Niharika Sanyal: Returning to the longing in our hearts and intuition (ep423)

Written By kamea chayne
“I like to think of our anger and depression as not things to be feared, but emotions to be befriended — because they are leading us back home to our deepest longing to really live in tune with our true selves.”
— Niharika Sanyal

How do we show up as sensitive, creative and intuitive beings in a system that does not honor the uniqueness of our spirits? How can we stay true to our calling when we’re so busy simply trying to survive?

In this episode, Niharika Sanyal shares sweet fruits of wisdom on the radical act of honoring our unique gifts as offerings during times of darkness. In guiding us towards the deepest desires and whispers of our hearts, Sanyal draws from her personal experiences, yoga philosophy, and Vedic myths. Her teachings shine a light on the collective pathways that can lead us towards more divine ways of being, feeling and co-existing through tuning into our innate inner wisdom, knowledge and unconditional love.

Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app and read on below for our episode transcript.

 

About our guest:

Niharika Sanyal is a Soul Purpose Guide™ and Facilitator of Work that Reclaims the Heart, based in India. Her work supports people to discover their soul-level purpose and awaken to the love-force of the Shakti within. Formerly, Niharika served as Associate Director & Senior Mentor at Purpose Guides Institute and completed her Masters in Human Development & Psychology from Harvard.

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transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Niharika Sanyal: We go through five stages of grieving the loss of ourselves. And it starts with suppression, which is where we are unconsciously suppressing our gifts as a means to survive in the world. Or we're told that the only way to survive in the world is to suppress our innate knowing. That is the stage of anger because a lot of that suppressed energy has to go somewhere. So often it transforms into anger. And stage three can be depression.

I like to think of our anger and depression as not things to be feared, but emotions to be befriended because they are leading us back home to our deepest longing to live in tune with our true selves.

There's this beautiful book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde, in which he says that our gift is like a constantly flowing river and if we dam up the river, either one of two things will happen: either it will stagnate, or it will fill the person up until he bursts. So that river, that life force energy, innate creative, divine feminine Shakti force that wants to move through us and create in this world, if we don't find the appropriate channel for it, it will either stagnate as depression or it will erupt and break the dam and come out as this torrential downpour of anger.

So keeping that river flowing, kind of allowing ourselves to be the channel for its current to flow through, I think that is where all of the healing in the world can come from. I think all of our depression, violence, disease, health issues, and everything for me at its source can be pointed down to this disconnection from our truest self. And everything that is manifesting in these ways, for me, contains a deeper message pointing us back to connection with that deeper self and that higher source.

And so if we just learn how to listen to that deeper stirring and take these symptoms that are showing up outside either emotionally or physically as disease, as a kind of nudge from the universe to go back to the source within. All the healing begins there. And I think that's in a sense our sacred wounds that we are born with. Each of us is kind of born with a certain sacred wounding, often a kind of area in our life where we have had to learn deep lessons. And it is in that learning and that education process that our true education happens to train us for the work and the healing that we are here to offer, the medicine that we are here to bring forward.

And so in a certain sense, our suffering is intimately connected with some part of the world that is broken and is longing for our work, our purpose to flow towards it.

There's this beautiful quote by Frederick Buechner, that, our deepest gladness and the world's deep hunger, the place where they meet is the place where we are called to serve. So what is it that moves me? What is it that breaks my heart the most about the world? Just asking that question and tuning into what suffering in the world most is calling out to me can help us to bridge that—to find that unique niche in which each of us, each of our experiences, has trained us to be of support in the world.

Kamea Chayne: I want to weave in a quote from you here. You say, “Trying to return to a normal world after submarining with madmen underwater isn't easy. This world was not designed for our return. It was designed for our expulsion. And yet we have to be the ones that make it worth the return for one another”. I would appreciate it if you could take us deeper into what you came here in terms of this world not being made for our return, but for our expulsion. As in what do you see us being expelled from and what are our hearts yearning to be able to return to?

