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 Indian 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 Friday 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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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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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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.

I’m continuing to respond to the crises in our collective lives by changing things up at Jaya Kula in 2026.

For those who might not know, Jaya Kula is the non-profit based in Portland, Oregon where I give teachings in the traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.

This year, we’ll be concentrating our energies on group practice so that we can deepen our immersion in living presence and learn better how to take refuge in whatever is happening.

There will be many opportunities to gather in community both live and via livestream. Have a listen to the video, and visit jayakula.org to find out what’s going on.

I especially want to highlight our main group retreats. I’ll be continuing what I started at last year’s retreats—more wild-style, more spontaneity, daily formal transmission, and lots of play.

Find out more about our 2026 retreats »

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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.

Ignorance is not shameful

We’re all born with more or less access to wisdom. That is our natural condition, and there is nothing wrong. Each of us is ignorant to some degree.

Ignorant about what?

Everything from lacking ordinary clarity about what is happening immediately around us to degrees of ignorance about the nature of our existence.

Again, there is nothing wrong with us or damaged about us because we experience some lack of insight or understanding. That’s how we are made.

But then what? What about after we are made?

Adhikāra and bhūmikāra

In my spiritual tradition, the Sanskrit word adhikāra means our innate capacity—what we bring into this life. Our adhikāra is intellectual, emotional, spiritual, creative, and sometimes even mystical.

Bhūmikāra is what we do with our adhikāra—how we develop, nurture, and express our adhikāra.

Any combination of adhikāra and bhūmikāra is possible. We may have low adhikāra in some areas, but we do a lot with that and take advantage of the opportunities we encounter.

We may have high adhikāra in some areas, but we don’t develop that or have the best circumstances to express our adhikāra.

We may have terrible circumstances and still be able to develop and express ourselves in a wonderful way.

There are infinite permutations.

So the question is: Given the spectrum of our capacities, what are we doing with them?

Titan fragility

In the titan cultures, the U.S. being prime among them, many of us have a difficulty with being beginners and with learning.

Our self-worth often depends on projecting a false aura of accomplishment and knowledge even before learning takes place.

All accomplishment requires us to tolerate a high degree of experimentation, ineptitude, and even failure.

All learning involves unlearning or relearning. Many of us find the destructive aspects of learning to be too uncomfortable.

In order to ward off shame, we assert limited forms of knowing as if they were unassailable or ultimate.

We take up the position of the knowers, the definers, and the judges when we actually understand very little.

We refuse to ask the questions and let in the evidence that would reveal our limitations because we are too fragile to host the discomfort of the destruction of our cherished, yet limited concepts.

At the same time, we make actual money and generate cultural capital when we project certainty and adamantly insist on our clear categories and simplified, closed analyses.

The brain plate

I’ve been keenly aware of my own ignorance since I was a very young child.

Back then, I recognized that what I saw in front of my ordinary eyes and could access with my ordinary mind, was extremely limited. I felt very frustrated by this.

I imagined my lack of understanding as a metal plate bisecting my brain. This plate was a metaphorical structure for the feeling of being blocked or cut off from a fuller wisdom.

Now I know that it was not just my mind that was blocked, but all of my senses. And I’ve spent a lifetime trying to remove those blocks with only partial success.

To do even this, you have to be willing to not know, to be wrong, to feel helpless, to question everything and be questioned. The ground you stand on has to be perpetually unstable. You have to assume the impermanence of much of what you now feel certain about.

Most of all, you have to strongly desire clarity and to know your real situation—from the mundane to the most existential.

Refusing genocide

One thing that has become clear to me since October 7, 2023 is that many people are refusing clarity. They don’t want it. They are refusing knowledge in the most abject, obvious ways.

In order to continue refusing the onslaught of clarity and the desperate appeals being made to our minds and hearts, our insistence on our ignorance has to grow that much stronger.

And we have to become more cruel.

Of course I’m talking about Zionists who refuse to learn about the real history of Palestine and Israel or about what is happening today in Gaza.

People have been indoctrinated and lied to, but the tools that would free them are now openly displayed everywhere.

Many Jewish people have gone through radical examinations of their understanding and attachments and have extricated themselves from the cult of Zionism.

However, a larger number of Jewish people and their allies have not. And at this point, this refusal of wisdom is becoming more and more stark with each passing day.

But I’m also talking about those who identify as progressives who still hold onto the idea that Israel is defending itself or is even a viable project.

I’m talking about those who identify as progressives or even radicals, who refuse to deal with the complicity of the Democratic party and most elected Democrats and yes, Democratic socialists, in genocide.

I’m also talking about spiritual teachers and students who issue vague, isolated calls for peace, or who say absolutely nothing, or who have used what is happening in the world as a jumping off point for self-advertisements about their superior understanding or equanimity—code for “I’m too realized to react.”

I wonder if some of you, as I do, feel exhausted and frustrated by the endless, repetitive dissections of Trump and MAGA when the mirror is so rarely turned on ourselves.

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Exquisite tenderness

Gaza is not just another genocide. For reasons we will never fully understand, it has become a global mirror that is reflecting the real condition of many colonial countries and our cruel cultures.

Gaza is also a mirror reflecting the possibility of community. And it is revealing more widely our profound yearning to live in societies based on mutual care and kindness.

Along with many folks I know, since the first Trump presidency I’ve been re-examining and learning so many things about myself, others, and our world. This process of stripping, deconstruction, and coming into more clarity intensified greatly after October 7th.

I’ve learned a lot of history, explored my relationship to Judaism, experienced new intimacies with people from around the world, felt a lot of pain and grief and loss, and encountered piercing beauty and wonder.

I know I’ve gained capacity and skill as a human being because of my openness to becoming destabilized and ungrounded and to experiencing in a more intimate way some extremely painful realities of our lives together on this planet.

Lately, I’m less moved to speak, but I’m not less moved. I feel full, and I sense something about to be born of this fullness, this exquisite tenderness.

Birth canal

We all feel the destructive quality of this moment in human history. It is also a time of conception and gestation. Things are coming apart and coming together in a new way. But the new has not yet arrived.

Globally, it seems likely that the destruction will intensify. We may need more chaos in order to be forced to re-order our lives.

I do know that the longer we refuse to let ourselves be remade and reborn, the longer we will remain here in this difficult, generative, fierce darkness.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

Hey friend! I am offering a retreat on Darkness, Destruction, and Generosity in Portland, Oregon from February 12-15th.

We’ll explore:

• Teachings on darkness, destruction, and generosity from Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen

• Teachings on generosity and the overthrow of oppression

• Shiva the Destroyer and fierce Devis

• Practices of shunya and destruction from the traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen

Find out more here.

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.

Over the past two years of intensified genocide in Gaza, some yoga people, Hindu people, and Buddhist people from the West have publicly announced that they feel duty-bound to “witness” the horror.

We in the U.S. and other Western countries are paying for the genocide and are many-handedly propping up a failed, genocidal state. So the bid to be positioned as a witness stands in stark contrast to the reality of our direct complicity and instrumental participation.

We are also experiencing here in the U.S. the ascendance of a dictatorial state.

As does Israel, this state uses violence and terror as primary methods of control.

It starts wars or threatens war in order to remain in power.

It is rapidly enacting racist and misogynist policies and breaks laws to do so.

It is building an even deeper surveillance state and promotes false narratives of success when failure is its real condition.

As I said in a recent podcast:

“This isn’t just about somebody else. You’re not just witnessing something about somebody else. This is about us.

It’s about every one of us. It’s about every one of us in the United States, about every one of us in Western Europe, about every one of us on this planet. Because the whole question of what it means to be human is now globally up for grabs.”

- From Satsang with Shambhavi: “Spanda, Codependence, and Being Untethered,” Dec 3, 2025.

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A brief history of witnessing

Sankhya, Vedanta, and Advaita Vedanta are broad and ancient swathes of religious view and practice from India. They span the spectrum from dualistic to non-dualistic views of reality, but they share concepts of God or the Absolute as a witness to manifest life.

