There are things we do, think, and feel. And then there are the “bones” structuring what we do and how we think and feel.

Just as you move around through your days without being too aware of how your bones are holding the shape of your body, we generally have internal, habitual assumptions structuring our external expressions, our thoughts, and feelings.

Even politically progressive or radical folks can be shaped by the bones of supremacism and not be aware of those deep structures.

I’ve been pondering these bones for a very long time. So I decided to make a list.

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Ten Bones of Supremacist Cultures

1. Caring about “the best,” “the highest,” “the purest,” “the most cultured,” “the smartest,” etc.

   The “hierarchy bone” structures individuals, nations, families, cultures, religions, political movements, and many other groups. When we think designations such as highest, smartest, most cultured, etc. are viable, decidable, or important, and we spend any time trying to demarcate ourselves or any group we belong to by creating hierarchies of valuation, we’ve got this bone embedded in us.

2. Being on a mission to be first and find beginnings.

   Remember Star Trek’s opening credits—”Where no one has gone before”? The writers thought it was so progressive to change to “no one” from the original “no man.” But every place the Enterprise visits is populated by indigenous inhabitants or some other group that traveled there or crash-landed. The Enterprise absolutely never gets there first. And why should they care? Because that’s the whole colonialist explorer-discoverer vibe. Firstness. Firstist. Firstism. What if the opener were: “To find other intelligent life in the universe and collaborate”?

   
   We’re also being firstist when we think it’s viable, decidable, or important to locate the first person or the first group or the first culture to come up with some idea or invention or accomplishment, or even the original oppression. This is especially icky when we discount oral traditions or indigenous traditions and relocate their origins to written texts or just “forget” them altogether and move origins to more dominant cultures. This bone also structures claims that there is an “original” oppression, for instance misogyny, or ableism, or colonialism.

3. Having a single, explanatory lens for everything and taking refuge in that.

   The working class. Patriarchy. Sexuality. Childhood trauma. Astrology. Immigrants. Capitalism. Civilized vs “barbarian”. You see how this works? Human life is just more messy and multi-layered and rich than any single explanatory lens.

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4. Really, really wanting to have the best explanation and be the one who knows.

   Explaining everything and everyone and getting to decide what counts as knowledge is one of the most pernicious and pervasive forms of violence that oppressed people experience. If your take is your whole personality and/ or you get anxious when you don’t know something, you’re being shaped by this bone.

5. Your attachment style is categories.

   Categorizing and labeling is one of the main tools of colonialism. And that activity is not innocent. Its goal is to establish hierarchies of value and use them to leech resources from others.
   
   Many of us have the class system, racial categories, gender and sexual expression categories, or the DSM-5 tattooed on the insides of our eyelids. These categories might be useful when strategically deployed, but when we hold onto our categories too tightly, making them into identities or even essentializing them, we inadvertently become obedient to the systems that invented categorization as a tool of control.

6. Finding the enemy.

   Establishing a designated enemy is how oppressive systems get away with a lot of the violence they perpetrate and how they keep us ignorant and obedient. Case in point: the Democratic Party. Trump is the enemy. No time to self-reflect. Change is dangerous. Oops, now the enemy is our own constituents.
   
   Whenever we create separations along lines of good and evil, righteous and unrighteous, and we tune our focus monomaniacally outward, we’re not looking in the mirror. We’re not learning. We’re not growing. In-fighting and loss of collective power is the result.

7. Normalizing punishment.

   Who do we think we are punishing each other? No, seriously. Take a giant step back. I always wondered if we learned the whole reward and punishment system from the Abrahamic gods. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Some of us live as if the anvil of doom were constantly dangling just above our heads. Want vertical, not just horizontal change? Ditch punishment and reward. Total abolition. Let’s be simple and just give each other all the help we all need.

8. Insisting on gentleness and nonviolence from everyone all of the time.

   This sounds good. But it’s actually quite violent. First off, claiming that there is a single best way to be in all circumstances, and that you are it, is in and of itself a supremacist move. Second off, those with more political, economic, and cultural power have always attempted to control marginalized and oppressed people with anger policing and by positioning all violence (of the oppressed, not against them of course) as unacceptable. We might naturally speak in quiet measured tones or deeply desire nonviolent solutions, but that does not make us better people. Wisdom allows for many different appropriate responses in the infinite variety of circumstances.

