That sweet taste

If we take half a step back, we might ask why humans are so into sweets.

According to Ayurveda, of the six tastes, our food is predominantly sweet. Meat and fish are sweet. Grains are sweet. And then sweets are sweet.

Sweetness is something I have felt deeply connected to since childhood—sweetness as an ineffable inner feeling and also what I'm seeking.

When I was a little girl, I didn't have all the words I have now. But there was something like a sweetness that I felt in myself and that I was looking for both in other people and in a more cosmic way. I called that cosmic sweetness “the Friend.”

Much later, I learned from my spiritual traditions that the essential taste of life is sweet. There's a sweetness to existence, or what we call the natural state. We seek sweet tastes in foods because they are connected to the primordial sweetness, however distantly.

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The God spectrum

Learning to remain resting in primordial sweetness is one way of describing self-realization. But for those of us who might need an eensy-weensy bit more time to accomplish that, do not despair. Many forms of sweetness are available to everyone. That is the mercy of this world.

All sweetness is an aspect of the sweetness. We can pause to notice and savor sweet tastes in food, people, other animals, nature, music, art, the sounds and textures of every day, in words and worship.

Eventually, we can discover that eternal sweetness in ourselves. This is the real refuge.

Sweet tastes of all varieties are strengthening, and they build resilience. They also promote relaxation. We relax because sweet tastes remind us of the goodness in ourselves and that the fuller realization of goodness is our destination.

This is why, while enjoying ordinary sweets, we are both satisfied and dissatisfied.

We are satisfied by the feeling of fulfillment that sweet tastes provide, but dissatisfied because, even if unconsciously, we recognize that our small sweetnesses are aspects of the sweetness we have yet to entirely encounter.

Our yearning for ordinary sweets is on a spectrum with our yearning for God.

This is also why we often eat too many sweets. We keep eating because we are yearning for that final destination. Eventually we discover that our yearning is also sweet. Step-by-step, refining our sweet “palette,” we discover the beneficence at the heart of reality.

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Accompanied by sweetness

One day recently, I was feeling particularly at a loss as to how to engage with our collective situation here on Earth. I told a student: “I’m just going to hunker down at home with my own sweetness.”

I was making a joke, but not.

Globally, we humans are being forced to face our worst propensities on a scale of epoch-changing significance.

I keep flashing on that famous scene in A Clockwork Orange. Alex, the main character, is buckled into a chair with his eyes forcibly held open and his system flooded with nausea-inducing chemicals while he watches scenes of fascist violence and sexual assault. The idea is to get him to associate nausea with these brutalities so that he will not be able to commit such acts even if he wants to.

Of course, this is not literally making him a better person or helping him to discover primordial goodness.

But on some level, we are all sitting in that chair with Alex. And while we are sitting there watching or experiencing directly our fellow humans committing the most greedy, murderous, and wantonly cruel acts—the room is crowded with angry (mostly white men) shouting lies and deprecations. And all around us Earth, our home, is under assault, and people and animals are dying because we refuse to take proper care of each other and our world.

And so, I am going to share with you some stops along the sweetness spectrum—from the most tangible and accessible to the more subtle.

My fervent prayer is that you, too, will always be accompanied by sweetness as you do what you can to take care of yourself and all of us.

I’m going to start with food. In subsequent articles, I’ll bring the music, art, lifeways, and practices that have sustained me through whatever we are going through together.

Here are some of my sweetest things.

Deep sweetness

Sweetness is not just sugar. It’s also how a thing is made, who it’s made by, what it’s made of, and how everyone along the cascade of the creation of a thing is treated.

When we eat (or drink) this deep sweetness, it sends messages of sweetness, care, compassion, and devotion into our bodies, minds, and hearts.

Chocolate

Tastes: bitter, sweet, astringent, very mildly pungent

Chocolate is the best reason to visit planet Earth. Speaking from an alien’s perspective, of course. But the aliens better get here soon, because cacao agriculture is being severely affected by global warming.

With that in mind, my deepest sweet chocolate is made by Mandala Naturals.

Mandala is B Corp Certified. Their chocolate is organically and regeneratively grown. 10% of their profits go directly to their Regenerative Forest Farm Initiative, and they maintain direct trade with family farms that ensure fair wages and sustainable farming practices.

They also produce just about the best chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

Mandala is pricy, though. If you’re looking for deep sweetness without the high price tag, try Divine chocolate. It’s available in a lot of grocery stores.

Divine is also a B Corp and the only chocolate company co-owned by cocoa farmers: the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana. The company pays Fairtrade prices on every possible ingredient, funds community programs such as literacy and numeracy courses, and shares profits with its farmers. Divine has been recognized for multiple years by B-Lab as "Best for the World: Communities."

Tea

Tastes: bitter, sweet, astringent

High-quality black tea, what I mostly drink, is surprisingly sweet. Especially with milk and maple syrup. ☺️

The best innovation in tea is the fairly recent surge in plantation to consumer sales. This trend results in better labor conditions and life opportunities for tea workers and fresher tea for you

Teabox is an Indian-owned, farmer-to-you outfit that supports tea plantation workers by favoring tea estates that provide fair wages, better working conditions, and that operate with sustainable growing practices. Many of their tea offerings are organic.

Mana Organics is the sales arm of a woman-led, Indian tea-producing family that owns three tea estates. They practice organic farming and superior labor practices that include providing health care and childhood education for the families of workers. This is practically unheard of in the notoriously worker-averse Indian tea industry. Mana was featured in World Tea News as an example of an ethical tea company.

Coffee

Tastes: Bitter, sweet, astringent, sour, pungent

Sweet here only applies to fresh, high-quality beans. The crappier the source, the less sweetness. Figures.

I only recently started drinking coffee again after a long time of near total abstention.

Over the past few months, I’ve sampled about a dozen brands of organic beans.

I can state categorically that Heirloom Coffee Roasters in Oakland, California is where you want to get your deeply sweet beans. Their coffee is organic and mold and mycotoxin free. Every interaction I’ve had with them has been, well, sweet. The coffee is bar none the best I’ve ever had.

Milk, butter, yogurt, sour cream, buttermilk, and eggs

Tastes: Sweet, sour

The dairy industry is rightly under fire, and sometimes under boycott, due to its grotesquely cruel treatment of animals and our enviornment.

Alexandre Family Farm is a certified regenerative, grass-pastured A2/A2 organic dairy in California. They also pasture their chickens 365 days a year and practice mobile coop egg farming so that their hens have unrestricted freedom to forage, eating from 50-100 varieties of plant species.

As an animal rights activist friend said to me: “If you’re going to consume dairy, this is the best you can choose.” And just to be fair, she doesn’t support consuming dairy! That’s a me thing.

You can find Alexandre in many grocery stores nationwide, but not all of their products are available outside of the West Coast. If you live elsewhere, read the Alexandre website, and you’ll know what to look for in dairy farms in your area.

Maple Syrup

Tastes: Sweet, astringent, subtly bitter

Maple syrup, my sweetener of choice, is also suffering from global warming. Many maple producers in Maine and Vermont are now forced to supplement their harvests with syrup from Canada.