Witnessing in Vedanta, Advaita, and Sankhya is most often coupled with an idea of purity and remaining untainted by phenomena. It is associated with transcendence, not immanence, and with stillness rather than activity.

Across various Hindu source texts, witnessing is strongly associated with detachment from the needs of the body, sexuality, emotions, and the outward-moving senses in general.

Two birds

A well-known allegory of the witness appears in the Mundaka Upanishad, a section of the Artharva Veda.

Two birds, companions and friends, nestle on the very same tree. One of them eats a tasty fig; the other, not eating, looks on.

Stuck on the very same tree, one person grieves, deluded by her who is not the Lord; But when he sees the other, the contented Lord—and his majesty— his grief disappears.1

— Mundaka Upanishad, 3.1.1 - 3.1.2

This is considered to be one of the more scholarly translations. It’s debatable whether or not the gendering of the two birds accurately reflects the letter of the Sanskrit text. But it does reflect a near-universal cultural lens through which “she” is the one who cannot control her passions and who “deludes,” while “he” represents the idealized witness who is detached and not subject to desire.

The birds of witnessing and ordinary desires are “companions and friends” because they exist within each of us. The standard contemporary interpretation of this verse is that the suffering human must recognize the witnessing aspect of himself and this will cause the female-coded aspect of the self to cease its indulgences.

The female-coded, and also the dark-skinned and lower-caste, are associated with the body, sexuality, sinfulness and the senses. The male and lighter-skinned and upper caste are associated with the mind, purity, witnessing, the eyes, and with seeing.

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Lose the watcher

Various teachings from the traditions I’ve practiced in contain instructions such as “We must lose the watcher,” “We should be free from both the watcher and the watched,” “Unmind the mind,” and “Real darshan (seeing) is without witnessing.”

The triad of the witness, the act of witnessing, and the witnessed is the fundamental protocol of dualistic experience despite the fact that various non-dual traditions from India recommend deploying it.

It works like this. I set myself apart and perform an operation of witnessing life, or my own mind, thus relating to my thoughts and emotions as a kind of othered entity.

For the witness, the world becomes a panopticon, a tower keeping order over a scene of incarceration.

The panopticon is a privileged view. But what is incarcerated?

Eyes rolling (back)

For the witness cultures of mainstream Hinduism, and to a lesser extent Buddhism, various styles of non-involvement are admired.

These range from literal renunciation to the admiration of insensible states of interiorization or trance, to spiritual practices that encourage becoming unaware of the body or one’s surroundings.

Along this spectrum I would also include what I have called “spiritual botox,” the crude assumption that “detachment” is equivalent to non-feeling or non-expressiveness.

Some Western-derived teachers in the witness traditions are prone to speaking in measured monotones, their facial muscles remaining unnaturally still. They may even move with a deliberate slowness.

This is a performance of a concept of witnessing or detachment.

None of my more realized teachers behaved like this. In fact, they had an enormous emotional range and were the most expressive and spontaneous people I’ve ever encountered. And they laughed wholeheartedly.

The Spiritual Witness Protection Program

The teachings on the witness were more nuanced in general earlier on in their histories. Now, however, we have people actually promoting as spiritual accomplishment the assumption of a stance of faux neutrality or distance from the suffering of others.

Deploying witnessing in this way is one more layer of the protection of privilege: the protection of spiritual “authority,” the protection of reputation, the protection of money.

But what matters to me most is the sequestering or “incarceration” of unbound compassion and kindness.

The Eve of Destruction

When we are busy taking up a position, any position, with respect to others, our access to compassion, to spontaneously being moved, is impaired.

We can take up the position of the watcher. We can take up a position of detachment. We can take up a position of “reasonableness.” We can even take up a position of compassion.

Having done so, we will be more cut off from others, not more intimate.

One of the most important lessons that has been gifted to me in my life as a practitioner is that compassion, mercy, kindness, and tenderness are aspects of the natural state. They are woven into the fabric of an alive aware reality.

These are wild, unbound, magical and magnificent flows that don’t follow the rules we have made up about what they should look like or how to embody them.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to make anything up and in fact cannot cultivate what already permeates all.

What we can do is destroy that which stands in the way of us being naturally moved. We can destroy the watcher. We can destroy our brands. We can destroy our reasons. We don’t need them.

We can relax and let the wisdom of life take us.2

Over the past two years, someone occasionally has asked me if I think it’s spiritual to be political.

These questions are sometimes full of yearning. At other times, they barely hide a degree of disapproval.

But I’m not speaking out because I think it’s the right thing to do, or because I have some justification that allows the political and the spiritual to co-exist.

I’m doing it simply because I am moved to do so, because compassion is. Because I can feel that your life is my life, and we are together in a great intimacy that no one can describe, but it can be lived and known.

Some days I am so full of feeling, words pour out.

Some days I am so full of feeling, I cannot speak.

Whatever is happening, I just let myself be and follow however I am moved.

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

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.

Here in the U.S., we suffer from a terrible virus. We catch it at a young age and most of us die with it running rampant in our systems after a lifetime of uncontrolled replication.

The virus is so ubiquitous, many of us think it is who we are. We don’t notice it sucking our time, energy, attention and joy. In fact, the more infected we are, the more “successful” we are likely to be, the more acclaim we will garner and the more money we are likely to earn.

Unfortunately, no matter how successful we become at meeting the demands of the virus, the more impaired is our ability to feel satisfaction, contentment or fulfillment. This virus has one ceaseless demand: become Greater, and Greater and then GREATER still.

Many, if not most of us Americans, are thoroughly programmed by the Greatness virus in our conduct and emotions. The programming runs something like this:

• If I’m not continually improving, I’m failing.

• Every next step has to be a step up.

• Growth and expansion are always good.

• I am destined to be Great (at something.) If I’m not, it’s because I screwed up or because I’m irreparably damaged.

• Greatness consists of measurable, visible accomplishments: Degrees, certificates, certifications, net worth, salary, position, size and location of domicile, possessions, including “Great” relationships, or number of followers on social media. And for spiritual folk, greatness is measured in amazing “spiritual” experiences, spiritual initiations by and meetings with “Great” teachers, numbers of students, lineages held, and general buzz about spiritual me.

Viruses are dead things. When we embody the Greatness virus instead of a more natural life, we become enslaved to the endless, repetitive work of promoting our self image and the attempt to antidote fear, uncertainty and loneliness.

We waste our precious time aggressively and defensively manipulating how others see us and hiding from how we really feel about ourselves.

The survivalist strategies and activities of the virus stand between us and intimacy with others.

We become dismissive, disparaging, supremacist, and violent in myriad ways.

The virus depresses us and subjects us to deep wellsprings of shame and rage. It impoverishes our relationships and locks us up in prisons of self-concern.

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The greatness of the heart

But there is another version of greatness, one that leads us to deeply relax instead of perpetuating our tensions and cruel cultures.

The Sanskrit prefix maha—great—indicates the glorious and abundant embodiment of wisdom virtues such as generosity, compassion and kindness. It is often used to refer to a person who exhibits greatness of heart.

Baked into the ancient Indian concept of greatness is also great modesty.

Modesty shows up as a lack of interest in measuring accomplishments, measuring oneself against others, or being measured by others. It shows up as a feeling of happiness at the success of others and a sense of humor about our own foibles and failings.

Both pride and shame are immodest as they both place great importance on the individual to the detriment of our ability to care for or even notice others.

Nine ways to kill the Greatness virus and discover your naturally great heart

1. Recognize that life has ups and downs. Nature does not operate as a continual climb to a fictitious top. It just doesn’t. Learn to gracefully adapt and redefine success as successful adaptation not “winning” or “improving.”