Niharika Sanyal: There is a beautiful myth that I like to share, which for me illustrates this point. It's one of the earliest myths found in the Vedas in India. It's a myth about a goddess of flowing water called Apas. So in this myth, you know, the earth is flowing with her waters and everything is abundant and nourished and beautiful. And then apparently there's this dragon called Vritra who comes and falls in love with her and decides to kidnap her and take her away in a cave. So he coils up all of the waters of the world and puts her away in a cave. And without that flowing water in the world, the world becomes dry and thirsty with longing and everybody is kind of aching with that thirst for that water. They barely even remember what was once there, but they know that they're longing and they're thirsting for something. For me, the metaphor of the dragon hiding the waters in the cave is a metaphor for how that serpent-like fear coils up all of our inner water, nourishing water of our soul, of our love. It coils it up deep at the back of the heart. So for me, that cave is like the cave of the heart.

In this particular myth, what eventually happens is that one of the gods Indra wakes up and says: I have to go and bring her back. So he's standing there at the cave door, waiting to discover a word or an image or something that he can utter to open that door. And after a while, it does find him and the door opens. And the water has come flooding back out and he slaved that dragon. Now in the interpretation that I like, apparently this divine feminine energy was represented by Opus. The water was strong enough to free herself and return on her own, but she kind of chose to be in the cave for a while because she was waiting for the right environment held by that sacred masculine energy to invite her to come forward and to make space for her to come forward.

So for me, this is a myth about how our divine feminine intuition, creativity, and life force are often unable to flow in this world because the world is designed more from a mechanistic, narrow, rational, scientific, over-scientific capitalist, postcolonial paradigm, which has in all ways kind of tried to cage her flow. And she cannot flow in these cages. So until you connect with that sacred masculine—which all of us have within us—that essence of silence and vastness, that enormous canvas onto which she can flow like the river banks to her river. She cannot flow unless the world holds that space for her.

So the divine feminine, our intuition in a sense, cannot wake up unless we have each in ourselves cultivated that silence, that divine, that vastness, that wideness, that inner presence into which she can emerge and flow because so much of our time is spent in this world-leading from the mind, which tends to distort and control and narrow things down and categorize things.

If we want to live in connection with our soul, she needs space. She needs spaciousness, vastness, presence into which she can flow, you know. So it's less a story of like what's happening in the world, although the world is a mirror. It's also what's happening within each of us.

I lived most of my life so much from my mind and my intellect. I’m very good at leading from my mind. And in the process, I had denied my intuition.

I did not trust her and I believed her to be un-trustable and like it would be dangerous if I let my intuition forward because the world is not designed for her. So I constructed my whole life for a great period around how can I survive in this world that seems to have been figured out by everybody, and has a certain rational paradigm, and not let that intuitive side of me be seen because it does not have a place here.

Eventually, I guess I had to find in me the inner silence through meditation and practices that connected me with that, and being in the soft lap of nature. And then in that silence, I could hear her voice, the voice of my intuition and could allow her to flow. The world needs to prepare itself for her return, for the return of a life that is led from the heart, from the intuition, from the soul. Which is what the waters represent to me: it is that the blazing current of life force, that divine Shakti that is waking up and kind of asking us to hold space for her saying, hey, I can't wake up unless you create that space for me.

Kamea Chayne: That's powerful. All of this resonates with me too. And I just feel a desire to tune deeper into my other ways of knowing that are very often suppressed by the mainstream culture and system. I would also be curious to hear your thoughts on how our mainstream cultures and educational systems might suppress our intuitive ways of knowing and living because I feel like our mainstream cultures disproportionately emphasize and prioritize the intellectual mind over other ways of knowing.