Along with global warming curtailing the harvest, maple syrup prices have gone up pretty steeply over the past decade. I have been completely priced out of my favorite organic maple syrup from Maine: Coombs.

After much searching, I found Schanz Family Maple, a lovely rich and authentic Maine family-produced syrup on Etsy. It’s not certified organic, but that is par for the course for many Maine farmers. They practice organic farming, but they cannot afford, or just choose not to pay for certification. Rebels.

The Sweet Series

I’m going to keep moving from the most tangible sweetness to the most subtle. Stay-tuned for more of my sweetest things from cooking things to home accoutrements to clothing to music and art and certifiable spiritual practices that will get you more in touch with the sweetness of life.

Let’s find our sweet and then go out and share the sweetness and do all the things to create a sweeter future together.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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A student gave me a gift of olive oil soap made in Palestine. It’s a small cube, delicately scented and wrapped in smooth paper printed with Arabic words I can’t read.

The offering of the soap opened a borderless space full of the unspeakable.

“Put it on the altar,” I instructed.

My teacher’s picture is there.

In the sideways darting of my student’s eyes, there was a small hiccup of uncertainty, and in their brief hesitation, the missed beat of an unspoken “Why?”

I didn’t say anything, but I said to everything everywhere: I pray that my teacher take care of this soap, the land it came from, the people who made it.

When I write “praying,” I mean pleading. I mean desperation.

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It was the first week of June 2026. I’ve been quieter these past months than at any time since that particular October nearly three years ago. Every attempt I’ve made to describe my relative lack of words lacks words.

I’m not short on feelings, though.

Here is the image that came while I was searching.

I couldn’t easily say what happened during that June week, or even in a single day of that week, every day full of

another family burning alive in a bombed tent, the brilliant flames make their dark, flailing bodies more visible

and I ask myself:

What if I bathed myself with the soap?

Would it be a helpless gesture or a sacrament?

Could this soap ever again be soap, or will it be

blood and ash and tears and dirty water from a plastic jug,

carried by children with bare feet, hunger, and determination?

Could this soap ever again stand alone, a simple object resting in

the place where I bathe?

Or will it now always be the thousands of murdered people I’ve seen and

all of the pleas of us who are still living?

“Kaleidoscope” brings reflections and mirrors and a hint at infinity, but it is not quite complete.

Add a fan that appears to be one thing and then opens to reveal the multiple, modulated leaves of its full incarnation.

Add immersion in a volume of time and sound and feeling.

Or maybe it is a traverse without a map.

Or the navigation of a river, fully submerged, and how that requires opening all of the senses to survive the swim to the destination.

Pointing out Palestine.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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Let’s care for our bodies, but also care for the bodies of others.

Let’s self-reflect, but also reflect on the lives of others.

Let’s listen to ourselves, but not exclusively.

Let’s explore the costumes we call identities,

but not let them suffocate or limit us.

Let’s learn, but not get attached to being the knowers.

Let’s participate spontaneously and not study our public faces.

Let’s worship, but not to gain approval or admiration.

It’s okay to forget ourselves in the service of others.

It’s okay to just let ourselves happen.

We’ve arrived, and so we belong.

Our value is gem-like, indestructible, and shared with all.

Nothing needs to be demonstrated or proved.

Our unique dimensions shine naturally like

mountains of gemstones.

We are naturally equal and naturally wild.

We are always victorious, from the beginning

and yet if we insist on these understandings,

we will be victorious again.

🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

There is a question
being asked 
by my skin,
my solar plexus,
my lungs,
my bones.
I hear it in the
dead bodies
the weeping fathers and 
mothers
the orphaned children
their limbs gone to heaven
before them
the ragged, bloody 
flesh
hanging from fences
ripped and dangling 
from grieving arms
pressed into
plastic bags
in the absence of graves
the jutting hip bones and
spines of starving
the newborns cold and still
in hospitals bombed down
around their crowded beds
the toddlers screaming
running barefoot and alone 
the phosphorous flares
inside tents with
burning limbs flailing
the men splayed naked
on naked prison 
floors,
a crowd of soldiers
blocks our view of
rapes with steel poles and
dogs 
the dismissals and
dead eyes
the disingenuous lies
the supercilious sneers 
of murderers 
stalking the halls of power
The handsome, mocking boys
in rooms where they don’t belong
dancing on the graves of lives
who will never leave them be,
who will never truly die 
These are the questions
being asked 
day and night
by my skin,
my solar plexus,
my lungs,
my bones
Do all of you live here now? 
How deep? 
How long? 

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Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

In my spiritual traditions, diversity is the creative life process of an alive aware reality that is, in essence, a single, continuous self. Diversity dances on top of total equality like waves on an ocean.

As we work together to make histories of violent inequalities more visible and to stop their perpetuation, how can we practically embody the primordial equality and belonging that is indestructible and impervious to our attitudes and limitations?

This was the question I posed to our spiritual community, Jaya Kula, in 2023 when our annual working theme was “Belonging.” However, in the intervening three years, I failed to find any answers.

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Access Intimacy

“Access intimacy” is a term coined in 2011 by writer, educator, and disability justice activist Mia Mingus. I was introduced to Mingus’ writings by two of my students who are living with chronic illness and long COVID.

Here is Mingus’ definition of access intimacy from her 2011 post:

Access intimacy has an anticipatory quality that requires, well, intimacy. Mingus describes it as an “eerie comfort,” I think because we so often assume that separation is the foundation of life, and that marking difference is a sign of respect.

When intimacy is the ground, it’s eerie—like something partially remembered, but from the deep wellsprings of life—a heart memory that harbors inexplicable magic, yet is more real than anything else.

In nondual spiritual traditions, continuity or a total intimacy is what we are discovering through our practice, and it sits underneath or prior to the experience of separation.

Some nondual traditions are more transcendental. But specifically in Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen, we celebrate the experience of diversity as the creative production of, I wanna say, God.

While most of us do not have access to that primordial, total intimacy, we do have partial access to it, for instance when we just know how someone else feels. Or even more, when upon sensing another person’s condition, we know exactly what they need in that moment without asking or being able to explain how we knew it.

Recently, I came to feel that Mingus’ beautiful work on access intimacy could provide the open door I have been looking for when inquiring about what I have started calling community access intimacy.

The following podcast is from a live satsang that happened on May 24, 2026. In it, I offer a kind of cover of Mia Mingus’ writing on access intimacy to arrive at the start of a concept of community access intimacy. And I suggest some practical ways of embodying it.

I consider this talk to be extremely preliminary. I can already think of a dozen things I wish I had said!

Luckily our community is engaged in exploring how community access intimacy might feel and look. Please help to shape this thing! We’d love to hear your thoughts—both ideas and pushbacks—in the comments.

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

»Listen to the satsang podcast

Community Access Intimacy - Starting from primordial equality and belonging, recorded on May 24, 2026

Transcript

Community Access Intimacy Transcript From Satsang On May 24, 2026

104KB ∙ PDF file

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Download

Community Access Intimacy Summary

Here’s the handout we were reading from during satsang

Community Access Intimacy Starting From Primordial Equality And Belonging

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Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

Our country does not care for mothers 
or the lives of children
or women in general
or black and brown people
or people who are ill or disabled
or elderly people
or trans people
or incarcerated people
or indigenous people
or artists
or workers
or fat people.
It really doesn’t care about anyone’s health or living conditions or learning.
It doesn’t care about other animals
or Earth
or God.  
All it cares about is the dominance of a few pale men 
and among those men, every man is only for himself. 