2. Do what you enjoy and enjoy what you do. Many people infected by the Greatness virus worry inordinately about what to do with their lives or how to act. Whatever they choose has to be “Great” or have a Great effect. The best choice is to simply do something you enjoy and act with the understanding that you are a speck in a vast universe. Do your very very small part, and enjoy it a bit along the way. That’s a perfectly fine life.

3. Take a pause from measuring. When you find yourself comparing, contrasting, and judging yourself or others, take a pause. Don’t put anything in place of that measuring activity. Let emptiness arise. Take a dip in immeasurable life. Accustom yourself to it. The more you do this little exercise, the easier it will become to just live.

4. Get into apprenticeship. Approach everything you do and all of your relationships in the spirit of apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is an attitude of experimentation, forever-learning, deep attention, the cultivation of patience, modesty, curiosity, and a quiet passion for the craft. Anxiety about mastering something or being perfect are all part of the virus’ programming. Don’t be duped.

5. Do your best and let go of the result. The Greatness virus tells you that you should be in control of what happens in your life and even the lives of others. It tells you that when something goes wrong or even when it goes right, that is down to you. This is a totally false view. Cause and effect are infinite. You are only one, small factor. Just do your best and forget about it.

6. Notice what moves you in others and aim to embody that. What really moves you from the heart? Is it a certificate? An award? A promotion? A big bank account? Admiration? Praise? I doubt it. Look at the people who deeply move you and ask yourself what is it about them that brings tears to your eyes and a swell of gratitude and nameless love to your heart. Those are the qualities and “accomplishments” you really value. Organize your life around learning to embody those qualities.

7. Feel the compulsion of the Greatness virus. All fixations (aka karma), come with a feeling of compulsion. It can be compulsive worry, or compulsive excitement, or compulsive competitiveness. But the feeling of that little engine of compulsion chugging away is unmistakable. Get in touch with the feeling of compulsion in order to be able to discern when you are meeting the demands of the virus. Recognizing this will give you the motivation to relax and allow a more natural course of life to unfold.

8. Take a at least a 1/2 day a week and do nothing. Don’t work. Don’t plan anything. Don’t read books. Don’t do errands, or catch up on home improvement chores or exercise. Go on a media fast. Rest quietly at home, or go out in nature (no strenuous hikes) and just be. Cook some simple food. Take your time eating it. You may feel anxiety as your senses relax and you come back into touch with your surroundings and yourself. Let it come, and keep relaxing.

9. Take refuge in generosity. When we are giving to others and have an attitude of service, no matter what is going “wrong” in our lives, and no matter what failings we feel we may have, we can always get in touch with our fundamental goodness.

The Greatness virus cannot accomplish this for you. No matter how much others admire you or how many accomplishments you rack up, you will be compulsively seeking the next Great thing.

Great goodness or compulsive greatness? You choose.

With infinite love,
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.

Blackout is coming

From November 25th through Cyber Monday, there will be a mass blackout of shopping and working in the U.S.

The blackout exempts small, locally owned restaurants, grocers and shops.

A third No Kings protest is called for Black Friday, November 28.

The Blackout comes on the heels of two previous No Kings protests, the first attended by an estimated 5 million people. Seven million people in 2700 locations supported by more protests around the world took to the streets during the second No Kings—the largest mass protest in U.S. history.

Many people on the left (whatever that actually means in the U.S. context), or just more radical people, have roundly and soundly dismissed No Kings as a liberalgasmic street fair with no demands and an implied or explicit aim of returning to capitalist business as usual with a Democratic Party face.

A white woman at No Kings was photographed holding a sign that said, “If Kamala was president, we’d be @ brunch.” This photo became emblematic among some sectors of all that is wrong with No Kings. And I don’t disagree. But I’ve kept largely quiet because I feel there is much more happening here—something powerful and useful.

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Too soon to tell

Here’s my list of somewhat hopeful thoughts about No Kings, the Blackout, and whatever happens after that.

• Donald Trump has proved to be susceptible to the spectacle of large protests in our streets and worldwide. As liberal-schmibral as some folks who turned up for No Kings may be, the sight of our streets filled with millions of protesters is working to destabilize the world’s most extreme and possibly dumbest narcissist and his regime.
  
  Trump has already reacted to the protests in ways that reveal his weakness to even his staunch supporters. His power is waning, albeit, too slowly. No Kings is playing a role in this.

• Trump told Netanyahu, “You can’t fight the whole world, Bibi.” This was a direct reference to pro-palestinian/anti-zionist protests. That spectacle pushed Trump to push Netanyahu to sign onto a ceasefire. We don’t yet know what effects the No Kings protests will have. It’s too soon to dismiss them, but they already are not nothing.

• Right now, the whole deal about hero-leaders might be up for kicking to the curb. I’ve been aware since the global pro-Palestinian protests started, that this uprising is different. Strong leaders are absent, and a strong, broader platform is in embryonic form. No Kings is even less defined with dozens and dozens of groups organizing from varying sectors of the political-cultural spectrum.
  
  I am curious to see how this pans out, although we might just return to a capitalist and Zionist oligarchy with a socialist patina. But I’m also not up for the rigidity and dogmatism of the traditional left. Is there an opening here for something more anarchic, mutual-aid centered, decentered, and playful?

• No Kings is building momentum. It’s emboldening people. It might be educating and even radicalizing a small percentage of people. The question of next steps is emerging from this momentum. A general strike is much more possible now. The energetics of No Kings might be more important and powerful than the marches themselves.

• The general peacefulness, mockery, and playfulness of No Kings and anti-ICE protests feels appropriate to the moment. The fascist 2025 agenda explicitly calls for inciting violence among the disaffected populace so that authoritarian rule can be more easily justified.
  
  Although the No Kings organizers and many of the participants take “peaceful” as an ultimate value and don’t recognize the racism and anti-legal nature of this stance, I still think no violence is the right strategy for now. Anti-ICE activists have a more nuanced and radical view in general, and they are also choosing non-violence for now. I think this is smart.

  Also, I’ve been waiting my entire life for a mass protest movement that employs mockery and theater as a main tactic. This is a powerful way that we can refuse to be ruled. Queer people have been doing this for generations. It works.

Anarchy in the U.S.A

Maybe my natural optimism is getting the better of me, but I do feel that leaderless and with messy zones of unity and zones of disunity, we are lurching toward greater freedom.

I attended a Marxist children’s camp and high school. I have participated in many social justice movements and worked full-time as a tenant organizer in my 20s. I have intermittently been around traditional leftists for more than 60 years.

My experience is that they do not like a mess. They do not tolerate well the unstructured, the inarticulate. They come into grassroots movements with strong agendas and a general disdain for folks who are less radicalized or just doing things differently.

But this is womb time. It is a time of gestation. Inside the womb, it is dark. This living darkness hosts the sticky and wet and unformed. The creative processes are so intense, the temperature of the mother rises. She is glowing and full of nectar.

Can we be mentors?

What I would like to see is that those with clearer perception and a more firmly anti-capitalist, new-order-not-just-reform orientation would take it upon themselves to do the work of mentoring rather than denigrating.

Well-deserved and decades-old critiques of liberalism are being newly sharpened. Yet we do have a unique window of opportunity to build on the anti-supremacist movements and cultural flows of the past decades to open hearts and radicalize some people.

I have been trying to do this since October 7th, 2023. I can tell you it’s hard, and sometimes sad, and sometimes the pushback is intense. But it’s really, really sweet when it works.

I have lost students and teachers and friends. But I’ve also gained some new and trustworthy companions on the path.

This is happening

I’d like to end with a few things that unfolded this week.

Buy Nothing, a nationwide, hyperlocal mutual aid network of neighbors supporting neighbors erupted with folks looking for “grocery buddies.” This is people offering to buddy up with neighbors who are losing their SNAP benefits and to shop for and deliver and pay for their groceries for the month of November.

A local cafe in a largely white, professional-class neighborhood in Portland, OR raised nearly 90k in one day to support free breakfasts for people experiencing food insecurity.