Niharika Sanyal: In my experience, a lot of mainstream education is focused only on cultivating the mind and the mental being, but we have all these other parts of us, our emotional, physical, the spiritual side of our being. Instead of kind of serving the purpose of being a container in which the inner being that each child is born with can unfold from within— each child is born with that innate essence and that light and already is born with a certain gift and mission and remembers it even more in the earlier stages. Instead of kind of creating containers where that inner being who is infinitely wise and old can guide the unfolding of that child’s journey, we have been creating these structures that kind of unconsciously separate us from all parts of our being and knowing and instead only harness the mind. We are trained to listen only to the voice of reason and we have lost touch with the voice of intuition. And so no wonder we kind of go into professions, careers that eventually often are not aligned with who we really are.

The word vocation has at its source the word ‘voice’ in Latin. So the way to find the work that's calling us in the world, the vocation that we're called to serve is by listening to that inner voice.

But no wonder we often in the world, have a rampant sense of meaninglessness everywhere because we have lost touch with that inner voice. In fact, in India, suicide rates among young people are extremely high and most mental health issues rise by the age of 14 years. So that disconnection from our inner voice eventually leads to disconnection from our true calling and a sense of meaning and therefore high rates of mental health issues and suicide. For me, all of this is interlinked. And it can easily be addressed actually in schools and education systems by just introducing more silence, and more mindfulness.

I remember when I was growing up in school, there's just one single moment I remember when our class was being extremely disruptive in middle school and making a lot of noise and the teacher came in and said, looks like the class is super active today, why don't we sit down and meditate? And it was like a new word that she introduced, meditation. And she just took us through this 10-minute beautiful heart-centered meditation and the whole atmosphere shifted into such a pristine and pure silence. And the strange thing is that that's the only memory I have from all of my schooling— in a very excellent school in the country—where we did something like that, where we paused to go within and connect with silence. So how can we create more space for silence to allow that inner voice to be heard?

There's this dream that came to me a couple of years ago where I'm kind of standing in a hall listening to a radio. I go up to the radio, and I'm trying to listen to the right signal and receive the message from the radio. But the radio is full of static and noise. And I'm trying and fiddling with the buttons, trying to get the right signal and to tune into the right frequency, but everywhere is just static and noise and I'm not able to find that right radio station which has that message for me that I'm waiting to receive. And it's kind of like that. It's like our inner voice is like that radio station that we just need to tune into if we create enough silence in our mind to be able to hear that inner voice. But often because we've been educated so much to fill our minds. with knowledge, which is not necessarily wisdom, we're unable to hear that silence, soft, subtle inner voice, which usually will never shout, it's just a whisper. But because there's so much noise going on in the mind, and static, we're not able to tune into her signal. So for me, I think the education system is missing out on something essential by not creating that room for silence.

Instead of asking our kids, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’, what if we would ask them, ‘who do you want to be?’ And ‘what do you love enough to listen to, to spend the rest of your life listening to?’

Because I think when we live in alignment with our intuition and true calling, it's a a process of listening, deep listening and unfoldment. Only the next step gets shown and then the next one. And so how can we create our education system in such a way that we learn to be deep listeners of life? And therefore for me, the creativity process is essential and that's something beautiful I picked up from my architecture education. Because the creative process is all about listening to that unfoldment. It's about discovering what the next thing wants to be. And it's not about focusing on that outcome, that goal, but about being in that process and listening to that process. It's a magical process, creativity, because it has its intelligence and it already knows what it wants to be and we're listening to what it wants to be.

That attitude of ‘Can we listen to what life wants to be through us? Can we listen to what spirit wants to do through us like that?’ Cracking that capacity opens us to surrender to the larger flow of life. Creativity for me is the process in education that can begin that process for the young ones. I feel that every school should have some kind of a support system: mentors, counsellors, guides, and coaches, who can be a kind of purpose coach to the young ones, holding space for them to listen better to themselves, holding space for them to unfold into their deeper calling from within.

Kamea Chayne: My mind's kind of racing right now because I'm like, it's not just our educational system. It's also the media. And, you know, there's so much info overload. There's so much that's telling people who they should be or what they should become that it goes beyond school and what's taught in schools. It's our entire society.