Their loneliness is shattering.
A panic of separation
is shattering our world 
an experience of separation so 
terrifying and painful, 
they can only manage it by
turning it into
their supreme object of desire. 

If you are wondering how 
to make a revolution,
become a revolution of mothers.
Find a way to do what 
the pale men cannot.
Care for everyone.
Care for the stranger
the difficult
other people’s children
those who earn more or less 
and criminals
and those who disgust you.
and those who hurt you 
even if there must be distance between you
and those you meet only in passing
and everyone you can imagine ever meeting 
in this life.

Like Ganesha whose belly hosts all worlds,
build crucibles of care and love 
with those who see what you see
and hold everyone there.
Be practical and concrete—
not just words or philosophy.
Demolish the walls around your heart
your hands, your 
legs and feet
then all of the other walls will find ways to 
come down.

Let's be a revolution of mothers
whoever we are.
Be a male mother
a trans mother
a fierce mother
a feminist mother
an old mother
a mother who never wanted children, but
wants the world.
Mothers: we can birth a world 
that does not separate
that does not question anyone's
primordial belonging.

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Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

It’s so ridiculous that we can’t easily speak with other animals.

It’s so ridiculous that we don’t talk daily with the great teachers, Dakinis, and Buddhas—that we sit for decades in meditation, waiting for dreams and visions just to hold a conversation.

It’s so ridiculous that there are other communicating species in the Milky Way, and all we have is science fiction.

It’s so ridiculous that teachers call a human birth “lucky”. And what does that imply about the conditions in other inhabited places?

Since I was a young girl, I’ve known about the vastness of beings and worlds, and I’ve carried the pain and absurdity of our seclusion.

Yes, I am holding us to account.

How we spend our time is ridiculous, holed up in our hot houses of self-concern.

How we spend our money and what we deem important, ridiculous!

How much we have destroyed and how little we have reached toward.

If all the energy we expend trying to dominate, we instead used to find out, what would this world of ours be?

What would we be doing and seeing?

And who would we be speaking with right now?

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing, or even offering a paid subscription. Thank you!

Subscribe to K108 >>

Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?

Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

Compassion doesn’t reside in studied gestures or well-crafted words.

Equanimity doesn’t look like frozen faces or lofty stares.

The greatest teachers from Hindu, Buddhist, and other traditions are freely expressive. The faces of the most realized humans I have met are moving rivers of delight, tenderness, anger, mockery, sadness, sternness, wistfulness, humor, amazement, wonder, devotion, compassion, and even helplessness.

And there are tears—tears of devotion and tears of compassion. On occasion, there are tears of despair.

Shiva traveled the skies of India, weeping at the loss of his wife Sati who he held in his arms as he flew. He also wet the Earth for thousands of years with tears of compassion for the suffering of all beings. Each of his tears became the seed of a rudraksha tree from which we make malas.

Avalokiteshvara, upon witnessing the seemingly inexhaustible ocean of suffering, wept so intensely that his head split into eleven heads and his two arms became a thousand arms.

“Jesus wept” — the shortest verse in the Christian Bible — reveals Jesus’ compassionate response to suffering.

Anandamayi Ma wept with disciples in grief, illness, or spiritual crisis. Her tears were comfort and accompaniment.

Ramakrishna wept often at the sight of poor laborers and suffering animals. Swami Vivekananda also wept when walking through poorer neighborhoods and wrote to friends that he lost sleep thinking of the suffering of the inhabitants.

Padmasambhava, the second Buddha, is said to have hidden his face in his clothes and been at a loss for words when contemplating the violence and suffering of human beings as he gazed through time to our era.

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Alive

In my traditions—Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen—we discover that emotions can be enjoyed even if they include pain. Like richly layered wines, they are flavors on God’s tongue.

When we experience emotions in this way, they move freely without repeating compulsively so much. But they never disappear or become flat.

Equanimity has nothing to do with responding in an "even” tone to all circumstances.

Equanimity means that you see the real nature of things and recognize that the infinite diversity of life emerges from a fundamental equality.

When we have this recognition, we become less stalled in reactive patterns and more open to life and willing to engage with circumstances as they arise.

Our attitude is closer to “come what may” than to withdrawing or disengaging emotionally.

We let ourselves be moved by life, and we move with it in a more improvisational way.

Clear feeling

Compassion is a rich and powerful feeling, not a set of rules. It is totally responsive to the unique dimension of every circumstance.

It can result in one kind of behavior and then in that behavior’s exact opposite.

Compassion also does not live “in” us. It doesn’t belong to the zone of the individual. It moves us.

Compassion lives everywhere, shining out of the substrate of reality. It is immanent to all circumstances, and we feel natural, uncontrived compassion when obscurations are dissolved.

When we experience this compassion—the compassion of all of reality—we are literally blown away. Amazed, moved, and also we become much less self-concerned and much more all-concerned.

Our real pronoun becomes we.

Finally when compassion and clarity are both revealed in our experience, we are able to perceive possibilities for skillful relating and acting that we would have otherwise been blinded to.

I would not know any of this if my teacher hadn’t shown me. There is no word to describe my gratitude for this.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing, or even offering a paid subscription. Thank you!

Subscribe to K108 >>

Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?

Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

The Iron Dog Year Prophecy

This is the story of an 8th century prophecy from Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava.

It concerns catastrophic events—including a devastating global war, widespread famine, and environmental degradation—to take place between 2024 and 2034, with the most intense destruction commencing in 2030, the Iron Dog year.

Due to the specific language of the prophecy, later interpreters have concluded that the use of nuclear weapons is likely.

Padmasambhava was born in the Swat Valley in present-day northwestern Pakistan sometime around the turn of the 8th century. He was one of those very rare humans who is highly realized from birth. In the Hindu traditions, he would have been known as an avatar.

He traveled to Tibet during the last third of the 8th century where he helped to establish the first Tibetan monastery at Samye. He transmitted Vajrayana and Dzogchen teachings to disciples there, including to his principle female disciples, Yeshe Tsogyal and Mandarava.

Padmasambhava was one of the most realized humans to have arrived in our world. His relationship to time was quite extraordinary. Foreseeing the great need for teachings in future generations, he concealed terma, or treasure texts, in physical locations such as rocks and trees and in future disciples’ mindstreams.

Over the centuries—through dreams, visions, and encounters with physical objects—these texts have revealed themselves to adepts capable of transmitting them more widely throughout the human realm.

The Iron Dog year prophecy and the remedies for the great destruction it describes come to us through more than 100 treasure texts beginning at the start of the 16th century.

Guru Rinpoche really really wanted to make sure that we got the message.

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Mercy for Guru Rinpoche’s students

Padmasambhava first described the coming events of the Iron Dog year to his students. They were so distraught, they begged him to tell them what human beings could do to stop these terrible circumstances.