With the climate-change-driven hurricane of the century bearing down on Jamaica, the Israeli genocide intensifying in Gaza, and the mass killings in el-Fasher, I am seeing more people making connections between these events and their own lives in late-late capitalism.

Something is being birthed.

The barriers between the U.S. and the realities of our own lives and those of rest of the world are breaking down.

Let’s get in there and get messier and birth this thing to light.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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Temples, Cosmos, City

The sacred geometries called yantras and mandalas are technologies employed during Tantrik sadhana to invoke the presence of many beings and wisdoms. But their structures are also architectures that can correspond to temples, the cosmos in its entirety, or a city.

Yantras in the Indian Tantrik traditions, and mandalas in both Indian and Tibetan traditions come in diverse forms. Many have four exterior gates like the gates of an ancient city or the doors to a temple.

The lines and intersections and shapes of the interior may form concentric circles, interlocking triangles, squares, rings of lotus leaves, and other configurations.

In the Indian tradition, three-dimensional yantras are carved out of crystal, mercury, and stone. Tibetan Buddhism is famous for its mandalas of colored sand.

Many yantras in the Tantrik traditions invoke the creative, world-building power of Devi. In the center are a single or three downward-facing red triangles invoking Devi’s creative force as she incites the process of creation from the absolute to the appearing of dualistic experience.

Sometimes the center of the yantra is a simple red or blue bindu indicating that all of manifest life flows from the absolute.

Both yantras and mandalas are explicitly technologies or instruments for recognizing the nature of reality. In Trika Shaivism, we would say for recognizing the nature of the Self.

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Different “takes” on the same reality.

The temple is a place of worship. In the Tantrik and Hindu traditions, a temple is where one goes for darshan: to see God and to be seen by God. This mutual gazing is a vector for the transmission of knowledge of the nature of the Self, one’s own nature. Through ‘having’ the darshan of the deity or God or Guru, we can recognize ourselves and all else.

Manifest life--the cosmos--is also a temple. It is the house of God and a place of worship. The Temple is the micro cosmos.

A city is also a micro cosmos. It embodies the diversity of manifest life in a human size. A city is explicitly where we go to meet others, have interesting conversations, experience chance encounters and surprises, indulge in the arts and different cultures, engage in commerce, and learn to navigate a diverse, shifting landscape.

The yantra or mandala, whether as temple, cosmos, or city, teaches us, among many other things, that the nature of reality may be realized in the course of everyday life and that participation is foundational to the nature of manifest life.

The poet Rumi called this participation the “constant conversation.”

Spiritual communities as mandalas

Spiritual communities are sometimes referred to as mandalas.

In Vajrayana (Tantrik) Buddhism, the mandala is a sacred enclosure or energetic field within which practitioners encounter the presence of buddhas and bodhisattvas.

Monastic communities and lineages often conceive of themselves as collective mandalas centered around a teacher (lama or guru) who occupies the inner position analogous to the bindu at the center.

In Tantrik lineages, the term mandala refers not only to a geometric or ritual diagram but also to the community of practitioners, teachings, and energies gathered around a teacher.

A creative energy emanates and animates from the center, connecting and guiding the community. But in a healthy spiritual community, the mandala is not governed by competition between the center and whoever inhabits the spaces further out from the center.

While the teacher or other representative of wisdom is at the center, the location in the mandala of students near and far should ideally be governed soley by the desire of students.

If we consider a city and its larger metropolitan geography, some people want to live downtown or in crowded places where the “action” is. Others want to live in quieter neighborhoods with easy access to both the center and seclusion at home. Still others want to live further out in the suburbs. Those who choose the most “rural” locations, e.g. furthest from the center, might visit the center only rarely or enjoy the center from afar.

This is a completely natural process in which students should be free to find their own place.

Sometimes teachers do try to bind students in unhealthy ways, subverting students’ natural inclinations. They use the concept of a “center” to magnetize students and incite jealousies and competition that enable them to control students.

In our culture here in the U.S., I’ve encountered some students over the years who want to be seen as being at the center, but who actually have very little interest in doing practice or participating in the community. The “center” is a brand for them, not a real desire.

Fundamentally, the center just means you are “centering” spiritual life and your relationship to your teacher and community. If you want to do this, fine. If not, fine. But it is helpful to know that you are free to chose according to your natural desire.

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Mandala at Jaya Kula

We refer to the Jaya Kula community as “the Mandala.” We consider anyone who engages in any way to be an aspect of our Mandala. So, for instance, those who subscribe to the newsletter, or who listen to our podcast or read something I’ve published, but who never interact with us or come to teachings are aspects of our Mandala.

Then there are people who show up for social events, or who participate in some way with the community, but who don’t have an interest in working closely with a teacher.

There have been folks whose primary commitment is to a different tradition, but they like to “visit” our tradition now and then.

At the center, there are students who are working very closely with me and who support the community in many ways because they have chosen to do this.

Each person is respected and cared for in recognition of their inherent and equal value. At the same time, each person has a totally unique relationship with our Mandala and with me.

Those closest to the teacher through their sadhana, creative energy, seva, and devotion, collaborate with the teacher to hold the shape and purpose of the Mandala for everyone.

This collaboration and the energy of the Mandala that it sustains are among the great beauties and blessings of human life.

with infinite love,
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!

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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.

(This is not the standard version. Links to other versions below.)

We shall overcome. We shall overcome. We shall overcome one day. Oh deep in my heart, I do perceive, we shall overcome one day.

From the rivers to the seas, from the mountains to the shores, from the South to the North, we shall overcome. Oh deep in my heart, I do perceive, we shall overcome one day.

We walk hand-in-hand. We walk hand-in-hand. We walk hand-in-hand today. Oh deep in my heart, I do perceive, we walk hand-in-hand today.

Childhood music

I don’t remember when I first heard “We Shall Overcome,” but I couldn’t have been older than five or six.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my parents were somewhere left of center and right of officially left.

Protest music was a regular feature of my childhood. Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez were household names. At an early age, I could belt out whole albums, albums that are still stored somewhere in my aging brain.

Looking back, I feel that the most important gift my white, bohemian parents gave me was a strong orientation toward caring about and standing up for people whose circumstances were significantly different from my own.

My mother held up the more radical side of things. She admired the Black Panthers and defended their right to carry arms as well as their use of guns-as-theater. She also had a pretty sophisticated take on the misuse and abuse by the powers that be of the label “terrorism”.

Both of my parents were of Jewish ancestry, although my mother was a staunch atheist. Zionism was not a thing in our house.

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Camp Miquon

Both of my parents worked as high school art teachers. For a few summers during my early childhood, my mother taught art at a day camp run by The Miquon School, a progressive education movement elementary school out in the Pennsylvania countryside.

Miquon got started during the 1930s when the American communist movement was gaining traction. Most of the teachers were some kind of Marxist-style lefties. In 1970, one of the teachers started a 7th-12th grade upper school from which I graduated in 1973.

Some of the singers I most loved visited our camp and held sing-alongs for us kids. Pete Seeger was a regular. I remember a visit from Joan Baez.

The songs I learned then, including We Shall Overcome, followed me through successive anti-war, civil rights, and social justice movements rippling like never-ending waves through the years of my life.

As the decades unfolded, the songs collected memories, feelings, resonances.

We shall overcome

“We Shall Overcome” was originally a hymn titled “I’ll Overcome Someday,” written by the Black Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley in 1901.

The song has accompanied the yearnings and activism of millions of people, including labor activists and civil rights leaders, for more than a century .

Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and many others disseminated the song, which attained near-anthem status, through performances at political rallies and marches.

October 10th, 2025

On October 10th, 2025, we woke up to scenes of people in Gaza celebrating a ceasefire.

In the days since, I haven’t written much. My heart is so full of flows moving in all directions, words feel impossible.

I’ve preferred listening to the voices and cries of those inside Gaza and in the diasporic and refugee communities as the genocide continues, although in a slightly stealthier mode.

