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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.
[upbeat music] 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.
STUDENT: Could you talk about patience?
SHAMBHAVI: Patience.
We only have two choices: be patient or suffer.
[laughter]
Seriously.
Learn to be patient or suffer.
[laughs] I've often described us as little
speedboats, when reality is a giant cruise ship,
and we're speeding around wanting everything
to change direction really quickly,
and the cruise ship's going like this.
[laughs] Hopefully the food's not as bad
in all of reality as it is on the cruise ship.
Anyway, what is patience?
Is it just gritting your teeth and bearing it?
Sometimes.
But mostly it's understanding how things are.
I've thought now and then about why Buddhism is
more popular in the United States than Hinduism
among people who weren't
born into those traditions.
And a lot of the way that Buddhism gets taught
in this country is very similar
to the Abrahamic traditions.
There's a lot of finger-wagging about bad things
are gonna happen to you if you
don't do this, that or the other.
It feels comfortable to have
the finger wagged at you.
In this tradition, there's no sense that you
only have this life, you better get to it.
So if we understand that we actually are part
of the eternal, even though this incarnation,
we should do something with it,
like realize what we can,
but we don't have to have this sense of desperate
urgency about getting everything
done before we die in this life.
We should just do our best.
And then if we have this idea that we're an aspect
of eternity, we can relax and realize that we have
more time than we think.
And things take a long time.
So if we have to think, well,
maybe this will last for a year or two years,
or maybe this is just my lifetime to experience
something that's difficult,
we can develop patience with that because we feel
that time is not so urgent
and that things take time.
We have more of an understanding of-- that things
are just progressing how they're progressing,
and they might take a lifetime,
they might take a decade, they might take a year,
or they might take a minute, but however
long they take, that's just how things are.
So if we have some idea that we have to get rid
of something or fix something or
achieve something or realize something [laughs]
really quickly, or we wanna get out of some pain
really, really quickly,
that's like pouring salt in a wound.
We don't know how long things are gonna take.
And we have some tools that teach us things like
that, and we have life
experience that teaches us that.
But astrology and divination are very good tools
for understanding that things
take a long time most of the time.
And what can we do other than
just try to relax and do our best?
Put in effort.
Don't be fatalist about anything.
Things could change in an instant,
but they don't usually.
[laughs] So how can we reduce our suffering?
We can reduce our suffering by basically just
acquiescing to how things actually are,
and trying to find some enjoyment and sense
of satisfaction and fulfillment even in the middle
of whatever it is that we're experiencing.
I saw this little video
on Instagram of this woman.
I'd never seen her before,
and she got on and she said,
my husband and I both are schizophrenic.
And they own a bakery together.
Has anybody seen this couple?
And then she said she was in the bakery working
and she saw on the floor,
on the customer side of the counter,
a little wrapped-up serving of cookies,
like how she would wrap them to give
to a customer, but they were lying on the floor.
And she realized that she had wrapped up these
cookies to give to a nonexistent
customer that she was hallucinating.
[laughs] And this little neatly wrapped thing
of cookies ended up just on the floor, 'cause she
went like this, and of course they just fell down.
But [laughs] she was laughing hysterically.
I mean, just like we're laughing right now.
And with just a really genuine sense of enjoyment
and just sort of laughing at herself
and the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
And I just thought how great that someone could
have that kind of thing going on in their life,
but still find room to find it funny.
I just thought that was so marvelous,
and I would wish that for all of us, too.
So often we take everything
so very, very seriously.
And then, of course, we suffer more.
But if we could find more opportunities to laugh
at the ridiculousness of our situation,
[laughs] that would really be helpful.
And it would also help with our patience.
'Cause if we have to put up with something
for a year or 10 years or decades or a lifetime,
we might as well find
opportunities to laugh at it.
I mean, really, what else can we do?
Even when we're not able to laugh,
like when we're just feeling awful,
still have a sense of devotion
and an understanding that this is the condition
that we were given, basically,
and that there's some kind of wisdom here for us,
even if it's very difficult.
If that's not possible, then we can just duck.
This was a piece of advice given to me by a
wonderful acupuncturist and mystic from Maine.
We were just having a conversation
about I don't know what.
She said, well the thing that I've really
learned this year is how to duck.
And that really stuck in my mind.
The sense that there's a storm raging,
but you can just get down low to the floor
and just kind of hunker down and let it do its
thing, and not try to change it
or fix it or do anything with it.
Just understand that everything's an aspect
of impermanence and it'll go away eventually.
[laughs] So that's sort of like
if we can laugh at it, great.
[laughs] If we can remember that everything has
wisdom and everything has been given to us, great.
And if we can't, just hunker down.
[laughs] Just duck.
[laughs] Wait it out.
I mean, look at what's happening in the world.
Most of us are contributing something
to trying to change the situation.
Then there are other days when
we just have to hunker down.
It's all we can do really.
But as long as we can maintain our connection
to that presence that always invokes devotion,
we're always doing something
wonderful if we do that.
I was actually thinking
that when we were chanting.
No matter what is going on in our lives
and everyone else's lives, if we can have mantra
in our mouth, if we can say mantra, it's great.
We have that, and it feels very merciful that even
in the midst of horrible stuff happening,
that we can still do that and we can still feel
our own value and we can still feel the presence
of God or whatever you wanna call it.