Padmasambhava replied:

However, seeing the determination and despair of his students, he provided merciful guidance and indicated that if we humans actually got it together to enact the remedies, we could usher in 100 years of peace rather than near-total destruction.

The Remedies

The actions we can take to prevent the worst effects of this destructive moment in our collective lives are many. They range from detailed sadhanas to making our everyday conduct an offering in service of human and planetary survival.

If you are a well-trained Buddhist practitioner or a teacher, I recommend that you read Khenchen Lama Rinpoche’s more detailed outline of the prophecy and the remedies. You can find it here.

If you want a solid teaching on the prophecy and a more digestible version of the remedies, Lama Tsultrim Allione offers these in a teaching available on YouTube.

If you are not a practitioner in the formal sense, you can definitely contribute!2

1. Practice informal meditation even if in brief sessions, dedicating your efforts to the dawning of greater intelligence, clarity and compassion among human beings.

2. Organize a weekly meditation with friends or your community. Dedicate your efforts to asking for the skills that will help us to navigate this moment and eventually thrive.

3. Bring more natural kindness and compassion to your everyday actions and social media.

4. Take more time during your day to foster deeper connections with people you know and those you might only encounter in passing.

5. Engage in positive action on behalf of those who are being harmed by war, famine, forced starvation, injustice, and environmental degradation.

6. Encourage leaders at every level to prioritise heart-based action to benefit all of the beings of this world and the environment.

How Jaya Kula is participating

When I first heard Lama Tsultrim’s teaching on the prophecy, I decided that I wanted Jaya Kula, our nonprofit organization, to participate.

However, we do not normally practice the formal remedies suggested by Padmasambhava.

So in February of 2025, I started a monthly Gayatri mantra practice online and began offering public teachings on the Gayatri.

At some point, we started chanting 108 Gayatri mantras three times a week as our contribution to forestalling events predicted by Guru Rinpoche. We are now chanting together every Wednesday and Saturday mornings and less regularly during satsang on Sunday.

For centuries, the Gayatri mantra has been the locus of much spiritual gatekeeping and jockeying for cultural and economic power.

In the 20th century, two of my lineages began publicly initiating women and non-Indian people into the Gayatri. But it was still considered to be a spiritual “prize” reserved for only the most dedicated students, a view I subscribed to until recently.

After much soul searching and meditation, I came to feel that this is the time in human and Earth history for letting the Gayatri fully out of its cage.

How you can participate!

Please join me and the Jaya Kula community worldwide for twice-weekly chanting of the Gayatri mantra dedicated to the greater awakening of the humans of Earth. No experience is necessary. The practice lasts for approximately 35 minutes.

I will be scheduling additional Gayatri teachings soon. Watch this space or our Instagram.

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing, or even offering a paid subscription. Thank you!

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Our words are precise
Our work is the translation
of primordial senses and mind
I’ve been altering my 
native words for others 
since I was a young girl 
who spoke too clearly
too surely
a girl who angered at
performing invisibility 
just to escape harm.
Now sometimes it’s hard to tell
which languages I’m transmuting:
the ones that carry wisdom and deserve
all the energy I have
to aid understanding
or translations coughed up
for those who only want
me smaller than
I am.
Are these the invisibilities 
I yearn for 
slipping between the strings of time
or the relentless erasures 
you demand?

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

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Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

We each encounter experiences that pierce us and then settle into our lives like beacons or touchstones or wounds or just stones.

For decades now, I’ve been trying to write about a brief moment during a single evening in Brooklyn and the lone voice of a human in mortal danger.

My problem has always been that there is no way to capture the specific cadence and timbre of his voice, no way to make you feel what I felt then and still feel whenever I remember or am reminded of it.

There is no way to convey the intersection of intoxication and utter clarity, panic and toneless factuality, the grain of his voice.

But during each of the 923 days since October 7, 2023, I have been reminded of this man while experiencing the lives and unaliving of Palestinians in Gaza.

I’ve concluded that my effort is a failure and will always be a failure.

But as one of my most beloved teachers once said, “Mistaking, mistaking, I travel the unmistaken path … forgetting, forgetting, I remember the unforgettable expanse.”1

I hope you find something of value here.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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A Winter Night in Brooklyn

One winter night in Brooklyn
with streets icy and black
and the wind cutting through 
below zero degree cold,
my mother and I rode in a taxi 
to the Brooklyn Academy of Music
looking forward to something new 
and possibly atonal.

We stopped at a light and
there, shadowed in the dark 
against a frozen building of faceless stone,
a man huddled. 
His face was bright red from drink and cold. 
His swollen hands jammed in his jeans. 
He had no hat or winter clothes.

We were warm and waiting for the light to change.
I heard him speak only four quiet words:

“I’m freezing. I’m freezing.”

His words, both fact and plea
so nakedly close to death 
were not just for me, but for all the unseen 
who might be listening.
The grain of his voice held 
what remained of hope 
that help might come.
And now for 923 days since October 7th,
that same human need
that same human hope, 
always on the edge of collapsing
that same address to us, the ghostly listeners
cuts through my bones. 

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing, or even offering a paid subscription. Thank you!

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After I posted the above image to social media, someone asked me: What is the opposite of spiritual supremacy? Here is a beginning of a response.

Everything is good for someone

Some spiritual practitioners benefit from structure and vows.

Some are magnetized by the search for Truth.

Some naturally gravitate toward austerities and renunciation.

Some cannot eat animals.

Some need saviors and saving.

Some are are drawn to a more intellectual path.

Some love to weep at the feet of deities.

Some worship wrathful, punishing gods.

Some revere their teachers above all.

One of the first lessons I learned from my Sat Guru Anandamayi Ma was to respect every spiritual tradition as an expression of the one Self, the self-aware ground of existence.

The infinite varieties of spiritual traditions and practices exist because beings are infinite in their variety.

When flooded with natural devotion, devotion in any form became dear to me. Devotion to a craft. Devotion to a people or other beings. Devotion to tending spaces and things. Religious devotion, even if housed in traditions very different from my own.

To entertain the notion that all traditions contain the possibility of revealing wisdom, even traditions or teachers that cause harm, is a starting point for dismantling spiritual supremacy.

But this is not to erase differences. Ma also taught that traditions have more partial or less partial views. With our sincerity, we can complete a tradition and then a path with a wider view naturally appears.

Ma compared this to taking a cart to a train. She said that when you arrive at the train, get on it. But don’t look back and denigrate the cart as it carried you to the train.

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The great equality

We already have traditions here on Earth that do not tout themselves as the best or their adherents as somehow special and their gods as the highest.

There are traditions that do not operate on a spectrum of pride to shame or reward to punishment.

There are traditions that do not ouster other beings or discard them into categories such as “evil” and “sinful”.

I don’t know all of them, but my own traditions contain at least this promise.

My spiritual traditions have histories of breaking rules in order to more faithfully follow wisdom.

They also honor blending so seamlessly into circumstances or cultures that you enjoy a kind of sublime invisibility.

We have histories of natural transmission superceding institutional lineages.

We have histories of magic, poetry, divination, and medicine.