And there are also, you know, economic pressures that make people feel like it's not practical to follow their hearts, and systemic injustices that make it more difficult for people to be a certain way and so forth. I also wonder if this form of silence and tuning deeper into our intuitive senses is contextual in a similar way as our intellectual lenses are. So, the ways that we perceive the world are very much shaped by our education, by culture, by the media messages we receive and engage with, and by the political messages we receive and engage with. And with so much info overload and mixed messages, I feel like sometimes our deeper yearnings or dissatisfaction or stresses and insecurities can get hijacked or weaponized, whether it's our sense of insecurity being blamed on a particular group of people, which fuels discrimination or hatred, or blaming certain issues on the wrong culprit and sparking something in certain people that they should make it their life mission to address those issues, but in these ways that were sort of indoctrinated to them. I guess I'm curious what your thoughts are on how we practice discernment in terms of relearning our purpose and knowing what is authentic. And whether what is ‘authentic and true’ is also shapeable by our broader context.

It doesn't feel like my deeper yearnings can be isolated and exist on their own, but it feels like maybe my yearnings were also conditioned in some way, or could be conditioned in some way. So how do we sort of make that discernment of what is true to us and our deeper yearnings of life versus what this broader system may have been conditioning deep inside of us to become a certain way to fuel the interests of the system, if that makes sense?

Niharika Sanyal: We are highly conditioned beings, living mostly from our ego personality structure, which is often formed by all of these beliefs that we have picked up, all of these ideas about ourselves and the world that we have picked up while growing up, and all of that conditioning that we've received from parents, society, upbringing, media like you said.

So the great task of really falling into our true calling is about unpeeling all of those layers. And unpeeling, unpeeling. It's a bit like archaeology of digging through those layers to discover that inner being who lives behind all of that. And is free from all of that conditioning. And who is ancient and wise and already remembers who we are and knows why we are here. But often, because of all this conditioning, that inner being has become very thickly veiled. And so for most of us, we're not able to feel that inner being through much of our early life because it's so thickly veiled by all of that stuff in front.

But there are moments, pristine moments, when there's a spark, there's a little bit of a light, there's a flow, there's an innate joy that bursts out. And we feel connected. And there are these moments when we feel suddenly intimately part of all of life and we feel effortlessly supported and things are magically in a state of beauty and abundance and those are the soul print hints you might call them. They're like little breadcrumbs spread throughout our lives to remind us of that shiny spark within.

And I guess the whole task of how we live in deeper connection with that inner light is, I guess it begins with cultivating silence because without that foundational grounding in silence, in that silence of the inner being, it can be really hard to distinguish which part of us is speaking, which part of us is holding this idea and this desire and this want. So the very first step I think is to cultivate silence through meditation, mindfulness, or being out in nature, whatever works for you.

And then in that ground of silence, once that is established, I think in my life, it showed up as Vipassana. I did attend a Vipassana meditation camp and the effect was not dramatic, but in the following months, I could begin to hear out from under all of that static and noise in my mind, some deep, quiet, still voice within which was nudging me in the direction of my true path. And the more you pay attention to that inner voice, the louder it becomes, and the clearer it starts becoming. The more we trust in it, the more we invite it forward as well, it's also for me a process of invocation, a process of surrender, a process of tending deliberately and consciously to that inner longing of the heart, that inner aspiration, which is glowing at the back of the heart like a flame. Sometimes that flame is like a simmering, dying, ashen ember and we might need to breathe into it for a while, we might need to nurture it and pour our love into it for a while until it becomes a beautiful, alive, intense flaming fire again. And that flame of our longing, our aspiration to live a truer life. The more we tend to that, the more we kind of nurture that in our flame, it kind of starts growing bigger. The way I see it is like the flame becomes bigger in the heart and it eventually starts melting away a lot of that stuff that's clogged up in the front of the heart as these labels, identities, fears.