In this ragged gap where cessation is partial but also drunk deeply, there is some space made for different kinds of expressions and conversations to emerge.

We’re holding many conflicting feelings in this moment, feelings that include tenderness, anger, sadness, relief, resolve, and dread. A couple of mornings ago, “We Shall Overcome” began playing like grace notes over my own emotional score.

I started singing, and this is what came out.

Feel free to sing along, share, copy, mix—whatever serves you. But I hope you feel accompanied, too.

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

Links to other versions of We Shall Overcome

Mahalia Jackson version »

Martin Luther King Jr. “We Shall Overcome” speech»

Joan Baez version »

Pete Seeger version »

Nina Simone did sing a powerful version of We Shall Overcome, but it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere for streaming.

There are dozens of versions on Tidal.

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

Over the past two years, I’ve encountered and shared the work of many Palestinian writers, poets, visual artists, dancers, filmmakers, scholars, and musicians.

Their words and art and music reflect the pain and trauma of occupation, loss of property and freedom, and genocide. But within that pain, the seeds of life continually burst forth.

These artists reflect a culture of resistance woven into everyday life. They demonstrate the power of art to resist a system of domination in a way that is decentralized and insists on the right to rage, enjoy, mock, sing, and communicate with silences, in the gaps.

On this day, the second anniversary of this brutal phase of the genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people, I’m reposting some of the words and music I’ve featured over the past two years, and also some I’m sharing for the first time.

May Palestine finally be free, and so may we all.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

Malak Mattar

Malak Mattar is an artist, illustrator, and author from Gaza City. She began painting at the age of 14 as a way to process the trauma she experienced due to the occupation. Look long and hard into the faces she paints.

As of 2025, Malak Mattar lives in London. She exhibits her work locally and internationally.

Malak on Instagram»

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Hend Jouda

Hend Jouda is a Palestinian poet and short story writer from the al-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. She is an award-winning songwriter and short story writer who is gaining in recognition internationally. Hend has published four collections of poetry: Someone Always Leaves (2013), No Sugar in the City (2017), and A Finger That Managed to Survive (2024), and Gaza: Ô Ma Joie (2025 French).

Text: Hind Jouda Translated into English as part of the project Voices from Gaza Read by: Asma Bahar

What does it mean to be a poet in war time?

What does it mean to be a poet
in war time? It means that you
apologize. You apologize
excessively to the burned-out
trees to the birds without nests
to the flattened houses to the
long cracks in the road’s
midsection to the children, pallid
in death and before it and to the
face of every grieving or
murdered mother

What does it mean to be safe in
a time of war? It means you are
ashamed of your smile of your
warmth of your clean clothes of
your yawning of your cup of
coffee of your undisturbed sleep
of your beloveds alive of your
satiety of accessible water of
clean water of your ability to
bathe and of the coincidence that
you are still alive!

Oh God I do not wish to be this poet in a time of war!

Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi

Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi is a 19-year-old essayist, poet, and editor from Gaza. She studies English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. Her school was bombed by Israel, and she continues to study with her teachers and fellow students online.

Read Taqwa’s October 7th, 2025 essay, “I’ve Endured Two Years of Genocide. But I’m Still Here” on the Nation »

Link to Taqwa’s poetry, essays, and her new zine »

Taqwa is also one of the founders of Coastal Lines Press, a newly formed collective of writers living in Gaza. Through Zines from Gaza, they are turning words into life-saving supplies for their families. Please visit and purchase some zines of artwork, poetry, and prose.

Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha

Ahmed Muin is a Palestinian musician and teacher based and displaced in Gaza. He is the founder of the tent music school, Gaza Birds Singing. The teachers and children of the school use music as a form of resistance, survival, and healing in the midst of the genocide.

In August, 2025, Ahmed and Gaza Birds Singing released this video of “The Drone Song,” an act of defiance, desperation, and joy. The song is composed by Zaid Hilal.

The song went viral and has birthed hundreds of remixes and covers.

Here is the original video followed by a few of the creative productions inspired by it.

Lyrics: Lift him (the martyr) gently high upon the camel’s back, Lift him — I entrust you safely in God’s care.
The martyr’s blood, perfumed with cardamom-Oh night, oh blessed night.
Woe, woe upon the oppressor - his doom, his curse, will be from God.
I keep vigil with the stars of night, calling out our martyrs name.

Alia Sharrief

A choir at the Keizersgracht Church in Amsterdam joins in

Pals for Palestine

Pals for Palestine is a group of Irish activists. They created this version of the Drone Song with sections in Irish in recognition of their shared history of oppression with Palestine.

More covers and remixes can be found on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, YouTube, and Instagram.

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

When I was barely 20 years old, my haircutter got involved with a spiritual community. He described their aim as “perfection.”

As he was clipping away, I asked him, “So what are you going to do once you achieve perfection?”

Bless his heart (for reals). He had no answer. I think he was even younger than I was.

Another time, I knew a couple of yogis who, when asked to describe their tradition, would answer: We are finding TRUTH!

As they spoke these words, you could practically hear the capital letters. A funny look would flit across their faces—a kind of “I dare you” gleam of pride in this supposedly ultimate and unassailable View.

No mission

Having a spiritual mission such as perfection or truth is exciting and lends a feeling of meaningfulness, and even profundity, to our mundane existence.

The practice of Trika Shaivism, however, offers us only destruction.

Perfection cannot be achieved because everything is already perfect. All we can do is destroy the limitations to our perception of that.

What does “perfect” mean? Magical. Jewel-like. Vastly intelligent. Blazingly alive. Full of knowledge, clarity, compassion, creativity, and devotion. Spontaneous. Unconditioned by concepts or linear time. Etcetera. . . 🤣

In all of existence, there is only that self-aware, creative and devotional livingness. It is neither true or false. But it is expressive.

Manifest life—all beings and worlds—are God’s art. Continually creating this infinity of experiences is what God does.

The point of human life is to perceive and embody more of natural wisdom-virtue and be able to participate more fully in the creative play of the world.

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Participation

One of the most important teachings in the entire Kashmiri tradition is that we encounter God or reality right here, in the midst of life. You cannot know the nature of reality, the Self, outside of this. There is no outside.

This world, our ordinary world right now, is God appearing as a fantastical display of infinite variety.

Since everything is already God-wisdom-reality (whatever you want to call it!), we can practice with all of the aspects of our lives: waking, sleeping, dreaming, eating, moving, relating, working, and sitting. Everything is sadhana.

What a wonderful circumstance that we can practice with the elements of our everyday life and become more realized because all of the Lord’s creations are the Lord!

We are not trying to escape because there is nowhere to go.

Jivanmukti in the city

One way of describing our experience once we become more realized is jivanmukti. Jivanmukti means “liberated in life.”

We eventually discover our fuller, less-limited nature, and we participate here more creatively, spontaneously, and freely. We are not so bound by concepts and limited perceptions.

In the Tantrik traditions of India, especially the Bengali Shakta traditions, this manifest life is compared to a great city.

A city is where we go to be in a crowd, meet new people, and enjoy a variety of experiences. We go to a city to be surprised, amazed, and delighted. We work in cities, play in cities, and creative people often gravitate to cities. Cities are for participating.

Of course, the Tantrik city is the city of all life and all forms of life. Someone who is more realized is participating more fully wherever they are and whatever form their life takes—whether rural or urban or something else.

There is no specific form of life that is touted above all others. But when we are more immersed in natural livingness, our senses and mind are wide open, and we are engaged.

with infinite love,
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!

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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.

A student once asked me: Do I ever have the right to be angry?

I get this genre of question frequently. Should I be angry? How can I not be angry? Do I have the right to be angry.

Or students who are obviously angry will deny being angry or feeling anger.

Some people think anger is not spiritual, and we should suppress it or bludgeon it into submission with our spiritual practices.

Others, usually privileged people, think that anger has no place in public discourse, and we should always strive to be “reasonable.”

