Community as Sadhana—Hosting, Belonging, and Seva

SHAMBHAVI
There are three aspects to direct realization practice, and one of them is integration.

These are all householder traditions, meaning that they're not ashram-based or they're not monastic. They're, by and large, taught by and practiced by people having regular lives like we are having.

And we are wanting to integrate our practice with our everyday lives. And that means two things. It means practicing in the course of every day, so integrating our actual sadhana, our actual practice, into our days. And that can look like many, many different things.

But ultimately what it means is integrating the state of our practice into everyday life. Being able to relax into the state of our practice, the fruit of our practice, the result of our practice...

While we're at the supermarket. And while we're having an argument with a friend. And while we're taking care of a baby. And while we're doing our bills. And while we're watching Netflix. Everything.

Ultimately, what we want is to be in the condition of being more relaxed, and in essence more realized, wherever and whenever and however we are.

The number one aspect of community, of spiritual community, from the perspective of this tradition and of me as a teacher, is that it gives us a place to practice integrating.

We aren't just sitting on a cushion and then going out into our lives and being the same whatever as we always are. In this community, this community specifically, we have this little phrase that we sometimes use, which is living our lives together.

So we're not in an ashram, we're not monastics, we're all doing this, that, and the other. But we gather as a community and do things as a community much more than your average Christian church, or Buddhist meditation community or something like that.

We are, many of us, in contact with each other every day, and we do things together, and we have many more opportunities to gather with the teacher than in a lot of other communities and streams of practice.

And that is because we are in training to be in the state of our practice 24/7. That's what these kinds of traditions are about.

There's a phrase for this, akhanda sadhana, it means unbroken sadhana.

But again, doing sadhana is leading us to just being, in an effortless way. We're not going to be doing sadhana for endless lifetimes, hopefully. At some point, we just relax and we're just being in, embodying, the fruit of our practice effortlessly.

But we are doing that in a non-compartmentalized way. We're not just doing it in spiritual settings. We're doing it everywhere. So the community is training for that.

And we are a community of people like every other spiritual community, who, most of us didn't know each other before. Some of us did. You know, people bring friends. But by and large, we're people who didn't choose each other.

And this is wonderful. Because if you got to choose everybody in your spiritual community, it wouldn't be as hard. [laughs] And there wouldn't be as much fruit from the practice of being in community. I'll explain that in a minute.

So we're training for integrating. And then part of that integration is that, through relating to each other and working with each other– And Jaya Kula is by and large student run, so there's a lot of work that we do together, too.

In that process, we are learning how to relax, but we are also seeing our tensions. We're seeing where we are having habitual patterns of emotions come up.

And we're learning how to relax those or work with those in the context of living relationships so that we can make a more perfect spiritual community. [Mimics buzzer noise] No. Okay? No.

The spiritual community is totally open. It should be. We're not trying to have a perfect community. We're trying to have lives in which we can express the fruits of our practice.

Learning in a community where people have had similar teachings and are all going in a vaguely similar direction, we have more opportunity to work with our tensions, we can use a similar language. Right?

We learn language and View when we're in teachings, and we can talk to each other in a way that we understand. And things can be pointed out more easily than just at work or something.

However, but that's not the end of it. The end of it is out there, not in here.

We're training to integrate. We're training to be able to work with our tensions, our karmic patterns, using the community as a mirror and the teacher as a mirror.

We're training to relax in the face of our tensions, not just work on them. We just love to get a hold of something and work on it. But a lot of this is more about relaxing. Then, there's work to be done, but we also want to remember to relax.

And then very, very importantly, and speaking back to what I said about we're just a collection of people, we knew each other, we didn't know each other, we didn't choose each other. We learn that we can love anyone.

This is really one of the most wonderful fruits or consequences of being in a healthy spiritual community. Is that the person who just, you could not stand when you first met them, two years later you just love them. And this is an incredible lesson for people. And hopefully that spills out.

Obviously, it's not just about then, okay, I love my teacher, I love everyone in my community, even the ones who annoy me. And let's now close the doors and just love each other.

No, it's not about that. It's about learning, wow, I can love people that I hate. [laughs] I can love people who annoy me. I cannot get exercised when someone's annoying to me. I can just be like, okay, I'm annoyed. Big deal. I still love them.

So we can go out into the world with this. We can meet someone new, and that person rubs us the wrong way somehow. And then we remember, oh, remember that other person that happened, within two years later I loved them and saw all their good qualities.

So I'm going to relax now. Maybe that's going to happen with this person, too.

We don't have to compartmentalize our love so much because the state of realization is a state of loving everyone without exception and without conditions. So we're training to learn that that's possible.

When we first start out, we don't even think that's possible. And if we're really just beginning, we don't even think it's desirable. And some people feel that way. Why would I want to love someone who's horrible?