9. Dismissing the unknowable.

   The entire Western project is founded on command, capture, and control of people and lands and animals with the justification of having more knowledge and better capacities and systems for gaining knowledge. In this landscape (or hellscape), the unknowable, or whatever overruns systems of knowledge, is just something to be conquered. And often, what we don’t know, we just make up or make disappear.
   
   The best thing we can do is examine ourselves ruthlessly for any hint of the fabrication of knowledge for the purposes of self-aggrandizement and domination. Say “I don’t know” when you don’t know. Never lie about or exaggerate what you know. Never dismiss out of hand other people’s ways of knowing. Learn to get comfortable in the wilder zones outside of what you think you know. And recognize that all knowing is limited. There is no mastery of life. No theory of everything. Life is always bigger than we are.

10. Not listening to others

    For as long as we are trying to prove something about ourselves or carve out a brand for ourselves, we are not fully listening to others. We are creating more separation and loneliness. Once we stop needing to be the knowers, definers, and categorizers, we can really start listening to others. We can be in real conversation and experience real intimacy. We can approach life with a deep and wide and abiding curiosity.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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.

Hey Friend,

If you have K108 bookmarked, please update so you can always find us.

You can write to me at kindred108@pm.me.

lots of love always,

Shambhavi

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.

That sweet taste

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

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

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

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

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

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The God spectrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Accompanied by sweetness

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

I was making a joke, but not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some of my sweetest things.

Deep sweetness

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

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

Chocolate

Tastes: bitter, sweet, astringent, very mildly pungent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tea

Tastes: bitter, sweet, astringent

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

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

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

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

Coffee

Tastes: Bitter, sweet, astringent, sour, pungent

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

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

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

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

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

Tastes: Sweet, sour

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

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

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

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

Maple Syrup

Tastes: Sweet, astringent, subtly bitter

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

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

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

The Sweet Series

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

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

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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

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

“Put it on the altar,” I instructed.

My teacher’s picture is there.

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

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

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

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

I’m not short on feelings, though.

Here is the image that came while I was searching.

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

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

and I ask myself:

What if I bathed myself with the soap?

Would it be a helpless gesture or a sacrament?

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

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

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

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

the place where I bathe?

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

all of the pleas of us who are still living?

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

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

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

Or maybe it is a traverse without a map.

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

Pointing out Palestine.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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.

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

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

Let’s listen to ourselves, but not exclusively.

Let’s explore the costumes we call identities,

but not let them suffocate or limit us.

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

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

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

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

It’s okay to just let ourselves happen.

We’ve arrived, and so we belong.

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

Nothing needs to be demonstrated or proved.

Our unique dimensions shine naturally like

mountains of gemstones.

We are naturally equal and naturally wild.

We are always victorious, from the beginning

and yet if we insist on these understandings,

we will be victorious again.

🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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.

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

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

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

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Access Intimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

»Listen to the satsang podcast

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

Transcript

Community Access Intimacy Transcript From Satsang On May 24, 2026

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Community Access Intimacy Summary

Here’s the handout we were reading from during satsang

Community Access Intimacy Starting From Primordial Equality And Belonging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clear feeling

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

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

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

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

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

Our real pronoun becomes we.

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

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

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

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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.

The Iron Dog Year Prophecy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mercy for Guru Rinpoche’s students

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

Padmasambhava replied:

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

The Remedies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Jaya Kula is participating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How you can participate!

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

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

with infinite love,
Shambhavi

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

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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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genocide and trauma by the numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Genocide Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the entirety of the dream.

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

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

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

What I want to say is. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we are that wisdom more than we are genocide.

with infinite love, Shambhavi

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

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

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

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!

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His transformation has always been a beacon for me.

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Soldiers

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

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

The ridiculousness of this is beyond commenting on.

But hear me out.

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

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

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

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

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

Compassion does not

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need to become protectors, not punishers.

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

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Humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember Audre Lorde?

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

Audre Lorde is still right.

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

Then we might finally be onto something new.

with infinite love, Shambhavi

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

Subscribe to K108 >>

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

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

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

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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

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.

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

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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!

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.