Still others are afraid of their own anger.

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Our vital energy

I often surprise students by encouraging them to feel their anger. Anger is an aspect of our vital energy. It’s very alive—full of movement, texture, temperature, and intensity.

When we suppress anger or don’t acknowledge our anger, lots of secondary effects arise that deaden our self-expression and cloud our perception.

We can remain stuck in chronic sadness or grief. This can feel safer to people than anger.

We can become exhausted from contriving a ‘not-angry’ personality and monitoring our speech and emotional expression.

We can become passive aggressive—letting our unacknowledged anger out in sneaky ways that are meant to undermine and hurt others while maintaining plausible deniability.

If we are afraid of loss of intimacy or abandonment, we can get into a habit of suppressing or deflecting anger with self-blame and self-depreciation.

If we are being abused or oppressed, it is often dangerous to express anger, but we still have to feel it internally in order to take appropriate action to protect ourselves.

Feeling anger is a very important part of recovery from abuse and oppression.

As practitioners, we want to understand that acknowledging and feeling our anger is functional. It frees up our vital energy and brings clarity to our situation.

But if we identify with anger as a right, or if we strongly identify with outrage or rage as an aspect of who we are, we get stuck in habit, and we cannot discover the more expansive, enlightened forms of anger.

The right to be angry

What does “the right to be angry” mean?

Basically, it means we are enshrining or installing anger as the proper response to particular situations.

We are justifying the response of anger in a way that binds it to specific conditions, and we are conditioning ourselves to respond with anger as a matter of course.

But from the perspective of the traditions I practice and teach in, there is no response that is permanently tethered to particular circumstances.

For instance, many people who are survivors of horrible crimes such as internment or torture or rape, are really angry, but some are not. Some are so traumatized that it’s hard for them to feel anger. Some few feel compassion for their oppressors and attackers.

Some people cultivate anger. Some people strive for forgiveness. Some people just feel pain without anger or blame.

An infinitude of responses is possible depending on the circumstances and the condition of the person experiencing these harms.

All of them are perfectly “right” and within your rights because you are here and that is your response.

But not all responses are what we want to identify with or hold onto forever as practitioners.

As a practitioner, rather than thinking that anger is the only right response, or that I have a right to be angry, it’s better to just have the attitude that “I am angry.” Our anger is a fact, not a life sentence or a diagnosis or a mission.

If we make this small change, we can feel our anger as vital energy. We begin to free our attachment to a certain emotional state and its narrative. Our anger can have more clarity and start becoming more useful to ourselves and others.

Eventually, but maybe not in this lifetime, anger will transform along with other emotions into even more expansive expressions.

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Enlightened anger

Everything here in our ordinary experience is a contracted, more limited version of a more expansive expression of this alive-aware reality.

Or you could say, everything here can eventually reveal its source in wisdom through a process of relaxing and unfolding. We encourage this process when we do practices such as mantra and meditation.

The inherent wisdom of anger is clarity. Self-liberating anger is like fierce, illuminating lightning. It transforms a situation instantly with its cutting-through energy and brilliant light.

However, self-liberating anger disappears right after the flash. It doesn’t hang on, exhausting itself by continually repeating, rehearsing, and trying to hurt and destroy. It reveals sharply, but it never aims to harm.

The anger that expresses in this way leaves behind the freshness of a summer lightning storm.

Have mercy

Suffering at the hands of others can be a very powerful experience, but we do not ultimately want to be at its mercy.

Without ignoring our pain and anger, we should try to view every situation in our lives as an opportunity to discover more wisdom even when we are harmed or great harm is happening to many people.

When reactivity threatens to overtake you, first of all, try to remember what you really want. Where is your life headed?

Use your practice—mantra, breath, and thinking of your teacher if you have one. This is very hard. But even during times when we experience all kinds of compulsive reactivity, we should try to relax and remember what we are really here for, what we really want.

Thinking of my Guru always makes my deepest longing immediately appear in the midst of more contracted versions of emotions. When I think of her, I always know right away that she is my beacon, and my reactivity is not.

Remembering this, I can relax. Emotions reveal their deeper messages and illuminations. I can be more skillful and helpful and even kind in a natural way.

with infinite love,

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!

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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.

64 Things You (May) Have Missed is part two of a post I wrote here on K108 about things I didn’t know until after October 7, 2023.

In our spiritual community’s Slack workspace, we have a channel called leve-leve. It’s where those of us who are more deeply engaged in efforts to free Palestine from occupation and genocide support each other and share.

I asked the members of leve-leve to reflect on what they would have have missed out on over the past two years of the genocide in Gaza if they had remained oblivious or poorly informed and unengaged. Here’s what we wrote.

I will update this post with more things—so please add yours in the comments!

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64 things we would have missed

1. I would have missed learning about the real history of Zionism and the occupation.

2. I would have missed having my whole world view shaken.

3. I would have missed how it changes you to to experience simultaneously the depth of horror and the deepest virtue that humans are capable of every single day for nearly two years.

4. I would have missed learning about Palestinians’ beautiful culture and enjoying the care and love they show for their land and each other.

5. I would have missed seeing clearly what a danger U.S. liberalism is to our well-being and how it enables supremacy.

6. I would have missed experiencing the realities of genocide day-by-day. If humans are going to commit genocide, I don’t want to hide from it.

7. I would have missed the poetry of Fady Joudeh, Mosab Abu Toha, Hend Jouda, Refaat Alareer, Dareen Tatour, and Samih al-Qasim.

8. I would have missed having more clarity about the US government, both broadly around it being an imperialist power, and more narrowly around my belief that the Democrats were going to save anyone.

9. I would have missed Hamada Sho’s cooking videos, and just Hamada Sho. Amazing human being.

10. I would have missed learning from the resilience of the Palestinian people, their boundless generosity, kindness, love of family, and faith in God even in the face of unimaginable violence.

11. I would have missed knowing about the deep ties between Palestinian resistance and the Black Power movement, and the way advocacy and activism form a global, interconnected network, a living web, that is not only inspired by Palestine but also guided and mentored by it.

12. I would have missed the exposure of Zionism as a harmful social project—a cult-like ideology rooted in racism and sexism that ultimately harms everyone.

13. I would have missed being forced to grapple with the fear and complicity and silence of people I love.

14. I would have missed the revelation of Germany’s profound complicity: not truly reckoning with its harm to the Jewish people in the past while also participating, alongside other nation-states, in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians

15. I would have missed knowing that U.S. Democrats are in bed with Israeli lobbying interests. But also wtf is up with Evangelical Republicans being super into Israel?

16. I would have missed witnessing the staggering disconnect and complicity of celebrities and the ultra-wealthy in genocide.

17. I would have missed understanding disturbing truths about our industries and who we choose to elevate.

18. I would have missed seeing the deafening silence of the U.S. philanthropic sector in the face of this atrocity, and of course grassroots organizations still doing the work.

19. I would have missed the beauty of everyday people finding ways to connect with Gaza.

20. I would have missed the creativity and art that have emerged from this solidarity.

21. I would have missed reading If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer.

22. I would have missed knowing the hypocrisy of European governments.

23. I would have missed the realisation that no government or institution is going to save us. Any meaningful change we want to see in the world has to come from us, regular people, in our everyday actions.

24. I would have missed learning how to remain a soft-hearted human in extremely difficult circumstances beyond my imagination.

25. I would have missed feeling the power of the collective when we unite to condemn oppression.

26. I would have missed reading powerful words and poems—piercing courageous words with the power to dismantle our naive fantasies.

27. I would have missed learning how oblivious I was to Western media’s biased coverage of Palestine—all the headlines blaring about six people killed in Jerusalem, lots of space given to Netanyahu’s reaction, no mention anywhere of Israel’s latest assaults on Gaza City, blowing up high-rises and mosques and killing dozens overnight.

