Being Yourself | Meeting Self-Hatred, DIscovering Freedom
Gangaji Podcasts
“It’s in fully seeing it all…that there is this undeniable yes in the core.” What is unfolding before our eyes in the world—the violent aggression and heartbreaking destruction of war—reflects what occurs in our own minds. There is an inner war we can wage, often experienced as self-hatred. Self-hatred fuels self-destruction, and the consequences—both individually and collectively—are real. How do we meet this in ourselves? How do we end the war in our own mind? In this episode of Being Yourself, Gangaji speaks to the choice we have not to turn away from feelings of...
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Being Yourself | The Deeper Healing of Trauma
Gangaji Podcasts
“The real healing of trauma is bringing your love and consciousness to it.” In the wake of trauma, fear can take hold — in the body, in memory, and in the many ways we try to protect ourselves from feeling its pain again. In this intimate dialogue, Gangaji points to a deeper healing not found in escaping fear, but in bringing love and consciousness directly to the wound. She offers a powerful inquiry into what remains whole, innocent, and free — even after shock, loss, and disillusionment. Learn more about and her programs and . The next With Gangaji online global...
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Being Yourself | Hopelessly Lost on the Seeker's Path
Gangaji Podcasts
“If you are really, hopelessly lost, instantly you are found.” This month’s episode addresses that moment on the spiritual path, where all striving for enlightenment, all seeking of peace and freedom culminates in feeling at “the end of our rope.” Gangaji speaks directly to the possibility that even a moment of despair or desperation has something to reveal. What if being “hopelessly lost” is actually a doorway to freedom? What happens when the seeking falls away, and the hope of “getting something” dissolves? If you’d like to...
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Being Yourself | The True Fulfillment Within Nothing
Gangaji Podcasts
“Can you find a problem when the desire to attain anything is given up?” In our search for happiness and fulfillment on the spiritual path, we usually imagine it will be found in some desired state or experience or circumstance that we apparently lack. We may tell ourselves many varied and different stories about who we are, but as this conversation reveals, it is only who we think we are. What is possible is to examine the stories you are telling yourself and recognize that true fulfillment can be effortlessly discovered in an instant of stopping, of conscious rest. Fulfillment is...
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Being Yourself | The Trap Door into Consciousness
Gangaji Podcasts
“There is conditioning in our mind streams, but what we are drawn by, what has brought us here, is closer and deeper than any conditioning.” How is it possible to penetrate the conditioning of our minds, the play of ego and superego, and discover our true identity? What if we just give up the game entirely? In this exchange, Gangaji deconstructs the egoic habits of judging ourselves and others demonstrating how an egoic trap can become the open door into consciousness. You can support this podcast and other programs of the Gangaji Foundation with your donation. Learn more about what...
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Being Yourself | The Surrender to Love One Another
Gangaji Podcasts
“The real challenge is to include all, every aspect of yourself. Even the aspect that hates can be loved.” When we take a spiritual path, we may be seeking our enlightenment or our awakening. But perhaps what is truly wanted cannot be discovered in any spiritual technique or acquisition or achievement, but rather in surrender, in the surrender to love one another. As Gangaji shares in this episode, “if we are beginning in love then there is really nowhere to go but here." Listen to more episodes of and her program for incarcerated men and women, and her of retreats...
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Being Yourself | Embracing Our "Stupidity"
Gangaji Podcasts
“We have overlooked what was actually innocent and was called stupid. We lost our stupidity and in that we lost our heart. Yet, we are haunted by the fear that we are still actually stupid.” We fear being stupid or foolish and try to be brilliant and clever. It is an aspect of our human drive for survival. In this episode of Being Yourself, Gangaji speaks to the unnecessary suffering that can be created through the mind’s power to distinguish, delineate, and classify with ever greater subtlety. Without making that power wrong or bad, what if for just one moment, we give up that power and...
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Being Yourself | How We Keep Identifying with Our Egos
Gangaji Podcasts
“You cannot learn the Self, you cannot learn Consciousness, you cannot learn Love, you cannot learn Trust, but you can learn how you deny that.” After an essential experience of self-realization, we can re-identify with the definitions and concepts we hold about ourselves in our mind. How do we resolve the paradox of recognizing oneself as pure consciousness and being human, living an ordinary life? In this lively exchange, Gangaji speaks about the ways we fall back into patterns of egoic identification.
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Being Yourself | Overlooking Spaciousness
Gangaji Podcasts
“What deepens is the mind’s surrender because the mind’s whole job has been to never surrender.” Even in the midst of uncertain times, we can recognize that what is always at peace is, in truth, who we are. How is it possible for us to retreat for just a moment from our mental strategies rooted in survival to recognize what we are overlooking—the very spaciousness of being. Can you let go of what you’re trying to get? Can you meet what you’re trying to get rid of? Learn more , her , and This podcast is funded entirely by donations. You can support this...
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Being Yourself | The Choice to Suffer (or not)
Gangaji Podcasts
"The way you can discover directly that your story is an illusion is to try it on as if it were real. The magic trick is exposed in that moment." Rather than address the question “why do we suffer,” Gangaji speaks to “how” we suffer, and how we perpetuate that suffering in our lives and in the world. In this exchange, we see a simple inquiry can lift our mental veils and offer the immediate opportunity to set aside any story of suffering we may cling to unnecessarily. Learn more about Gangaji's . Access all the resources available on Gangaji's website at
info_outline“It was a fire. It was really a fire because it was a razor’s edge. All of sudden there are these huge groups. And if I identified even the slightest negatively or positively…I am sliced on this razor I am living on. It was really a necessary fire. I had to be quiet. I had to be still.”
This month we share the soundtrack to a special 30th anniversary video honoring the community of volunteers and donors. The video begins with Gangaji’s first meeting with Papaji in 1990. After Gangaji speaks about her earliest experiences of teaching, we see what unfolded through community efforts in the years that followed. Includes featured music from Jami Sieber, Kirtana, and Amber Terrell.
To watch the video version or learn more about Gangaji and the Gangaji Foundation visit gangaji.org.