Gangaji Podcasts
by Gangaji
Gangaji Podcasts provide a rich and deep exploration into what it means to stop fixing ourselves and finally discover the lasting fulfillment and peace that is the truth of who we are. It's easy to think that who we are is made up of our emotions, thoughts and circumstances, but Gangaji challenges those assumptions, leading us on a life-changing inner dive. A Conversation with Gangaji, Epiphany and Being Yourself: Self-Inquiry with Gangaji cover all aspects of life: the search for happiness, what is enlightenment really, how to face our suffering, and ultimately realizing true freedom.
Episodes
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Being Yourself | The True Experience Words Cannot Capture
The True Experience Words Cannot Capture "Just the absolute, unshakeable heart knowledge of what is true, what is real, and what is here. That's what I invite you to. That's what these words are spoken for. That's what this word 'surrender' points to." In this previously unshared talk from a…
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Being Yourself | Meeting the Enemy: Finding Peace in the Midst of War
"'I'm right' is a closing to the possibility of conversation, of investigation." In a powerful exchange, a man deeply engaged in peace, justice, and human-rights work asks Gangaji how to face the horrors of war without turning away from either truth or action. When he reconnects with a former...
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Being Yourself | The Wheel of Doubt
Do you put more value on your doubting mind than you do on the reality of what is always present?" In this episode, Gangaji speaks about "the wheel of doubt"—addressing the way the mind generates doubt from the "fear of being open, or being still, and not knowing." While doubt has a very…
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Being Yourself | You Cannot Think Your Way Home
"Who I am doesn't need to be thought. It's here. It's already free of thought." In You Cannot Think Your Way Home, Gangaji invites us to stop following the next thought and fall into the living silence that is the truth of who we are. When our search for home through thoughts, experiences, and...
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Being Yourself | Special Presentation of Finding Home: From Disillusionment to Awakening
"I was in that place of 'I give up.' I don't know. And that's a very open place, actually." On this month's episode of Being Yourself: Self-Inquiry with Gangaji, we are honored to share Episode 4 of Finding Home, the six-part audio documentary series that traces Gangaji's spiritual journey. In…
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Being Yourself | What If Outrage and Despair Are A Doorway?
"I encourage you to let your heart be broken. Waking up to yourself has nothing to do with forgetting the suffering of others as if it never existed." How do we reconcile the recognition of truth and peace with the suffering, cruelty, and devastating loss we see around us or even in our own…
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Being Yourself | Meeting Self-Hatred, DIscovering Freedom
"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....
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Being Yourself | The Deeper Healing of Trauma
"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...
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Being Yourself | Hopelessly Lost on the Seeker's Path
"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...
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Being Yourself | The True Fulfillment Within Nothing
"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...
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Being Yourself | The Trap Door into Consciousness
"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…
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Being Yourself | The Surrender to Love One Another
"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...
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Being Yourself | Embracing Our "Stupidity"
"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...
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Being Yourself | How We Keep Identifying with Our Egos
"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...
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Being Yourself | Overlooking Spaciousness
"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…
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Being Yourself | The Choice to Suffer (or not)
"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...
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Being Yourself | The Lie that Keeps You Searching
"Just as you are right now, present yourself fully, nakedly with all of your imperfections and no hope of cleaning them up. Then see what is, see what welcomes you just as you are." As human beings, we have a natural egoic desire to improve ourselves. It is part of our survival mechanism, but…
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Being Yourself | The Longing is Your Ally
"I would never suggest that you get rid of the longing. Meet the longing, fall into the longing, and you are laughing, laughing, laughing." Perhaps you have had an experience of longing that won't go away no matter how you try to satisfy it or get rid of it. That very desire may actually be...
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Being Yourself | The Great Discovery Inside Self-Hatred
"I don't have confidence in my personality, but I do have absolute, total confidence in the Truth of who I am. And that is available for you because it is the same I Am." Quieting or shutting down the voice of self-hatred running in our minds often brings us to the spiritual search, and in that…
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Being Yourself | The Trance of Enlightenment
"True inquiry is examining all of those places where you have assigned your identity. One of the spiritual identities is the one who is enlightened now, finally." For millennia, human beings from all walks of life have sought after what has been referred to as "enlightenment." In this potent...
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Being Yourself | What a Split Second of Reality Reveals
Papaji said, "It takes one twelfth of a second, and then your life is never the same." Our spiritual search often begins with a causeless moment of true revelation that stops us in our tracks. In just a split second, what is whole and permanent is immediately recognized. As the powerful feelings,...