It doesn't really work that way. We do end up loving everyone if we keep going in the practice. Maybe not in this lifetime, but at some point. And the community is training wheels for that.

And, you know, this community has a lot of people in it that identify as queer. And so we have a lot of people who have experience finding alternate community and alternate families. And that also is another zone in which that happens, right?

And certainly it was part of my experience growing up, and one of the reasons why I find community so wonderful. Because I had that experience as a young queer person finding alternate family and alternate community and learning to love people that I didn't know and I wasn't related to.

Now, I want to talk about hosting and belonging. These are two core things that we're doing here that are cosmic wisdom virtues, or aspects of reality that we are trying to discover.

The community—this community in particular—is a crucible for doing sadhana.

For whatever reason, I was interested in doing a lot of sadhana from when I was in my mid-20s, and I have enjoyed some realization. And so what I naturally want is for you to have a similar experience.

I want everyone to have the experience that they can do sadhana and have some realization, or experience some greater expressivity, or freedom or sense of confidence or contact with God, or however you want to say it. You can talk about it differently for each person.

So that's why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because I want you to have the same opportunity and experience as I've had. Or better.

This community is focused on doing practice. And I know that some of the newer people who are online, and some other people who might be in the room, have had the experience of being in other spiritual communities where there wasn't as much of a focus on doing sadhana.

Where there was much more emphasis on talking about View and talking about spiritual philosophy. Or just doing a little bit of practice, like, 20 minutes a day or something like that.

This community is really functioning as a crucible for sadhana. And for that reason, my attitude towards Jaya Kula as an organization has always been that there is no reason for it to be here other than to serve as a crucible for sadhana. Which includes all the integrating that we do and relating that we do with each other.

I'm not really interested in an organization for an organization's sake. I'm not really interested in sitting around having long philosophical conversations as a part of community culture.

I'm willing to have long philosophical discussions with people who are new and don't yet know what it's all about [laughs], you know, just as a way of having them feel met in some way.

And a crucible is an alchemical container, so it can be used to do magic and alchemy in. It's also an offering bowl. So a crucible is also something that you would give an offering to God or to your ancestors or to your teachers in.

As a crucible, it is a container for us to do sadhana. It is an alchemical place. It is an offering. And especially an offering to my guru, Anandamayi Ma, which doesn't have to be true for any of you, but I'm just saying how I feel about it.

As a crucible, it's very important to me that people feel they CAN come here and practice. You don't have to do any sadhana to be part of Jaya Kula. But if you come to satsang, you are doing sadhana, so...fooled you.

But you don't have to do any seated practice if you want to be part of this community. There's a wide range of people doing whatever they want, basically, who are part of this community.

And we consider anybody who is interested in the teachings to be part of the community, whether very far tangentially or very centrally.

But if you want close supervision from me, then you make a commitment to do an hour of seated practice a day. That's just sort of the only fundamental rule that there is. But you don't have to do that.

So, what makes it possible for people to practice? First of all, they have to be treated relatively well when they walk in the door.

I have been members of communities where people weren't treated well for all different kinds of reasons. So, we're very engaged as part of our sadhana together here in welcoming people when they come to teachings. And this is an aspect of what we call hosting.

So people have to feel welcomed. They have to feel like they're not having to move past a bunch of attitude when they walk in the door, of varying sorts.

This doesn't mean that every moment that you spend at Jaya Kula is going to be attitude free. [laughter]

Somebody once said to me, I don't want to be in a community where anyone's ever mean to anyone else. And I said, well, I'm sorry, but we have mean people here. [laughs]

This is just a random collection of people, you know? We have mean people, we have sad people, we have passive-aggressive people, we have perky people who will drive you nuts. Whatever drives you nuts, you're sure to find it here at some point or another. [laughs]

But we try our best to have a baseline of being welcoming to everybody with the understanding that we're also human beings, right? We try to work with that.

Then, the next part of what you need to be able to have a crucible for sadhana is you must have a teacher who is honest, and not abusive, and doesn't misrepresent themselves, and does their best to offer the teachings in the best way possible. This is not so easy to find, right?

So I have some commitments that I've made to myself as a teacher that involve these things. I've given them to the community.

But I feel personally so much wonder that I have encountered these teachings in this lifetime, and that I've been able to practice, and that I've had any kind of realization at all.

I feel a sense of wonder that supersedes everything. And I feel a tremendous sense of devotion toward giving the teachings in the best way that I'm capable of.

It doesn't mean I never screw up, but I think that anyone will tell you that there's honesty here. And a human being trying to do their best and not be abusive to anybody.