So I think it's a parallel process of working at the level of mental deconditioning, firstly, maybe through therapy, inner child work, kind of peeling off that, those mental constructions a little bit. And then working at that deeper layer of the spirit as well, by opening to silence, by nurturing that longing of the heart.

Kamea Chayne: There are so many statistics, I feel like now, showing how many people are increasingly not happy with their jobs, or don't find their work to be meaningful, or bring them fulfillment. The concepts of a quarter-life crisis, or mid-life crisis, or another sort of identity crisis due to people not feeling aligned. I feel like these sorts of misalignments seem so common today. And as you touched on, it's very much tethered to increasing rates of depression and anxiety and so forth. And a lot of people are told and taught to address these things in more materialistic ways that still leave a lot of the same voids. Again, my mind goes in a lot of different directions here. I think about how so many people still look to the wrong measures such as gross domestic product, and GDP, to gauge how well a country might be doing. But I'm interested in looking at why are depression and anxiety rates going up. Why are people increasingly not fulfilled in their lives? That for me feels like a more direct gauge of really the quality of people's lives and how people are doing.

Just learning to listen to the right things is important and learning to listen to our hearts more, I feel like that is very much at the core of it because it might bring a lot of people a sort of —even if they find it challenging to uproot their lives to completely abandon their current lives and to follow this new thing that their hearts are yearning for due to practical reasons—the very fact that people can come to see these misalignments, I feel like is a part of what is needed for our collective transformation as well, for people to kind of connect their yearnings to what can we change about our broader society to be able to better facilitate people's abilities to live in better alignment. And so with this in mind, I wonder if ‘soul level purpose’ and calling is relational, as in something that can connect people from the individual to the collective, in being able to invite us to better listen to what our hearts are asking for and also what the world may be asking for us, in a sense.

Niharika Sanyal: Discovering our purpose is a little bit like discovering the unique ecological niche into which we fall within the larger ecosystem of our lives. This is a teaching that I've learned from Bill Plotkin, the psychologist, that just like every single plant and animal in the natural ecosystem has a particular role and niche to serve and it's serving joyfully innately that niche. It almost doesn't have to be discovered because it already is. It's living it. And in joyfully living that niche out, the entire ecosystem is served. And without that particular plant or animal, that role cannot be fulfilled.

So we all know about how we would suffer greatly if the bee population died out because so much depends on the bees. So just like that, for me,

Discovering our purpose is like discovering that unique niche in which we belong, in which we effortlessly can be as we are, and at the same time, it serves the collective healing, the collective ecosystem in some way.

So the two are inextricable.

I think a lot of spirituality so far has often focused a little bit more on individual self-discovery and individual liberation which was perhaps the need of that age and that time before, but the teachings that I take inspiration from now are coming a lot from the integral yoga and the works of Sri Aurobindo in which he expresses that the spirituality of the future is really about first doing the individual sādhanā and then offering that into the collective sādhanā, so the collective practice. It's no longer about kind of escaping this material manifestation, this 3D world because it's all illusion and Maya. It's not about kind of leaving that behind, going into the mountains and pursuing individual liberation, but it's about how we might need to pursue that inner silence and establish an anchor in that ground of being for some time. But then it's about coming back and being that light in the world. It's about serving joyfully the world. It's about how can we now bring down on earth that heaven that we remember in our hearts, that more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible.

As Charles Eisenstein says, how can we bring that heaven down on earth? How can we manifest that supramental divine consciousness in our work, in the collective? And so in that sense, how can we be better instruments for that higher consciousness to work through us? So it's very simple in the end, the whole work of discovering our calling.

In a sense, it's quite simple because all we have to focus on is to be humble enough, and sincere enough to be really good instruments. Pure, just clear instruments for the higher consciousness to work through us into whatever work it wants to manifest. So I think a lot of the work right and in the future, is going to be about manifesting that future world, the one that our hearts long for that is emerging more from the soul.