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Being Yourself | You Are Indefinable
"If you are willing to surrender for a moment any definition of yourself that arises however high or low, you will directly discover what lies underneath." Is there a relationship between our self-definitions and the desire to control? What happens when we set aside our definitions, is it freeing...
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Being Yourself | Losing Your Enlightenment
"Universal, limitless consciousness has no problem with feeling bad or feeling good." When we experience challenging emotions or exacting mental states we may imagine we are "losing our enlightenment." A day may start with oceanic feelings of bliss, but in the next moment, fear or rage or sadness...
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Being Yourself | Return to Who You Already Are
"Thought is a beautiful power that arises in Awareness. If that power is worshipped or if it is hated, then it grows into a tyranny. You are Awareness, not the thought of Awareness, but the reality of Awareness." When we identify with the thoughts and feelings arising in our mind and body, we...
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Being Yourself | Living a True Life, Not Just a Lifestyle
"When you're willing to be still…to stop this forward thrust of accumulation, of a lifestyle, you can give your life, the attention of your life, to discovering what is life." When we begin a search for peace or happiness, we may simply be looking for better circumstances, or wanting to feel less...
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Being Yourself Podcast Extra | Look Inward
On this Being Yourself Podcast Extra you are invited to "look inward." Take just a few minutes to drop into a brief selection taken from The Sacred Fire of Death: Reflections on the Katha Upanishad. It is the newest installment in the Sacred Text Series with Gangaji and Chris Mohr. Along with…
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Being Yourself | What Can Death Teach Us About Life?
"There is a possibility of meeting the Satguru which is death – the final great teacher of us all. Not as an escape from life, just an opening to what is inevitable, to what is here." Genetically, human beings are designed to survive, to avoid death. The fear of death is natural. But when we are...
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Being Yourself | A Question of Trust
"Regardless of those people who depend on you, it is possible for you to be true to who you are. Compassionately, ruthlessly true to who you are. . . true to the open heart." The most common question Gangaji receives at the end of a retreat is, "How can I trust myself to be true to the truth of…
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Being Yourself | Stopping Doing, Simply Being
"The mistake is overlooking what is effortlessly, choicelessly, always here." How is it that we actually overlook the truth of ourselves? When we pursue sublime states of mind to attain "unity" on our spiritual path, we can go down a path that instead delivers an experience of separation. Gangaji...
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Being Yourself | Healing the Primal Wound
"The secret of freedom is giving up the choice to escape yourself." A prison inmate's letter inspires this month's podcast. In one of the most loved monologues in the archives, Gangaji speaks of the essential choice to face what has been feared or run from for most of our lives. When we give up…
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Being Yourself | The Innocence That Was Never Lost
At some point in our lives, we will experience a loss of innocence. Whether that disillusionment is with ourselves, our family, or with life itself, there is a choice that arises in the midst of loss. Will we fall into cynicism and self-betrayal? Or do we meet the pain of that loss directly and…
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Being Yourself | Dare to Give Up Your Self-Denial
"You are free to discover yourself as Truth. You are free to rest in that Truth. You are free to be happy, regardless of your body, your thoughts, emotions, or circumstances." In this month's podcast, Gangaji begins with a clear exposition on how it is absolutely possible to discover yourself as...
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Being Yourself | Consciously Opening to Emotional Pain
"There is no problem with pain. There is pain. If you are seeking something to avoid pain, that's the suffering. That's the search that must be called off." It takes effort to avoid our emotional pain. We can try to avoid it, but ultimately the common strategies of withdrawing, protecting, and...
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Being Yourself | Necessary Pain, Unnecessary Suffering
"If you stop thinking about how to get out of the body that may be painful or how to keep the body that is pain free, you get to experience the truth." Physical pain is an essential aspect of life that serves the survival and well-being of the body, but we can easily turn that necessary pain that...
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Being Yourself | How Can Your Life Be Truly Lived?
Where is the life you want? As much as we can fear death, we can also fear living a full and vibrant life. In this exchange, Gangaji helps a woman get to the root of what keeps her fear of vibrancy running. This conversation demonstrates how each of us has the capacity to discover how to live a...
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Being Yourself | Facing Death is Facing Life
"The strategies and avoidance around the experience of "not being" or death are what keep you from the experience of eternal life." As a young boy of 16, Ramana chose to stop running from what he feared and turned to face death directly. In that moment of inquiry, he opened his mind asking, "Who...