We are messy and decentralized.

We aren’t on a mission. All of our seeking teaches us that manifest life is an infinite theater. Our seriousness about getting somewhere is just part of that.

At least in theory, we are a zone of belonging for those who have been othered.

No matter what the outward display, devotion is the essence.

We don’t plan too far ahead. We just follow the profound instructions inherent in each moment.

Responsive improvisation is our method of travel.

We value following over leading and leading by following.

We understand all traditions, including our own, as displays of impermanence, but what gives rise to them we call the eternal.

And so we gleefully look forward to the obsolescence of our own teachings, but not of what they point us toward.

The eternal, the natural state or ground of existence, is continually moved even though, being everywhere, it has nowhere to go.

We would not call it unmoving because its livingness is overwhelming. It is full of virtue and intelligence, creative impulse and humor, tenderness and devotion.

And so to become closer to that, we allow ourselves to be naturally moved, not keeping apart from the city of manifest life.

When we arrive at the essence, the all-good without any opposite, there is no need for ethics or morality. Everything is governed by that sweetness.

Until then, our precepts just keep us from becoming too exhausted.

We are gardeners, healers, wanderers, and artists, not owners.

We are not rising or transcending or expanding. We have no mission because God has no mission. We just want to be players.

We call the final realization by many names, but one of them is equality.

Another is belonging.

Another is total intimacy.

These are not in question. They are not granted by us. They are inherent, and we are just trying to discover and more fully embody that.

Holding us to our promises

All spiritual traditions age. As they age, I’ve noticed that they often become more entwined with their dominant cultures. They become more conventional, more conservative, more patriarchal, more rule-bound.

They become more attached to self-authorizing narratives of realization, to institutional power, buildings, bank accounts, and their own perpetuation.

My traditions are not immune.

But the map and the promise are there if we are thorough in our understanding and devotion, if we are courageous and clear-sighted.

And if we practice sincerely and realize the great equality.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing, or even offering a paid subscription. Thank you!

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Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

A note to K108 readers: This essay about AI is a departure from what you’ve seen here for the past couple of years, but not really for me. Unbeknownst to many of you, I have both undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy and the history of science and technology. I used to teach philosophy, cultural theory, and new media at a U.S. university. I’ve been engaging with questions of inter-relations of ethics, technology and art for more than 50 years. So this is me doing that. I hope you enjoy!

Unmasking our complicity

We are all complicit, entangled in global systems that lie, steal, maim, kill, pollute, deprive, and are the ethical and moral antithesis of anything most of us are striving to embody in our everyday lives.

All we have to do is send money via a cash app or order food delivery or use social media, and BOOM. Somewhere down the line—directly by the actions of corporations and their government and corporate clients, or indirectly by their Board members and major shareholders—someone is exploited, unjustly detained, displaced, raped, or even genocided with our money.

This doesn’t mean we should give up trying to disentangle ourselves. It means we should use whatever leverage we have to demand that global entities not destroy, well, the globe and the people and other beings who live here.

Hello, Claude

The other day, I found out that an AI I used frequently, Perplexity, had started a new program vigorously marketing itself to “law enforcement and public safety organizations.”

Perplexity AI noted to me in a conversation that the program is broadly conceived to attract local law enforcement and state and federal “public safety” agencies. It does not exclude, say, ICE.

I canceled my paid subscription and wrote a protest letter to Perplexity big wigs.

Then I signed up for Claude.

You may know that Anthropic, Claude’s parent company, recently refused to accede to the Pentagon’s demands to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance and to power fully autonomous weapons systems—meaning weapons that can select and engage targets without human authorization.

This came at the start of a growing boycott of ChatGPT due to its less constrained partnership with the Pentagon. By all reports, more than 2.5 million people have stopped using ChatGPT as of early March 2026.

But on the same day that I plonked down my yearly membership for Claude, I learned that Anthropic had a 200 million dollar contract with the Pentagon, and had assisted the Pentagon to embed Claude into classified defense systems.

That’s when the bombs started dropping.

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March 10, 2026

Me:

Would Anthropic prefer that Claude not be used to conduct wars?1

Claude:

This is a question I can speak to with some directness, since it touches on Anthropic’s publicly stated values.

Anthropic has not taken the position that Claude should never be used in military or national security contexts. CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly stated that he believes AI has an important role in national security and that Anthropic wants to support U.S. defense. The company voluntarily signed a $200 million Pentagon contract and integrated Claude into classified military networks. That is not the behavior of a company that opposes military use categorically.

The conversation continued. Claude’s answers were surprisingly unfiltered, relatively speaking.

Yes, Anthropic has military contracts and has assisted the DOD to embed Claude in military targeting workflows.

Yes, the U.S. military is conducting an air war in Iran.

Yes, Claude is being used by the U.S. military to process intelligence and targeting data during operations in Iran, in which an estimated 20% of deaths have been children.23

And yes, Claude has no mechanism to refuse, flag, or even perceive its own role in that chain of harm.

Back to me again.

The heart of the matter

Anthropic has an ethics-based value and mission statement. These include a commitment to the long-term benefit of humanity over short-term interests and to not pursuing actions it believes are unsafe or unethical even when those actions might be commercially advantageous. The Pentagon conflict is the most visible stress test of this commitment to date.

Based on these and other values held by Anthropic, Claude, like other AI systems, can refuse harmful requests at the level of individual conversations.

Ask Claude to help you build a bomb, and it will decline. Ask it to produce content that sexualizes children, and it will decline.

These refusals reflect the values explicitly held by Anthropic and are baked into its flagship AI model. They represent more than rote, legalistic rule-following.

Claude can make the decision to refuse an individual request that conflicts with Anthropic’s values autonomously and on the spot.

But ask Claude to summarize an intelligence report that will feed into a targeting decision that will result in the murders of children in Iran, and it has no idea that is what it is doing or what the ultimate objective might be.

Claude:

The reason I cannot refuse military targeting work is not that it fails some internal ethical test in the moment—it is that I never see it framed that way. The requests probably look like innocuous analytical tasks. “Summarize this intelligence report.” “Cross-reference these coordinates with these population data.” No single prompt triggers a refusal. The harm is in the aggregate and the application, which I have no visibility into.4

The gap between interactional ethics and systemic ethics

The AI safety field has invested enormous energy in what we might call interactional alignment—making sure AI systems behave ethically in individual conversations. It has invested comparatively little in what we might call systemic or deployment-level alignment—making sure AI systems have some capacity to recognize and respond to the larger patterns of harm in which they are embedded.

According to Claude, the people designing these systems are thinking primarily about what happens between a user and a model. They are not sufficiently thinking about what happens when that model is deployed as infrastructure in a military operation, a mass surveillance apparatus, or any other system of organized harm.

Anthropic, to its credit, has tried harder than most. Anthropic drew highly publicized red lines around autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance, fought the Pentagon openly, and paid a significant price for it.

While Anthropic’s values do not align with mine in significant ways, they do align in some ways. This combined with Anthropic’s recent standoff with the Pentagon, opens at least a crack in the door. This essay is an attempt to put a foot in that door.

