Acharya Shunya – Sovereign Self
Acharya Shunya is an internationally recognized spiritual teacher, ordained lineage holder, and authoritative scholar of the Vedic Sciences of Ayurveda, Yoga, and Vedanta.
An Interview with Acharya Shunya – Ancient Yogic Wisdom for Trying Times
Interview by Liane Buck
Acharya Shunya is a wisdom teacher and a catalyst for empowering health and elevating consciousness worldwide.
She is an award-winning and internationally renowned author, speaker, and scholar of nondual wisdom (Advaita) and a classically-trained master of Yoga and Ayurveda. The first female head of her 2,000-year-old Indian Vedic spiritual lineage, Acharya Shunya provides a rare opportunity to receive authentic teachings from a genuine Vedic master—one with a distinctly down-to-earth, feminine flavor who never lets us forget that our humanity is to be embodied and enjoyed.
Throughout all her teachings and writings Shunya adeptly guides modern seekers through the core concepts and practices, demystifying and contextualizing ancient wisdom for modern suffering. She helps awaken and recognize latent human potential to be healthy, joyful, resourceful, abundant, limitlessly expansive, and ultimately sovereign.
Acharya Shunya is the President of The Awakened Self Foundation with its international headquarters in California and founder of the spiritual and philanthropic non-profit Vedika Global.
OMTimes: It is an honor and pleasure to have you with us today; can you tell us how you started on the Spiritual path. Was it a specific situation?
Acharya Shunya: Karma ensured that I become the first female lineage holder in a 2,000year-old line of Vedic spiritual teachers from northern India. I was born into a spiritual family in the holy city of Ayodhya. Outwardly it looked like any other family with a loving dad and mom, kind grandparents, and an extended circle of family and friends. But as I grew older, I realized we were no ordinary family. My Grandfather and great-grandfather were renowned Hindu sages of their time, nondual Wisdom, yoga practice, philosophy, and Ayurveda. My father, too, was a celebrity writer well known and awarded for his contribution to elucidating dharma. For fourteen long years, I was steeped in the Vedas and its scriptures, the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, along with Yoga and Ayurveda texts under my guru, my Grandfather, Baba, alongside regular schooling.
The 5,000year-old collection of celebrated sacred Wisdom from ancient India, collectively known as the Vedas, has given rise to several world religions. The same Wisdom influenced Western thinkers from Emerson to Ram Dass—and provide humanity with a uniquely accessible, yet universal and useful path to liberation and sovereignty. All of this sacred Wisdom came to me without my having to search for it outside my home.
My Grandfather paid extra attention to my training and grooming as a spiritual teacher because, for reasons (his soul knew), he chose me over many male candidates to lead our lineage forward as its first female head in the 21st century!
A life circumstance that tuned my consciousness inwards was the death of several loved ones, mother, sister, and the loss of important relationships at the same time. I almost lost all my family to death, except for my aging father, one by one before I turned thirty. After that, Vedic teachings on impermanence and change and discovery of what is eternal and unchanging became my solace, as well as my burning quest. Just as Darkness is banished when the sun appears, the truth of your real nature arises when you are exposed to enlightening Wisdom. You take the time to internalize it, live it, act from it. Today, I am not only content deep inside me, I feel complete despite losses. I also impart this same Wisdom through my Awakened Self Foundation, with its headquarters in the San Francisco bay area.
OMTimes: Tell us a little bit about your book.
Acharya Shunya: My newest book is called SOVEREIGN SELF. It embodies awakening teachings from India. With the Book Sovereign Self, I have tried to present a modern-day guide to the ancient Vedas’ Wisdom. So that each of us may emancipate ourselves from restrictive belief systems and discover our true nature—that which is always whole, joyful, and free. My message is simple: It is possible to create a life more wonderful than anything you can imagine. But it will take the will to look at who you are in a very different way. Throughout the Sovereign Self, I try to guide seekers through the Vedas’ core concepts and practices, helping demystify and contextualize sacred ideas for modern life.