We can still feel that.
At any moment we can turn toward that.
At any moment, doing something so simple as
chanting, no matter what the circumstance,
no matter how horrible it is.
I find that to not just be something that I can
take refuge in, but also remembering that there
always is refuge no matter what is happening.
Even if we were in some much worse situation.
I mean, each of us individually,
'cause there's people all over the world who are
in much, much, much worse situations than we are.
There is nobody in this room who is in the worst
possible situation that a human being could be in.
But no matter what situation we're in,
we can remember we always can
get in touch with that devotion if
we allow ourselves to turn toward it.
And that to me is just â¦
I can't even find the words
for how wonderful that is.
I was saying the other day in satsang that I'm
just finishing up this very long astrological
period ruled by Rahu. And at the beginning of it,
my astrology teacher told me that sometimes people
lose contact with their spirituality
or their devotion during this period.
I was just, like, as I said last week,
no way is that happening.
[laughs] And also during everything that's going
on now, like, if you put in
the effort to remain connected no matter what else
you're feeling or no matter what else is going on,
the rewards are just, like,
my devotion and my sense of integration has just
grown during this period because I just said nope.
[laughs] And that can always happen no matter
what, no matter what circumstance
you're in if you make that effort.
Nothing is more important to me.
STUDENT: I have actually wondered, like, I kind
of feel like this is just a selfish question.
So, like, when we are practicing
for other people, do we still benefit?
SHAMBHAVI: Absolutely. [laughs] Yes, absolutely.
We benefit any time we do practice
for whatever reason, even in bad faith.
[laughter]
STUDENT: I do have another question.
I'm sort of wondering more explicitly about my own
workaholic tendencies, and just wondering if you
can help me work with that a little bit better.
Because there's this tension between really loving
what I do and having a passion for it, and then
also knowing that I get distracted by that.
SHAMBHAVI: Yeah, that's an interesting question
because there is a subset of people, not everyone,
who do have a real passion for
the work that they do.
And it's usually people doing something creative,
but it could be people doing something
like helping others or whatever.
That kind of job, if you have that feeling for it,
it's tiring when you work a lot,
but it's not tiring in the same way as doing
something that you're only doing to make money or
doing something that you kind
of like but it's not a big deal.
Workaholism and working a lot on something
that you really love and that is-- you're expressing
yourself, you're an architect.
There's a really big difference.
I would say for you, the only thing that I see
that you might wanna do,
and I think you've already started doing this over
the years, is to really be much more
selective of what jobs you take.
Don't take jobs that aren't really gonna allow you
to express yourself in a way that's enjoyable,
and where that exhaustion of working hard is kind
of a sweet tiredness and not a feeling
of being scraped from the inside out.
Rarely people with passions find partners who take
care of most of the day-to-day stuff
while they go pursue their passion.
That's always such a wonderful
situation when that can happen.
But it's very, very rare,
and even rarer for women than for men.
But there's nothing negative about loving
what you do and doing it for a lot of hours.
I would just make sure that you just are
very selective in what jobs you take.
STUDENT: I've been around a lot of friends
recently who are feeling sad that they're
not in a partnership.
I feel like what I'm seeing is they're wanting
to be completed by a partnership or longing
for something that's not really gonna help them.
I'm in this conversation very frequently.
SHAMBHAVI: I know that conversation.
The way our culture is and how it grooms people
into thinking that all solutions are personal
and no solutions are political or [laughs]
everything is something we need to do in our
personal life to fix all the things that we feel
that are uncomfortable,
and the number one thing's having a partner.
That is an absolute pillar
of grooming to try to go up against.
I would say in most cases it's not well-used
energy to try to talk people out of that.
That's my experience as a person.
There were a number of women who started coming
to Jaya Kula many, many,
many years ago who were in bad marriages and were
really, really unhappy, and even one person who,
the first time I ever met her,
the very first thing she ever said to me was,
I hate my husband.
And yet it took 10 more years for her to leave.
So it's a giant multi-layered thing that a few
words of well-meant advice is
probably just gonna bounce off of. [laughs]
I think just standing by and maybe
suggesting that there are other ways to feel
fulfilled, but don't spend a lot of energy on it,
I would think is the better thing.
I was just having a funny related thought today,
'cause sometime the last year I got
into watching dog rescue videos.
[laughs] And I've never had a dog, but, you know,
you see all these dogs in shelters,
and they're all so cute.
And occasionally these people are running around,
oh, I knew he was the one.
He was my soul dog. They use that one.
And I was thinking this morning in the car,
I could never have a dog because
I could never just choose one dog.
I couldn't just have a dog that I was taking
care of, because they're all so great.
Why would I just pour all my energy into one dog?
[laughs]
I think that's somehow related.
STUDENT: Next time I come to Portland,
are you gonna have 10 dogs at Jaya Kula? [laughter]
There's basically two people whose dog
rescue videos I watch the most,
and this one woman, she just fostered this tiny
little pittie with silvery gray hair,
just so sweet, and I thought, oh, gosh,
that dog is just the best. But then I thought,
but all the dogs are just that good,
so what would I do with one dog?
[laughs]
[upbeat music] 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 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.
[outro music]