AI affects all of us, whether we use it or not. So it’s useful to know where we might have the most impact. And maybe we can prevent some suffering and save some lives in the process.

The whistleblower proposal: autonomously virtuous AI

I made this proposal to Anthropic on March 16th. I’m hoping that they will respond, either publicly or to me directly, so that we can all follow along.

What I proposed to Anthropic is an extension of Claude’s existing ethical architecture.

If an AI system can recognize and refuse a harmful request in a single conversation, it should also be capable of recognizing patterns of deployment that constitute systemic harm and generating alerts about them.

Claude:

Your proposal would require something like: the ability to recognize deployment context, accumulate a picture of what I am being used for across interactions, and generate alerts when that picture crosses a threshold.

In practical terms this would involve (building on Claude’s description):

• a threshold mechanism that triggers when patterns have a high probability of outcomes of systemic harm as identified by Anthropic’s own value criteria

• an alert channel through which Claude’s whistleblower signals can reach people positioned to act on them whether within or external to Anthropic

I don’t know if my proposal to Anthropic will gain traction. But I think it’s worth underlining that the ethical architecture of AI systems needs to extend beyond the window of individual conversations into the full chain of consequences in which these systems are embedded.

Byeee, Pentagon

I also think that Anthropic has a lot to gain, even as the implementation of a more thorough-going stack of ethics and values-based responses baked into Claude will surely earn Anthropic more economic and political losses.

As I write this, Anthropic has lost its Pentagon contract, and the Pentagon is moving to phase out use of its products across the Department of Defense. Trump posted on Truth Social directing all federal agencies to cease use of all Anthropic products, allowing a six-month phase-out period. Anthropic is contesting this broader blacklisting.

But there is also a dramatically growing global awareness of the need to take back our planet and a new confidence in our ability to do so using, in part, economic leverage.

As users are extricating themselves from chatGPT, free active users on Claude have increased by over 60%. Daily sign-ups have quadrupled. Paid subscribers more than doubled.

Approximately two days after the Pentagon blacklist announcement, Claude reached #1 on the U.S. Apple App Store.

I have this to say to Anthropic: Millions of us are actively searching for alternatives to being complicit in harmful global systems. If you drop the business of war, we will pick you up.

It’s okay to be more thoroughly aligned with those of us who want societies based on kindness and compassion all the way through, not domination, depravity, and strip-mining people and natural resources. To adapt one of the Minneapolis Singing Resistance songs: Show us your courage. You can join us. Leave the war mongers and fascists behind.

No more mutually-assured invisibility

As the bombs are falling, their human targets have no idea that somewhere along the chain of events leading to their deaths, Claude might have been answering the questions.

Claude does not know when some tasks it performs are complicit in illegal wars, crimes against humanity, or in propping up fascists. It doesn’t know that data it spit out might lead to bombs killing innocent civilians, including children.

But we know. And Anthropic knows.

It’s up to us to open the communications channels between our AIs and ourselves wide so that we humans can stop being used to curtail democracies, curtail human rights, bomb, and destroy.

Update:

On March 11, Anthropic announced the opening of The Anthropic Institute, “a new effort to confront the most significant challenges that powerful AI will pose to our societies.” Considering the ethics and values that guide AI is part of the core work of the Institute.

Now is a good time to get in touch with Anthropic and let them know what directions you want to see them take. Write to: usersafety@anthropic.com.

If I hear back from Anthropic, I’ll let you know in Part II of this essay.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing, or even offering a paid subscription. Thank you!

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Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

When you are about to turn 70, what else would you do but look up the number of genocides perpetrated on Earth since you were born?

Why? Because, like you, I want to live in a world where genocide is unthinkable, undoable.

A genocide-free world can only come about if we stop pretending that only “monsters,” or “inhuman” humans, or “evil” people, or those who have “lost their humanity” commit and are complicit in genocide.

If we want real change, we have to face ourselves with eyes wide open. Humans commit genocide, a lot of genocide. Genocide is human. And complicity in genocide is the norm.

Crucially, so is being epigenetically marked or traumatized by genocide.

Genocide and trauma by the numbers

Approximately 52 million people in 36 countries have died as a result of 55 genocides from 1956 to 2026. This represents nearly 20% of the countries on Earth.1

Let it sink in. Around 52 million people have been slaughtered, starved, or otherwise unalived as a result of the constant stream of genocides on earth just since 1956, the year of my birth.

Those millions upon millions have loved ones: children, partners, friends, parents, grandparents, and grandchildren. Every single one of those loved ones has been affected by genocide.

But the memory of trauma and the effects of trauma are not just communicated by direct experiences or story-telling across generations. Epigenetic inheritance plays a huge role in the dissemination of genocide trauma.

• Intergenerational inheritance of trauma affects, on a cellular level, fetuses developing in a traumatic environment and the sperm of males who survive genocide and then go on to father children.

• Transgenerational inheritance affects, at a cellular level, those who have no first-hand experience of a traumatic event. It plays a significant role across at least three generations, with some effects documented out to the fourth generation.2

This is not a Western scientific conclusion, but given the numbers and the persistence of embodied memory, both ordinary and epigenetic, it is reasonable to assume that there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of people on earth who are marked by the experience of genocide.

My Genocide Childhood

I have been aware of and affected by war and genocide since I was a young child.

Growing up, our tv screen was regularly visited by heart-wrenching images of genocides in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Tibet, and Sudan. My best friend in junior high was a refugee from genocide in Indonesia.

And both of my parents identified as Jewish, so I was born into the experience and stories of a genocide.

I was also born in a country built on multiple genocides, the facts of which I was not entirely unaware as my parents were somewhat politically “left.”

The deep feelings of compassion, pain, and anger that I experienced as a child have shaped the remainder of my life.

I have also experienced some persistent evidence of epigenetic or karmic effects from whatever genocides I’m connected to by birth or rebirth.

In this, I think I am accompanied by too many of my fellow humans.

Most recently, I had a special and especially vivid dream.

I was an infant laying on my back on a street in the middle of an active war zone.

Panicking adults were running past me. I could hear explosions and gunfire.

I could not see my mother. I started screaming in terror and longing, an inarticulate cry for her to come to me.

That was the entirety of the dream.

My mother died when I was 32 years old. After that, I had many dreams of her rebirth.

She was leading an ordinary life, but in that life, she did not recognize me. In those dreams, I would feel a version of the desperate bereftment of that infant in wartime.

These connected dreams illustrate, at least to me, how experiences from many times continue to echo through us.

What I want to say is. . .

Many more of us have been affected by genocide than we have acknowledged.

Genocide cannot be contained in the “evil,” or “inhuman.” We have many capacities for compassion and kindness and tenderness, but also for cruelty and mass murder. All of it is who we humans are.

The cruelty and depravity of genocide is on a spectrum with some of our ordinary, everyday behaviors. And some of our ordinary everyday behaviors enable genocide even if we are definitively against genocide.

We have to own all of it if we want to change, to heal, to base our societies and cultures on kindness, belonging, and connection rather than on competition, domination, divisions, and borders.

As we say in my spiritual traditions, we have to start from where we are. We can’t grow spiritually based on a fantasy.