That's part of what it takes, I think. When we read about communities where there's abusive teachers, to me, as a teacher, one of the worst things is that that person deterred other people from doing sadhana. That person caused other people to not want to practice anymore.

And having been a person who's benefited so much from practice, I never want to be in that position. So if you think I'm not keeping up to my commitments, you can call me on it.

So this idea of hosting. And then the second idea is of belonging. I want to talk about that.

Hosting is something that belongs to what we could call Shiva. The aspect, the reality we call Shiva. Or even the deity we call Shiva. But in Trika Shaivism, Shiva is all of reality.

And then the belonging part belongs to Shakti, the creative aspect of all of reality. And these are hosting and belonging to things that we have been working on for ever, since Jaya Kula started.

There's been many layers to that and trials and errors and successes and all that. Lord Shiva, all of reality, the personification of all of reality in a Shaivite tradition, is called the Lord of the Hosts. He is called the Host, and he is also protected by the hosts.

He is the host in that he is the space, the space of consciousness, the space of awareness within which all of this is happening. So he is hosting everything that is, everything that occurs, and all beings.

He is the Lord of the Hosts. He is the Lord of all aspects of protection. So the hosts, they're called the Ganas, and that means the protectors, in one sense.

So he is the protector, and he also is the one who sends all the protectors out to protect us by nudging us in the right direction to wake up. And he is also the one that the protectors protect.

So the protectors, the Ganas, are the protectors of Lord Shiva. And in some stories, they are aspects of Lord Ganesha. Gana, Lord Ganesha, is a protector, is also the son of Shiva, of Parvati.

So the protectors are the protectors of Lord Shiva, the hosts that protect him. They are also his children. And this is very, very rich for us because we are hosts. We are hosts who are trying to embody the unconditional hosting of Lord Shiva.

Like, Lord Shiva is that space of awareness in which everything occurs and nothing is exempted. There's not, no, sorry, you're bad, go out there. There's no outside. To the extent that we can, we are trying to embody this 'no outside' quality of hosting, and everyone treated the same.

We are also trying to take care of Lord Shiva, in the sense that there are protectors of Lord Shiva, the Ganas, a multitude, a host of hosts, and they are also his children.

So by protecting the teachings, I'll just speak, you know, by me making commitments to be honest, and to not abuse anybody, and to represent the teachings as honestly as I can, and whatever else I do, I am protecting the teachings.

I am protecting those who have come before me to give teachings. I am protecting the students as incarnations of Lord Shiva.

And there's this aspect, which is that we are children taking care of the teacher, taking care of the teachings, taking care of God, so that we can learn to care for everyone.

And this is really beautifully embodied by Anandamayi Ma, my guru, who called herself a little child. And she asked her disciples to treat her as if they were taking care of a little child. So, I guess that's the other way around. But in any case, we are the ones taking care of God, just like her students took care of her.

We're also protected by the crucible of this community. And within that crucible of protection, we are taking care of each other. And in doing that, we're learning how to take care of everybody.

Occasionally, someone comes to me in private and says, I only want to relate to you, not to the community. Or they say the opposite. I only want to relate to the community, not you.

That's more acceptable to me. Someone just wants to relate to the community and not me, I'm more okay with that. But if you just want to relate to me and not to the community, it only means you're not really understanding what the community is for.

Okay, and then, so that's hosting, and that is embodied by us in how we set up our spaces, how we prepare our spaces before anybody gets there. How we relate to people who come for teachings. How we try to take care of each other when we're having a hard time.

All right, so now I'm going to talk about belonging. The Shakti aspect, belonging.

And there's a word in Sanskrit that I've given extensive teachings on that's written about extensively in the Tantras of Trika Shivaism. The word is kula, and we're called Jaya Kula.

The word kula means family. And it means ordinary family, like birth family. It means the family of students that has gathered around a teacher. So the extended family of the teacher is also called kula.

You may have heard the phrase guru kula. That's what that means, the students gathered around the teacher. And then kula means the family of all manifest life.

So we have this cosmic expansion of this word kula from our birth family to our spiritual family to the family of everything.

And this is our journey as practitioners. To journey from a narrow, circumscribed range of family to this bigger family, where we're making family with people we didn't choose, to feeling that we are kin and in kinship with everything.

And all of– The family of everything, not just sentient beings. All beings, all objects, all manifestations, everything, is, according to my experience and also this tradition, filled with that same awareness and wisdom.

So our feeling of devotion and kinship becomes to everything and everyone, not just to other beings of our ilk. That's what happens eventually.

So all of these things are being produced by Shakti. They are all aspects of the creativity of this alive, aware reality. Sometimes it's said that all manifest life is her body, or in her body, or being spoken by her. These are all ways that it's talked about.