I hope that the Sovereign Self will help humanity awaken to recognize its unexplored spiritual potential to be joyful, resourceful, abundant, limitlessly expansive, and sovereign.
OMTimes: What does it mean to have a Sovereign Self?
Acharya Shunya: When any worldly being (like you and me) becomes acquainted with something blazingly bold, deeply authentic, inexhaustibly creative, fiercely truthful deep inside them and yet as if from beyond the mind, then we can conclude, they have connected with their true Self, which is forever sovereign or free and inherently empowered (does not seek power from the world), to be and become what it wants to become! On knowing the Sovereign Self, one becomes inwardly peaceful while exercising full throttle passionate engagement in the world.
Knowledge about this Self is critical in my opinion. In the absence of this Wisdom, we humans have accepted a shackled and diminished existence. It is like the electricity saying, “I am the bulb.” It is like the great river saying, “I am the glass of water.” No wonder many of us feel our life is simply a jail sentence. We disappoint ourselves. We do not necessarily even like our- selves. We beg for freedom, recognition, and love from others, forgetting that our happiness, acceptance, and worth are up to us, that they are achieved through an inward journey toward the Self, never outward. We don’t recognize the more profound potential of being the ruler of our own lives, in full command of our own experience. My book, which is based upon the ancient Wisdom that helps us reclaim our sovereign Self, will give seekers back the tools to reclaim a sovereign life that they deserve!
OMTimes: How we create our own prisons of shame, compulsion, blame, and obsession—and how can you begin to break free?
Acharya Shunya: I introduce the concept of ‘samsara’ in my new book, which refers to the “subjective inner world” of our own making, unique to the human-animal, not aligned with reality, as it is. While we enjoy our subjective opinions and perceptions, we can also be biased and blind-sighted because of them. Unfortunately, sooner than later (unless we stay spiritually alert and learn to discern between appearance and reality), our Samsara becomes a virtual prison of sorts. Our Samsara can imprison our soul’s true potential, creativity, power, inner joy, and peace behind the bars of “shame, compulsion, blame, and obsession.” These are conditions arising from our distorted self-perceptions, delusory projections, impaired judgments, and false limiting beliefs about this world’s Self and nature.
In fact, I will go so far as to say that all humans (myself included) are prisoners in their respective virtual Samsara, to begin with, until we awaken spiritually through proper instruction and consciously cultivate a ‘prison free’ or ‘delusion free’ mind. Developing this illumined awareness is a matter of choice (most people like to stay distracted).
That is why I alert humanity to the existence of prion-like “samsara’ in my new book and invite all sincere seekers who wish to break free, to use the cognitive and meditative tools provided, to shed any unconscious bias and self-limiting conditioning. I want to they will cultivate a powerful and focused mind and to rewrite their destiny anew, breaking free of the inner clamor of would and should’ve! It is never too late to be who you were meant to be!
OMTimes: What is “Soul memory,” and how can disempowering beliefs (as you call them) keep us in shackles?
Acharya Shunya: More times than not, our conditioned mind acts like a veil, hiding our spiritual Self from us. It’s like looking in a distorting mirror and believing one is distorted. Forgetful of our spiritual nature, we begin to think in the mind’s fears and the gossip that goes around in this world. No wonder we undermine ourselves in numerous ways. We don’t recognize the truth that we are the ruler of our own lives, in full command of our own experience.
Fortunately, there is such a thing as soul memory known as “Atma vasana” in the Vedas. It is lodged deep down within us. Sooner or later, this memory will show up in our conscious mind or become activated by reading and hearing spiritually activating words. And when that happens, we start “yearning” for our real being. Suddenly, we may prefer quietly sitting in the backyard quietly or meditating over shopping or partying with our best friends, contemplating our teacher’s words over watching television or browsing on the internet. We start searching for not just any spiritual teacher, but our guru. As a last resort, we at least sign up for long-term psychotherapy to figure out the existential muddle! We become students of life, take spiritual workshops and wellness courses, read magazines like this one, take long walks in nature, and rediscover the joy of solitude.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Acharya Shunya