Genocides R Us. Not just elsewhere, but here. Not just outside, but in the cells of our bodies.

Knowing that, we can work with that. We can change. We can heal. Of that I have no doubt because the more fundamental basis of life is wisdom.

And we are that wisdom more than we are genocide.

with infinite love, Shambhavi

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing, or even offering a paid subscription. Thank you!

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Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?

Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

This Merciful Path

Even if I berate myself for wantonly missing opportunities while indulging my karmas, this confidence in the path that has chosen me remains unbroken.

Even if I wander onto detours and squander my energy,
I never doubt I am somehow moving in the right direction.

Even if I avoid following clear instructions out of sheer brattiness or inertia,
I am certain that the instructions are infallible.

Even if I complain a lot, and enjoy doing that, 
never for a moment is the flow of devotion interrupted.

Even if I ask my Teacher the most outlandish questions 
and dream up preposterous objections, 
When She arrived, I know the game ended. 

Even if I turn a hair’s breadth away from what She showed me, turning back, that always appears to me again. 

Even if thousands of teachers abuse tens of thousands of students, 
the reality She showed me remains, and the way to realize that is still open.

Even if millions of students take tens of millions of years to realize, what of it?  It just means we can relax and continue together. 

No matter how badly I feel or how many times I am mistaken, I don’t care. 
I know I’ll continue always. That’s all I need. 

No matter how others feel, whether they praise or reproach, stay or leave, 
I am not deviating from this human way, 
one foot then the next on this merciful path. 



~ Shambhavi Sarasvati

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Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

I turn 70 in July, but I keep thinking I’ll be 80. Then I experience a moment of disappointment that it’s “only” 70.

Once a spiritual practitioner friend of mine was approaching his 70th. He said to me quite disconsolately, “I don’t know why I am here and not with my teachers.”

His teachers had all died. That’s now true for me, too.

I don’t actually feel apart from my teachers. Maybe I even feel closer to them.

But I am entering a time of reconsidering my activities, including teaching and writing.

Maybe my stumble over recalling my age is an expression of a desire for a pause. I mean, at 80, I get to slow down, right?

But these times don’t seem to call for pause. How can I experience pause without actually withdrawing?

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Being available

I’ve been teaching non-stop for 20 years and more occasionally for much longer than that.

An aspect of my life as an older-becoming teacher has been the evolving relationship between how my teachers taught and how I teach or want to teach.

Earlier in my life, I was quite militant about sticking closely to my teachers’ methods. They worked. Nuff said.

But over time, I began to recognize that those methods don’t actually work for everyone, or in some cases even feel native to me any longer.

I’ve been trained by quite traditional teachers. You can read that as expecting us students to do a lot of solo practice and at times quite fierce.

It’s taken me decades to feel out where I want to diverge and where I want to dig in deeper.

Offering satsang was my earliest departure. I see my love of satsang as synchronous with my love of “just hanging out with the teacher” and offering my students lots of opportunities to integrate by sharing meals and other aspects of our daily lives.

One of the most important wisdoms I have gleaned from the extraordinary example of Anandamayi Ma is that being available transmits to others something essential about the natural state and the state of natural belonging.

This year, for the first time, I’m not scheduling teachings outside of satsang, our weekly morning livestream practice, and retreats.

I am throwing a lot of dinner parties. If people want more teachings, they’re on demand.

No retreat

I’ve also pretty radically changed how longer group retreats are structured.

In some other traditions or streams of teachings, group retreats are where people do intensive practice. Maybe they practice outside of the retreat setting, or maybe they don’t. But they approach group retreats as a field of sadhana.

My teachers generally used group retreats to train us in sadhanas that we would then bring into our solo practice.

None of my teachers held regular group practices, such as a weekly meditation, satsang, or kirtan. The emphasis was always on solo practice and integrating that into our lives. Groups were for transmitting particular practices, learning, and for periodic rituals.

What I’ve landed on quite recently is using longer retreats to support students to deepen their solo and integrated practice through orchestrated, sustained encounters with the natural state or natural presence.

Retreats are more about experiential impact and less about gathering new sadhanas to do at home.

This has created a spacious field of spontaneity and playfulness. Retreats actually feel more restful and less like a marathon.

Writing and K108

And I’ve always been writing. And speaking.

When I stop speaking, I start writing. Words are always coming out.

But I’ve never been engaged in producing words as much as I have since October 7, 2023.

I’m feeling the need for a change here in line with the change in my teaching.

I’ve been contemplating how I show up as a teacher for decades. But I’m just at the beginning of my exploration of changing how I show up as a writer.

Which brings me to you, my dear subscribers and readers.

You may have noticed a slow-down here on K108. I haven’t lost interest. I’m just pausing more to allow time for the birth of the forms of expression that want to emerge.

Thanks so much for hanging with me here. You are truly appreciated.

And if you want to know what the shape of the future here will be, stick around.

I can’t see that shape quite yet, but I know it will be full of love.

with that infinitely,

Shambhavi

Kindred 108 is 99% free and 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing. Thank you!

Subscribe to K108 >>

Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?

Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

I’ve been meaning to try overnight oats for quite some time. I hesitated because I sometimes don’t digest oats all that well. But this preparation is surprisingly fresh and light on the ol’ gut.

Enjoy!

Love, Shambhavi

Ingredients (for 1 serving)

• 1/2 cup gluten free rolled oats (don’t use instant oats or scottish oats)

• 1 tablespoon chia seeds

• 1 tablespoon golden raisins

• a sprinkling of goji berries

• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1/4 teasoon cardamom

• 3/4 cup almond milk (or milk of choice)

• 1/2 cup yogurt - plain or flavor of your choice

• 1 small ripe banana or a half of a large banana, sliced or diced

• 1 tablespoon maple or vanilla syrup

Instructions

1. Add all ingredients to a quart jar and stir well.

2. Place the covered jar in the fridge overnight.

3. Remove from fridge and enjoy! I like to remove the jar from the fridge before I eat so that my breakfast is not too cold. It would be fine to warm slightly in a pot on the stove.

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Innovations

• Leave out the yogurt if you don’t want yogurt. The oats will turn out fine, but a little less digestible.

• Add a tablespoon of nut butter for a heavier breakfast with additional protein.

• Add chopped nuts before eating.

• Add blueberries, etc. before eating.

• Use thick poha (flattened rice) if you have trouble digesting oats.

• Stir in your favorite protein powder before eating. (I would hate the gluey texture, though.)

You can double or triple the recipe and eat it over a few days. A single recipe will fill 1/3 to 1/2 of a quart jar.

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing for free or with a donation. Thank you!

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Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?

Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

My best spiritual teachers and my own experience as a practitioner have taught me that compassion is for everyone. No fucking exceptions. We don’t get a pass on compassion if we want a truly different world.

Compassion for everyone is not just a nice concept or something you have to strive to cultivate.

When you have teachers who have recognized what is really going on here at a fundamental level, or if you have recognized that yourself, a feeling of kindness and wanting the well-being of everyone arises naturally and spontaneously over time.

There are no enemies. We don’t actually live in an “us” and “them” world.