28. I would have missed that Israel intentionally bombed every university in Gaza early on in the campaign.

29. I would have missed that very young Israeli children are taught to hate all Palestinians and wish violence and death on them, sometimes through songs or rhymes.

30. I would have missed learning about the awareness that the Palestinian people have of other people's struggles around the world and how actively and vocally they support all efforts toward liberation

31. I would have missed having my mind blown seeing US power and impunity so glaringly exposed.

32. I would have missed seeing the misogyny, antisemitism, and colonialism underlying Zionism.

33. I would have missed the tenderness of Palestinian men.

34. I would have missed knowing how embedded higher education is in the military industrial complex.

35. I would have missed all the music, poetry, food, storytelling, dancing, and journalism, from Palestine.

36. I would have missed Ahmed’s students’ music being forever imprinted in me.

37. I would have missed grieving together.

38. I would have missed seeing how deliberately Israel has allowed polio and other infectious diseases to spread.

39. I would have missed hearing Palestinian children crying in hunger, how can we not turn towards that sound?

40. I would have missed the layers of helplessness in myself and others.

41. I would have missed the refuge of care, community, art, movement, God.

42. I would have missed this opportunity to really open up to the oppressor in myself and see where that shows up in how I try to control others and manipulate situations to keep my concepts intact.

43. I would have missed Gaza stripping away so many concepts I held about humanity. It has helped me to get honest and to know what kind of human I want to be.

44. I would have missed hearing and reading the words of Bisan Owda, Francesca Albanese, Ali Abunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Craig Mokhiber, Gabor Mate, Abubaker Abed, and Ilan Pappé.

45. I would have missed the history lessons.

46. I would have missed the journalists. Oh my god. The tender fierceness of the journalists.

47. I would have missed learning how to feel for joy in the midst of the deepest suffering. The Palestinians have shared their joys with us, right along with their suffering during a genocide. Where is my courage? Where is my honesty?

48. I would have missed learning how to be with people in their suffering, even if it's just reposting something they have asked to be reposted on social media. I would have missed answering that call.

49. I would have missed learning how to be with my own pain more fully, to find refuge in god, to be honest, and to keep doing it day in and day out until I die.

50. I would have missed experiencing people who love so deeply and tenderly.

51. I would have missed the invitation to know death more fully.

52. I would have missed the invitation to know fear more fully.

53. I would have missed seeing the biggest soup kitchens, cooks, jugglers, acrobats, artists, poets, musicians, medics.

54. I would have missed the courage, defiance, and beauty of young men doing parkour in the rubble of their bombed cities.

55. I would have missed hearing the words and sharing the lives of so many ordinary Palestinians coping with the most extraordinary and difficult circumstances.

56. I would have missed feeling and seeing the doctors, the nurses, all the healthcare workers in Gaza. Their skill, their bravery, their ethics.

57. I would have missed praying, begging, pleading and the deepest gut wrenching desire for freedom.

58. I would have missed how Gaza is teaching us all how to grieve again, how to be in relationship with one another, to hold one another.

59. I would have missed participating with millions around the world in this momentous turn in human history.

60. I would have missed buying za’atar at the local food Coop and Palestinian olive oil online and being in the extremely weird position of cooking with these while Palestinians are being starved.

61. I would have missed getting to know the brave activists on the freedom flotillas.

62. I would have missed forming friendships with Palestinian poets, artists, and journalists.

63. I would have missed the capacity of my heart being tested and expanded each day—the ache, the poignancy, the yearning for humans to be more loving, brave, and clear-sighted, and the recognition that some of us are.

64. I would have missed a gift of clarity. We have a choice to make right now. Palestine is demonstrating that we have only two options: continue with supremacy and die or find wisdom together, love each other, and live.

Thanks to: Kaden, Belén, Tania, Sol, Matri, Krys, and Sahaji

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

I will update this post with more things—so please add yours in the comments!

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

Destruction and clarity

The Trump-MAGA years and the genocide in Gaza have pushed me and many of us into an intense period of loss, re-examination, and learning.

Some of this has been painful. Some of it has been poignant and inspiring. All of it has been clarifying.

Here are some of the things I didn’t know and didn’t see coming before Trump first ran for the presidency and since October 7, 2023.

• Despite a lifetime of exposure to some fairly radical politics, I did not know that I was still attached to a lingering belief that the United States is an actual democracy.

• I also experienced, after 60 years of reading and watching science fiction, a certain degree of shock when I realized that we signed up for the dystopia not the utopia.

• I knew Israel was an apartheid, colonialist state, but I had never heard of the Nakba. I knew very little of the history of Palestine prior to the 1967 Six Day war.

• I did not know that 25% of my DNA is from southern Italy where successive generations of Middle Eastern Jews living during the Roman Empire were taken in slavery and indentured servitude. Growing up, we used to joke that my mother’s side of the family looked Mediterranean. Guess the joke was on us.

• Despite my Jewish ancestry, prior to October 7th I had zero knowledge of the fact that Jewish Americans are subjected to intense Zionist grooming and that the majority of otherwise progressive Jews in this country are deeply attached to Israel. This surprised me more than anything else. Israel was not a point of reference for my birth family.

• I barely knew what Zionism was, and I knew nothing of its real history.

• I didn’t know about AIPAC.

• I had never heard of Project 2025.

• I didn’t understand how pernicious U.S. liberalism is.

• I had never before used the word “corrupt” to describe most of the people in Congress and the entire U.S. executive branch.

• I never would have predicted that spiritual friends who teach compassion and political friends who urge solidarity would remain scared and silent, or numb and silent in the face of the overwhelming death and suffering in Palestine at the hands of our governments.

• I never could have anticipated that so many educated, intelligent people and all of the mainstream media would be so susceptible to such obvious propaganda and lies.

• I didn’t know the special pain and poignancy of experiencing the widening gulf between those who are moved to try to stop the atrocities in Gaza and those who, unaccountably, are not.

• I did not know how deeply and widely entrenched our elite universities are in brutally supremacist narratives and aims.

• I did not know that the Palestinian resistance has been serving for decades as mentors to other resistance movements around the world, including the civil rights and Black power movements in the U.S.

• I did not know about Palestinian food, art, literature, dance, or music.

• I did not know that Palestine would become the heart and mirror for the world as we experience a group of people cleaving to their faith and each other in the face of one of the most intense and cruel holocausts in history.

• I could not have foreseen that millions of people around the world would begin to make the connections between their own situations at home and what is happening to Palestinians.

• I didn’t know the sweetness and astounding generosity of the Palestinian people.

• I didn’t know what it was to witness a genocide every single day for two years, and how that would change all of us.

How about you? What didn’t you know? What took you by surprise? And what re-examination, learning, and recalibration have you experienced?

with infinite love,

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!

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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.

Rigor / mortis

Someone once opined to me that spiritual traditions from Asia could benefit from more “rigor”.

I hoped he was speaking of more watered-down versions of these traditions propagated by some, mainly Western teachers.

But the solution he proposed was not to go back to those traditions in their more unadulterated forms and seek guidance, but to impose on them an entirely different epistemology and set of practices from Western science.

As I’ve written elsewhere, assuming the power of interpretation and the redefinition of what counts as knowledge is the colonialist, supremacist move.

In any case, if you have practiced consistently with accomplished teachers in traditions from Asia, you could not possibly conclude that they are lacking in rigor. The reasons are too obvious and too many.

So here’s my main point.

Ignorance, innocent and otherwise

Practitioners born in Western countries often have no clue what the full fruits are of the spiritual practices they are doing or what it takes to realize those fruits. This goes for many teachers, too.

Some of this ignorance is due to the appropriation of spiritual practices for limited ends such as productivity, muscular flexibility, and ordinary relaxation.

Some of this is due to the prevalence of new-ageified versions of these ancient wisdom traditions with their hyper-individualized, easy-fix promises.

Some of this is due to a lack of contact with anyone who understands what spiritual life requires or who has done these practices to the extent that they have some significant realization of the intended fruit of the practices.