Stepping forward, everything will change. I think our food systems, education systems, financial systems, everything, politics, governance, everything will look different in that new reality. And it kind of is happening in many places around the world. I live in a place called Auroville. And that's one of those projects that has been ongoing for the last 50 years, attempting to manifest that new reality in physical form on earth with an integration of all that human mess and chaos that comes with it. It's a long project. This entire thing is a long-term project, which will take many, many years, many thousands of years, I think. But we begin here.

Each of our callings has a role to play in that. And in a certain sense, I think many of us right now are called to transcend our individual calling towards a collective calling. So I think it begins with discovering our individual calling and finding that anchoring in it. But at some point, we might be called to transcend that and then just serve the spirit, just serve the collective spirit in how it wants to emerge, even if it's not always going to be aligned with what my gifts are, what my talents are, all of that. It's calling us into a much deeper surrender and service this new reality. How can we just be better instruments for that?

Kamea Chayne: Beautiful. Well, we are nearing the end of our main conversation, but before we wrap up, I would love for you to share anything else that's on your mind that I didn't get to ask you about, as well as your calls to action or deeper inquiry or sensing for our listeners.

Niharika Sanyal: For the last few months, I've been feeling a sense of urgency about how waking up to our callings is an urgent matter right now. The world has gone such a way that it's demanding us to wake up. And that's why many of us right now, I'm seeing it all the time, are really feeling the pressure and the rifts and things are falling apart and their life as they know it, which was comfortable so far, is beginning to reveal the cracks that are there.

The situation on our planet is such that we are being asked to take stock of our lives because the collective depends on it. The collective survival at this point depends on each of us waking up to our callings.

And I'm feeling this urgency in the last few months. And so in that sense, I feel like our individual callings and our choice of whether to follow it or not in this life is hard, it's being shown to us by life, by the world, by the current situation in society. It demands us to step into that with courage because our choice is going to impact the collective part in the next few years.

I had this kind of vision a couple of months ago where I was connecting with the spirit of the Divine Mother, and asking to kind of see and receive support on where are we going as a collective. And initially, I saw this huge wave crashing down on Earth. It was almost like I was seeing a glimpse of the apocalypse. And I was horrified, shocked, and struck by grief, saying, oh my gosh, please don't show me this. Please don't tell me this is going to happen. At the same time, I immediately saw another scene, which was of a group of people in a circus sitting out on the land sitting around a kind of sacred ceremonial object in the centre, which was anchoring a huge pillar of light that was coming down from above, from the sky. And this huge pillar of light was coming down into the circle of this gathering of people. And that force field, that wave, that pillar of light created, it kind of pushed back the waves. And then I saw these circles emerging all over the planet and anchoring these pillars of light.

So at the energetic level, I think what we're being called into is to gather in circles where we can open our hearts together to the deeper calling of our being. We are being called to really be, to share in our collective grief and to hold space for that in circles and communities that can anchor this light. And the more we do that in the next few years, the more we can consciously choose to avert the disaster and instead manifest that more beautiful world with that higher vibration. So can we be these frequency holders?

Can we step into that sacred task of discovering the medicine that each of our souls bears and is born with at this time? Because it's not just anymore a question of individual liberation—the collective is asking and needing each of us to listen to that call.

And time is looming close to us and making that demand on us. So how can we be better listeners and ride the wave that's coming into each of our lives and allow it to transform us from within?

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Niharika, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure and honour to have you. For now, though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Niharika Sanyal: Thank you so much, Kamea. This was an absolute joy. I guess the final words I would leave with are that there is inside each of us an inner being, an inner guide who is older, who is wiser, and who loves us unconditionally and wants to guide us in our lives. And it is probably the most worthwhile project of our lives to open to that presence within. And when we do, I think we can never be alone again, because that presence is always there, deep within, and we're never alone.

So making space for that silence to go within is probably the most worthwhile project of our lives that any of us can undertake in my view. Trusting in that, trusting in that.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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