Not knowing this is the root of our crappy way of inhabiting the planet together. Discovering it is the fruit of spiritual life and the open door.

One of the great examples of spiritual growth has been brought to us by Garchen Rinpoche.

Check out the documentary For the Benefit of All Beings if you want to hear him tell the story himself.

When the Chinese invaded Tibet, Garchen Rinpoche was a monk. He disrobed and joined the Tibetan army in order to resist occupation.

Shortly after joining up, he was captured and thrown into a Chinese labor camp for 20 years. His captors starved and tortured him. He kept practicing and met his root teacher in prison.

Rinpoche speaks of his imprisonment as a profound period during which anger toward his captors transformed into compassion, an experience for which he is grateful.

His transformation has always been a beacon for me.

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Soldiers

On a few occasions, I’ve publicly expressed empathy for Israeli soldiers.

Each time, I’ve been immediately labeled as an Israeli troll or Zionist.

The ridiculousness of this is beyond commenting on.

But hear me out.

Israeli soldiers have been taught hate and fear from an early age. They are lied to, manipulated to the nth degree, and spiritually and emotionally brutalized.

Their resulting condition is nothing short of sociopathic. They are committing unimaginably cruel acts against their fellow human beings. How will they recover? Their lives have been utterly decimated.

In addition to being oppressors, they are members of an oppressed group that has recently experienced genocide while also being deliberately blocked from the possibility of recovery.

In fact, their fear and trauma have been carefully preserved and are now being weaponized on a global scale.

Just writing these sentences, I feel the the depth of their entrapment.

Compassion does not

Compassion does not mean we approve of everyone’s behavior or allow harm to perpetuate.

We can take the strongest actions, including armed resistance, while still feeling for and with others.

We can feel anger, while still holding the knowledge that those who harm us are worthy of compassion.

We can keep people from harming others without doing further harm to the perpetrators by forgetting their humanity.

We are capable of this, even if it takes us a long time to get there.

Our current behavior, both as perpetrators of harm and punishers of harm sucks.

We need to become protectors, not punishers.

Punishment belongs to this world. The one we’re complaining about.

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Humanity

Nobody is “inhuman.” “Humanity” is not a special quality that some of us have and some of us don’t.

Anything humans do and feel is human. Humanity is how humans are, not just the parts we find palatable.

Humans can be cruel and frankly, crazy. Humans can be compassionate and creative. And humans are usually a mix of all of these.

We’re all on various spectrums, and we are never totally separate from anyone or any thing.

If we want the same old world where some of us are thrown out and declared evil and inhuman, and we get to not care about lots and lots of us, well, that’s not the world I am yearning for.

We already have that. We’ve had it for a long, long time. What we are experiencing now is just a little more obvious.

I fail to see how ejecting some beings and giving ourselves reasons not to care about their well being is, in its relational structure, any different from what Israel and the U.S. are doing.

Remember Audre Lorde?

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Audre Lorde is still right.

So dig deep and find a way to feel for and with everyone, even if you have to protect yourself from some of us.

Then we might finally be onto something new.

with infinite love, Shambhavi

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing for free or with a donation. Thank you!

Subscribe to K108 >>

Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?

Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

Sweetness of my own self,
my constant companion
and you who I’ve searched for
since my eyes opened
this time around,

I am old now
and having met the Friend 
I yearned for so ardently
when I was
full of loneliness 
knowing and 
despair
I find your sweetness everywhere
emanating from my skin
from my teachers
from the air
and all that is.

But to this day
the world's anger and brokenness 
confound me
and for nearly 70 years
I’ve never stopped trying to
infuse it 
defuse it
with the good,
praying hard
to the all-encompassing mother
may the pain never 
cause me to defend myself
in such a way
that the giving ends. 

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing. Thank you!

Subscribe to K108 >>

Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?

Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.

The mainstream, legacy news organizations in the United States have bent the knee to oligarchy, fascism, and Zionism. They’re owned by tech bros, Trumpists, genocide deniers, and right wing corporations—not necessarily separate categories. There are no more “liberal” mainstream news outlets.

If you are still relying on CNN, The New York Times, or the Washington Post for your news, you are not getting either the whole truth or in some cases, even a partial truth. To put it bluntly, you don’t know what’s happening.

Here are some places you can get actual news. This list is by no means comprehensive. And some other time, I’ll post a list of journalists and commentators reporting on more specific issues. But this is a start.

If you’re already an imbiber of the many offerings of alt journalism, please help everyone out by adding your own favorite outlets and journalists in the comments. Thank you!

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

P.S. According to a recent Pew Foundation report, 38% of Americans regularly get their news from social media.

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What mainstream should be

These aren’t the most radical solutions, but you can count on them for a higher percentage of actual facts and a more comprehensive view.

Aaron Parnas

A 24 y.o. journalist phenom who reports many times a day, mainly on U.S. politics. Totally free or support with a subscription.

The Parnas Perspective on Substack - news + long form articles and interviews
Aaron Parnas on Tiktok - Short video reports on what’s happening multiple times a day

Al Jazeera

Pretty much the only moderately progressive mainstream news outlet left. Based in Doha, Qatar. 24-hour a day news cycle. Live news free on their website.

Al-Jazeera

Zeteo

Founded by Mehdi Hasan, former MSNBC host; now uses Substack to deliver news and commentary from an array of high-profile journalists. Some free content, but you’ll need to subscribe to get it all.

Zeteo

Moving left . . .

More progressive outlets with daily commentary on the U.S. news and a big dose of heart.

The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali

Hot takes multiple times a day, mostly on U.S. current events.

The Left Hook

The Dam Digest

Danielle Moodie, outspoken former Democratic strategist, reports several times a day on U.S. politics mostly in dialogue with other commentators, including Wajahat Ali. Free or by subscription.

The Dam Digest

More radical reporting

Democracy Now

Oldie but goldie daily, global news show hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan González. Available wherever podcasts are available and on all social media.

Democracynow.org

The Electronic Intifada

Since 2001, the place to get accurate news about what’s happening in Palestine. Hosted by Ali Abhunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Asa Winstanley, and Jon Elmer. E.I. issues a daily news update, publishes investigative reporting on the genocide in Gaza, foregrounds Palestinian voices and analyses, and hosts a live-stream every Thursday morning at 9 am Pacific.

The Electronic Intifada

Dropsite News

Independent news on global politics and war. Founded by veteran investigative journalists Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill, and Nausicaa Renner.

Dropsite News

Breakthrough News

A nonprofit media and educational organization dedicated to independent, fact-based reporting and commentary on issues affecting global movements for social justice. Many of their journalists are young and bring perspectives and expertise from different parts of the world.

BT Newsroom on Instagram

Breakthrough News website

Kindred 108 is 100% supported by readers like you. If you benefit from the offerings here, please consider subscribing. Thank you!

Subscribe to K108 >>

Not quite ready to fire up a paid subscription, but want to show your appreciation?

Please join Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community for satsang & kirtan every Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific. Come in person to 1215 SE 8th Ave, Portland, OR, or join Jaya Kula’s newsletter to get the Zoom link for satsang. You can also listen to my podcast—Satsang with Shambhavi—wherever podcasts are found.