Some of this is due to lineages and spiritual businesses perpetuating themselves by appointing and hiring teachers who themselves have limited understanding of what they are teaching. Students become unwitting inheritors of these watered-down or flat-out erroneous methods.

But most of our lack of understanding about the rigorous path and true power of spiritual practice is due to the deeply supremacist, titan cultures we live in. These cultures groom us to be both too fragile and too convinced of the superiority of our own take on everyone else’s cultures to put in the effort and the requisite time to learn and be “just” students.

An unnatural number of us are desperately seeking great spiritual experiences so that we can feel. . . great. Or we have to be “masters” and “teachers”. Our shame and our fantasies of superiority demand more than the unbranded, unremarked spiritual life “suffered” by millions of ordinary practitioners around the world.

Can I teach this?

Once again last week, a student asked me if they could teach the practices they were just, in that moment, learning for the first time.

This has happened before, of course. I’ve even had a yoga studio owner ask me if I would offer a teacher training in mantra for people who largely have never practiced mantra.

Occasionally a student has left a teaching because they were not getting a certificate or other authorization to teach.

As Patrul Rinpoche said: Though you’ve neglected to practice, You elucidate the teachings for others. Your learning is your own worst enemy.

I started doing sadhana in my mid-twenties. I started teaching in my early forties. This is the norm, not the exception, in my traditions.

Sometimes people will begin teaching in their 20s or 30s, but only after practicing and studying diligently since childhood.

My own Dzogchen teacher was 37 years old when he began to teach after a lifetime of practicing first in Tibet and later in Italy.

Patrul Rinpoche’s principle disciple studied with him and attended him until the student was fifty years old, and Patrul finally told him to leave and teach on his own.

Why? Because most of us—if we even have the capacity to teach—just need to do that much consistent, daily practice and study before we are ready.

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Rocket science

Unless we are sociopathic, we would not think of teaching surgery to others after studying it in a class and practicing it a few times.

If we were training to be an artist, we would not ask our teacher who was showing us a technique for the first time, “Do you mind if I teach this to others?”

I’m hard-pressed to think of any other field of learning where people’s first encounter with aspects of the field are in a “teacher” training.

We generally understand that surgery and art are rigorous fields requiring years of study and practice.

So why then do some of us treat the Asian spiritual traditions and practices we’ve encountered as exempt from this respect?

My friends, it’s racism, not rocket science.

I want to say this really bluntly.

Maybe you are just starting a spiritual practice, but you are already fantasizing about becoming a spiritual teacher. Certainly a surprising number of my students over the years have confessed to me, or demonstrated, that “Guru” is their idealized career path.

Maybe you are teaching what you have not practiced or have practiced insufficiently.

Maybe you have modified the methods and aims of spiritual traditions of which you have only a superficial understanding. And you think that is totally fine and even that you have improved on them.

The student who asked me if she could teach what she had not yet practiced was innocent and also a victim of other teachers who did not understand the value and necessity of practice.

But whether you suffer from innocent ignorance, or are a monetizing megalomaniac, you have inherited and are propagating racist, supremacist, colonialist orientations to the non-Abrahamic spiritual traditions.

Kindred 108 hosts an unusually diverse blend of offerings. Many of you reading this are both progressive politically and engaged in spiritual life. So take this as yet another vector for analyzing and ejecting the internalized assumptions and behaviors of supremacist cultures.

And don’t forget to enjoy the demolition!

with infinite love,
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!

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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.

Numbers game

When you ask a question about numbers and their significance in Indian spiritual traditions, you are likely to encounter a pyramid scheme of ever-proliferating, arcane explanations.

What is the significance of the three prongs on Shiva’s trident? Turns out there are way more than three contenders for the best answer. Why do scriptures say that the human body contains 64,000 subtle channels? Why are female deities so often described as being fifteen or sixteen years old? How long is the Kali Yuga? Careers spent proposing answers to this last one just might account for a significant percentage of India’s economy.

But the question I get most often is: Why does a mala have 108 beads?

Constellations East and West

Usually I crack a joke in order to evade answering. But some time back, I “got a download” about the 108 thing. We have to start with Jyotish, or Indian astrology.

Western astrologers use the 12 constellations: Aires, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, etc. Indian astrology is based in a different set of 27 constellations called nakshatras.

Around the 4th century BCE, Indian and Greek astrologers started sharing their knowledge. Greek astrologers did not adopt the Indian constellations. But the Jyotishis stepped right up and assimilated the 12 constellations of Western astrology. The more the merrier.

Today, many people practicing Jyotish rely heavily on the Western constellations. They also use the nakshatras, but often to a lesser extent. In my Jyotish lineage, the emphasis is on the nakshatras.

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Padas

The nakshatras reside in an area of the sky encircling the earth called the zodiac belt. Each nakshatra governs an equal portion of this band of sky, or 13 degrees 20 minutes. This is the distance that the moon appears to travel against the backdrop of the constellations in one day. In one lunar month, the moon passes through the “lunar mansion” of each of the 27 nakshatras. In fact, the nakshatras are said to be the wives of the moon.

As do the Western constellations, the nakshatras communicate to us about our unique ways of showing up as human beings. Each of the nakshatras hosts a large number of associations that speak to the potential qualities of a human life.

But 27 nakshatras are not enough for India, the country in love with the infinite. Each nakshatra is further divided into 4 segments, or padas. Significantly, the word pada means foot. The padas give astrologers access to yet more heaps of associations.

So here’s the only equation you will find in this post. Ready?

27 x 4 = 108.

The sky above us is divided into 108 segments, each representing a particular pada of a nakshatra. The moon progresses through all of them every month.

Now here comes the good part.

Walking back our karma

Jyotish speaks to us about karma—about the unfolding patterns in time that make up our experiences in duality. All of the significances of the nakshatras indicate the “flavors” of our karmic conditioning. When we are trying to wake up, we are trying to resolve or unwind karma, to be free of conditioning.

In the teachings of many streams of Tantra, both Indian and Tibetan, and in Daoism, the process of unwinding karma is one of walking backward from the conditioned to the less conditioned state.The journey toward realization does not involve the creation of something new, but is rather an experience of a return.

Returning is written into our bodies. For instance, in our sadhana or spiritual practice, we travel backward from more gross to more subtle awareness. That journey is symbolized in our bodies by the journey we take with the inhaling breath from the base of the central channel and the root chakra back to the heart and the crown.

The chakras along the central channel are our subtle, internal mala, or garland of beads. When we do mantra practice with an external mala, or string of 108 beads, we also walk backward.

We literally walk backward because as we chant mantra, the beads are always rolled backward with the fingers, toward the body rather than forward and away from the body.

As we roll the beads, we enact the motion of walking backward through all 108 padas of the 27 nakshatras, unwinding or reversing the karmic conditioning they represent.

In one lifetime, we may take this walk with our malas thousands and thousands of times. In doing so, we slowly regain our freedom.

Mt. Meru

But a 108 bead mala actually has 109 beads. The 109th bead is called the “Guru bead” or “Mt. Meru.” It is not counted when doing mantra practice because the 109th bead represents the unconditioned.

Mt. Meru is a subtle mountain of five peaks situated at the center of Reality. It is a living symbol of the source of the creation. All of the heavenly bodies circle Mt. Meru, as do we until we are free of karma. Mt. Meru is outside of linear time and is a fountain of infinite potential for Self-expression.

When we walk backward, chanting with our mala, we are walking toward Mt. Meru. Every time we reach the 109th bead, we flip the mala and walk backward once again. This continues until we divest ourselves of conditioning and come to rest in the center. Then, all ideas of a journey or a path end.

So the next time you turn the beads, see if you can infuse your practice with the feeling of the return. See if this understanding of the journey you are embodying brings you to a deeper, more subtle and connected experience.

Lots of love,

Shambhavi

How to Use a Mala

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.