We have a theme every year. Last year, our theme was belonging. And we're trying to, I am anyway, trying to feel my way into, how can we invoke a real sense of belonging for people.

The belonging that we're talking about is not dependent on anything. Basically, what this tradition shows us is that if you're here, you belong. There is no question to be asked.

There's no, we have to include you. You're pre-included. And how can we express that? We're grappling with that.

Finally, I'm going to talk about seva. The word seva means service.

There is, fundamental to reality itself, an overwhelming feeling of devotion. When you have more contact with the base state, the natural state, living presence, 'that', whatever you want to call it, you will be struck by an overwhelming fullness of this reality with a feeling of bhava of devotion.

It's just eager to serve. Eager to show itself to whatever shows up. So seva, in the best sense of the word, would be that. It would be a feeling of devotion toward everyone, expressed through service. Expressed through embodying the servant.

Now, in the teachings of Hinduism at large, it's said that people have certain specific flavors of relationships to their teachers, or to God, you know, both.

One could be as a friend, it could be as a lover, it could be as a servant. I think there's a couple of other ones, but I don't remember what they are.

I've always been oriented as a servant, and devotion has been something that I have been coming more and more into as I get older and do more sadhana.

So, it's very pressing for me. You may relate to things a little bit differently. But offering service, giving whatever we have, is an aspect of the enlightened state.

Abhinavagupta, one of the siddhas of this tradition, said, an enlightened person or a realized person is all for others. That's part of it. You're just like a fountain, all for others.

And this is just happening naturally. We're trying to feel this in ourselves, a little bit of that fountain in the heart, as much as we can.

Seva... In this sense, we are trying to actually do seva, not just imitate it. And that's a hallmark of these kinds of traditions. We're not trying to fake it till we make it.

We're trying to make it real in whatever way we can. Which might be a small way, but we make the effort to make it real. To really open a little bit to the heart and try to operate from that place as best we can.

So we have lots of opportunities to do that at Jaya Kula. In 2011, so many years ago now, the community decided that it would be community-run, student-run. Maybe some of you regret that decision now. [laughs]

In any case, we are divided up into small squads of people who take care of different aspects of the organization, hosting being one of them. And things to do with finances, things to do with technology, things to do with media.

I'm, myself, the only full-time paid employee here. And Nirmana is my assistant, she works quarter-time. And everything else is done through seva.

And that's a big part of practice for people, learning how to work together. When we first started, really, nobody knew how to work together, let alone run an organization.

We went through years and years of trial and error. But things are running pretty smoothly right now, but we are still working with working with each other and trying to do it in a way that is actually heart-based rather than I have to get this task done and grumpy. [laughs]

The thing that I'd really, really like people to get in them is that this is driven by what you want. That is the only thing driving this. Your desire.

And if you see people who are more involved and you think, oh, they can talk to Shambhavi, and they can do– They're doing it because they want to.

And if you don't want to be as involved, you're doing that because you don't want to. And if then you change your mind, that's also fine. There's no inner circle, nor is there any outer circle. This is all just people finding their own place in what you want here or don't want.

So one of the things that can really cut back on this anxiety about fitting in or looking and comparing yourself to other people, all that external stuff. If you can just settle in yourself and take responsibility for what you want.

Right? Take responsibility for what you want. Even just say to yourself, I want this and not that.

You know, there was somebody who was around for years who thought that there was some inner circle that they weren't a part of. And finally, they just realized they didn't want to do sadhana. I was like, that's totally fine!

You know, those people who she thought were the inner circle were just people who were wanting to do more sadhana. But as soon as she realized she didn't want to do any sadhana, the level of tension went down.

Instead of thinking there's something you have to compete for. You're not competing for anything here. And that's a problem for a lot of people, because a lot of people want something to compete for.

But what I'm saying is this is all driven by your desire. And people have different desires, and they have different intensities of desire. And if you can find out what you actually want.

Sometimes people don't want as much as they wish they wanted. Sometimes people sign up for an office hour with me and they say, well, I'd really like to do sadhana, but I really want to. And then they look at me like–

I don't have any solution for that! [laughs] You know, you don't want to, that's really it! Just be okay with that. [laughs]

But other times people really do want more than they are comfortable wanting. So sometimes people get afraid because their desires to be more spiritual feel very strong, and it feels like it might interrupt the rest of their life. Which is, yay. [laughter]

So neither of those things is a problem, or anything in between. But it always helps to just take responsibility for what you want. Just recognize what you want.

And what you want is what you want, and what you don't want is what you don't want. And you don't have to explain it to anybody.

It's not anybody else's business, really, to criticize or to think you should be different or anything. I just try to work with what people want, whether it's tiny, tiny amount or a very large amount.

People always ask me, how can I want to do more? I'm like, I don't know. [laughs] That's how you are right now.