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Being Yourself | Celebrating 30 Years of Love in Action
"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…
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Being Yourself | What Will Your Spiritual Practice Give You?
Gangaji speaks about the role spiritual practice plays in our lives and invites us to discover what we are practicing when we "get off our cushion and the chanting stops." What do our spiritual practices give us? What do we hope they will give us? What can they never give us? Learn more about...
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Being Yourself | The Yoga of Naturally Being Yourself
"It's a lie that any thing gives you fulfilling, true, deep joy. Joy is your nature." We can feel deeply conflicted when following our hearts doesn't line up with what we or others think we should be doing. When we reach the proverbial and often frightening "fork in the road," we have a choice to...
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Being Yourself | The Direct Experience of Certainty
"Universal, absolute awareness is who you are." How is it possible to be "certain" of who we are? In the wake of an essential and undeniable experience of our true nature as pure consciousness, doubt usually arises—"Did that really happen? Is it real?" Then, we often look to our thoughts for the...
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Being Yourself | Entangled in the Search for a Better Identity
"The error is that you are not what can be thought, or perceived, or felt. You are that in which all thoughts, all perceptions, all feelings, appear in." In countless ways, we search for a "better" identity to replace who we think we are. This month, Gangaji speaks to the trap of…
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Being Yourself Podcast Extra | Finding Freedom in the Darkness
"Incarcerated for life in a maximum security prison in Alabama and not using that as an excuse, refusing to use that as an excuse. In fact, using that as a vehicle." Gangaji reads a powerful letter of realization from a prisoner serving life without parole in an Alabama prison. Learn more about...
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Being Yourself | Healing the Ego Is Not Self-Realization
"This is not psychotherapy. This is not anti-psychotherapy. This has nothing to do with fixing you. This has to do with discovering fully and completely what is always here and was always here in the worst moments, in the best moments." In this monologue recorded during a recent retreat at Fallen...
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Being Yourself | Recognizing the Subtleties of Ego
"This is an invitation to stop. To not create who you are. To simply be yourself with no idea or memory of who or what that is. Just to be. Then to see, how vast this just is." Our lived experience in a human body gives rise to a wide range of phenomena that include thoughts, feelings, and images...
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Being Yourself | Chasing Desires, Overlooking Fulfillment
"When you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you are this stillness, that you are this awareness, then it doesn't matter what is on the surface." Human beings have a profound desire to realize a lasting peace. The question is where are we looking, and what desire are we actually chasing? In...
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Being Yourself | Sacred Land, Ancient Blessings
"To be nothing, to be nobody, is to realize who you are." This month on Being Yourself, we share one the first meetings Gangaji held in Byron Bay, Australia. This is the land of the Arakwal Bumberlin people, who have lived in the coastal landscape around the Byron Bay area for at least 22,000...
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Being Yourself | A Freedom Story
Discovering the truth of who you are doesn't require a certificate of realization. You don't need to understand Sanskrit or Advaita to know the truth of who you are. The only requirement is the willingness to investigate the thought of who you are. This month on Being Yourself, Gangaji shares…
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Being Yourself | The Opportunity of Fear
This month on Being Yourself, we return to the summer of 1993 in Boulder, Colorado. Gangaji speaks about the opportunity to break the trance of fear by directly experiencing fear itself. "This is a kind of contraction against life. Direct experience is the medicine, the remedy. You really...
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An Invitation & New Year Message from Gangaji
A timeless message from Gangaji as we begin a new year. Plus an invitation to join her for an upcoming online gathering on Saturday, January 7 at 11AM PT. Learn more at gangaji.org.
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Being Yourself | The Most Important Question
"For our purpose, which is the purpose of discovering the truth of who one is, let us forget why one is and discover who." We often are seeking answers to our questions of "why" and "how." Gangaji invites us to turn our attention to the most important question we can ask ourselves on the…
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About this show
Gangaji Podcasts provide a rich and deep exploration into what it means to stop fixing ourselves and finally discover the lasting fulfillment and peace that is the truth of who we are. It's easy to think that who we are is made up of our emotions, thoughts and circumstances, but Gangaji challenges those assumptions, leading us on a life-changing inner dive. A Conversation with Gangaji, Epiphany and Being Yourself: Self-Inquiry with Gangaji cover all aspects of life: the search for happiness, what is enlightenment really, how to face our suffering, and ultimately realizing true freedom.
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Gangaji
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