing,
which is commit ourselves to being honest.
commit ourselves to surrounding ourselves
with honest people and demanding
honesty from the people around us.
The last thing that we need is more subterfuge,
more manipulation, more lies,
more hiding things that shouldn't be hidden.
We can commit ourselves to honesty and to being
in environments with other people
who are committed to honesty.
Now, Ayurveda doesn't only say
that ojas is only about honesty.
It's about eating properly for our constitution,
just living in a way that is supportive
of our body, energy, and mind.
And we can do that on a micro
level to some degree.
And we can't really do
that on a macro level right now.
That's the whole problem.
We're living in an environment where the lack
of care and the abundance
of cruelty is hurting us for sure.
But we can make a commitment,
a deeper commitment to honesty,
demanding honesty from each other,
and also eating better and
sleeping as best we can and all that.
So we should do that to prepare and survive
whatever that's going to look like.
STUDENT: What is demanding honesty
of others look like to you?
SHAMBHAVI: That's a very complex question
because I have a very strong relationship to honesty
and I have often been very disturbed by
people's lack of honesty in my life.
But in any case, what it would look like now
at this point in this moment in history would be
reminding people that we're all
suffering from the dishonesty all around us
and I want to be around honest people.
Can you manage that?
That's what it looked like for me.
Like putting my ask in context
of what's happening.
Do any of us really need more lies in our life?
Do any of us really need to be more manipulated?
I mean, if you do, great. [laugh]
but I really, really, really, really don't. [laugh]
STUDENT: As many of you know, I grew up in
an apocalyptic cult and the apocalypse is often used
like as a scapegoat to not do the hard work
of creating the world that we want to create.
And coming together in a community that we were
speaking to earlier, it's easy to feel like
We have to hunker down and get all the water,
get all the materials, and all of our energy goes
to that, as opposed to creating true relationships
with each other and things that are supportive
in the moment, not supportive
in some imagined future.
SHAMBHAVI: Thank you for sharing that.
I really appreciate that.
So many thoughts are coming to mind when you were
talking, one of which is that the Trump
administration is deliberately trying to create
a sense of chaos and impending disaster in order
to, I guess, have a reason to take
over in a more militaristic way.
Lots of people are talking about that online
and people are strategizing how to not
play into that as much as they can.
The other layer, though,
is that we're in real destruction.
It's not just the spector of destruction.
And it causes us to reexamine
What's important to us?
What is of real value?
If you think of the Mahabharata,
there are six Pandavas, it's seven really,
but six, who are active in the most
of the story on the Pandava side of things.
So the Pandavas represent more wisdom.
There are a hundred Kaurava brothers.
The army is bigger, the number
of brothers is bigger, way bigger, right?
And the Pandavas have to go through all these
different difficult circumstances of loss,
isolation, war, humiliation,
all kinds of things that happen before
they retake their seat of being in charge of the country.
I think that's basically telling us that we have
all these terrible things happening
and they're all humans doing it.
But that part of us that is still oriented
towards wisdom is more powerful than all of this.
When there's a lot falling apart,
when things are falling apart,
that's when we get in touch with that aspect
of wisdom and we decide to cleave to it or
we decide to cut ourselves off from it more.
But those of us that are cleaving to it
are the ones who are learning
from destruction and moving forward together.
That's just how we're built
because wisdom always wins.
Jayakula, the mother, is always victorious.
The mother representing wisdom.
No matter what the forces are arrayed against us,
wisdom is always victorious.
That doesn't mean this world is going to survive.
It just means wisdom is going to be victorious.
Whatever happened.
Someone gets cancer.
They're threatened with death.
They find wisdom in that.
They grow spiritually from that.
You lose a job.
Your house burns down.
Somebody leaves you.
You can find wisdom in all
sorts of destructive situations.
What is it destroying?
Well, a lot of what gets destroyed
are false concepts about things.
If someone's threatened with personal destruction,
you're coming into an encounter
with your mortality.
Maybe you don't think about that every day, right?
And then suddenly, okay, I have cancer.
I might die.
In fact, very good chance I'm going to die.
I better figure out what's really important to me.
And it turns out what's really important to people
in general is caring for the ones that they love.
That, it turns out,
is what's most important to people.
For some of us, until we get to that point of
facing destruction, mortality in some sense or
another, we find all ways
to distract ourselves from that.
I'll care about my loved ones tomorrow
after I earn enough money to buy a Tesla.
So we have a lot of distractions.
That's how we're made.
And destruction focuses us.
And it focuses us on the part of ourselves that's
stronger and more enduring
and more aligned with wisdom.
STUDENT: You're talking about honesty.
I was wondering, is masking dishonest?
SHAMBHAVI: Yes.
I mean, just on the most ground level,
like most ordinary possible level, is exhausting.
So you can feel, for those that mask a lot
in their lives, you can feel how it's just sapping
your ojas, sapping your vitality to do that.
Absolutely.
All dishonesty is not the same.
Obviously, people who do a lot of masking because
they feel like they'll be rejected or they don't
fit in some way or they're just
trying to like navigate a day.
That's a really different kind of dishonesty than
someone who's gaslighting and manipulating
and doing more intentional harm to others.
But they both, both of those kinds of dishonesty
are exhausting and depleting your ojas and
affecting your immunity,
affecting your resilience in life,
affecting your cheerfulness,
ability to grow with the punches of life.
Yeah, they both have those
similar kinds of effects.
There's a lot of masking that goes on in spiritual
communities, which I've
desperately tried to get people to stop doing
with more or less success because we have these
ideas of what it looks like to be spiritual
and how we have to behave
and sound and what we have to do.
in order to convince the teacher
that we're good spiritual practitioners.
I've said this so many times
before, I just hate this.
I hate it for you, and I hate it for me.
And I wish everyone would
immediately stop doing it, 100%.
Just don't have any ideas about spiritual life.
That would be preferable.
STUDENT: I feel like some of my masking is just being
quiet when I actually want to say stuff.
But is that actually what that is?
SHAMBHAVI: So being quiet when you feel like
you'd rather be saying something
because you're maybe afraid of
what people are going to think of what you
say or something like that.
That's also exhausting.
It's not the same as remaining
quiet in a relaxed way.
It's also depleting your ojas.
STUDENT: I often want to talk and I
don't want to talk too much.
SHAMBHAVI: Well, how would you know
what too much is?
See, it's also exhausting to construct an edifice
of concepts about what other people want from you.
That's also exhausting.
What they want or what they don't want.
You don't really know.
Satsang with Shambhavi is produced by Jayakula,
a non-profit 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 other
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.