Primary Essay: The Witness & Shambhavi Mudra
The Witness and Shambhavi Mudra
How to See the Inside While Outside
The Witness and Shambhavi Mudra: How to See Inside while Outside
Can I Get A Witness?
We’re all familiar with the term witness from shows like Law & Order (Chung-Chung!), where a witness provides an unbiased perspective on a complex situation. Such clarity is invaluable in cutting through the blur of emotions and judgments. But this perspective isn’t limited to the courtroom—it’s something we often wish we could call upon in our own lives, ‘Can I Get a Witness?!’. Whether it’s for making major decisions or avoiding repetitive mistakes, the clarity of a witness perspective can transform how we navigate life.
As Shambhavananda teaches in Spiritual Practice:
“When I talk about the witness state in meditation, I am referring to the ability to observe the comings and goings of your mind and emotions. That doesn’t make you asleep or less conscious or less engaged in life. It allows you to see the patterns established in your life and to improve yourself.”
The witness perspective is not only a powerful tool for meditation but a necessary resource for living with awareness. As Sri Shambhavananda said, it is how we break free of our patterns and begin to improve our lives. In this way, the witness practice gives us a path to strengthening our capacity for surrender and harness the mind. The unique alchemy of the Witness practice merges inner and outer realities much like the Shambhavi Mudra, and gives us another way into this majestic and foundational practice. Over time, with consistent effort, the witness state, and the inward gaze of the Shambhavi mudra, can become a natural part of life and a key feature of our spiritual growth.
The Witness State and Yogic Tradition
The Shiva Sutras remind us that to grow as yogis and avoid suffering, we must stay connected to the fullness of our awareness while interacting with the mind and senses:
“For those who are fully aware of God consciousness, all the organs of cognition, organs of action, and organs of the intellect lead them to that supreme state of God consciousness. For those who are not aware, these same organs deprive them completely of that God consciousness.”
When we are disconnected from the fullness of awareness, the mind and senses pull us away from our true nature, leading to suffering. The witness practice helps us reconnect with this “fullness of awareness,” both during meditation and throughout our daily lives. In the yogic tradition, suffering is seen as the result of losing this connection—not in a sudden break, but through a gradual entanglement in the illusion of knowledge. This illusion keeps us trapped, clouding our perception of reality. As the Sutras continue:
“Being completely dependent on that illusive energy of knowledge, and being without real knowledge, we are continuously doing right or wrong. So, being completely entangled in that fence, we become just like a beast.”
Witnessing the mind allows us to detach from this “fence,” illuminating our life with deeper awareness. It’s a practice of bringing the fullness of awareness into each moment—not through exhausting effort but through consistent, natural effort over time.
As Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras:
“The state of yoga is a natural state and our true condition. It is the understanding of the Inner Self which is not limited by our physical form.”
Surrender and the Shambhavi Mudra
In our daily practice, we learn that surrender is a unique form of effortless effort—and the practice of the Witness follows this same principle. Witnessing requires only a gentle redirection of our awareness from focusing solely on the external to including both the external and the internal. By turning our attention inward, even amidst outer distractions, we begin to see the world with greater clarity. As Sri Shambhavananda often teaches, this inward focus reveals possibilities that remain hidden when we rely solely on an externalized mind. This dynamic blending of outer and inner awareness beautifully illustrates the nature of the Witness practice in Shambhavananda Yoga. In this way, using the Witness practice is closely aligned with the teachings of the Shambhavi Mudra.
As Sri Shambhavananda teaches:
“The Shambhavi Mudra is learning how to see inside with your eyes open. My name is Shambhavananda. It means to be immersed completely in your Inner Self while all five senses are working. You can’t close your eyes to the world and to the things that are of it. It is easy to close your eyes and daydream; it is more difficult to be present right here and now. You need to learn how you relate to the outer world. Being more in your heart won’t make you dysfunctional. It will make you more aware and more alert about what is going on around you. If you can learn how to keep your heart open and your eyes open, you will see a different world.”
As this quote shows, the Shambhavi Mudra—or the practice of the Witness—is not about closing our eyes to external reality. That approach is closer to daydreaming and misses the essence of the practice. Instead, we must move beyond acceptance and rejection, keeping our eyes open while simultaneously feeling the depth of our heart. This balance is more challenging, but it opens the door to profound, cosmic results. Tuning inward does not make us less functional; in fact, it enhances our functionality, revealing an entirely new world of possibilities.
The root Guru of Shambhavananda Yoga, Bhagavan Nityananda, practiced the Shambhavi Mudra endlessly, and Swami Rudrananda not only taught every meditation with eyes open, but also emphasized that the fastest path to spiritual growth is when you apply your practice to the circumstances of your life—the essence of the Shambhavi Mudra. Sri Shambhavananda himself was even named for this special practice by Swami Muktananda.
Shambhavananda’s name means “the bliss of the natural state,” and the Shambhavi Mudra also refers to the natural state of happiness that bubbles up when we are able to keep our attention inside while we move through our karma. The Shambhavi Mudra is a core principle in the yogic and Buddhist traditions as a living image of enlightenment. This is often depicted in statues of the Buddha or Shiva with eyes half open, meant to symbolize their ability to be in the world, but not of it. Neither accepting nor rejecting, but surrendering, or witnessing, while moving through their karmic reality.
The Beauty of the Witness Practice
The beauty of the Witness practice, and the Shambhavi Mudra, is that they are fluid and natural expressions of surrender in everyday reality. It might seem like we are doing something “extra” when we zoom out on our reality with surrender, but really we are simplifying our lives, detangling ourselves from our minds, and merging with a higher flow. As Patanjali taught:
“The state of yoga is a natural state and our true condition.” (1.19)
This means that the work of the Witness should make our lives easier and more natural. Patanjali also taught that this inward gaze is actually our natural function of thinking, even though it might not seem like that all the time:
“It is the natural function of the faculty of thinking to turn inside rather than to associate itself with outer objects.” (2.54)
The Vijnana Bhairava also teaches that the inward turn of the Shambhavi Mudra, during the throb of our everyday life, naturally calms our mind from the inside out:
“Nirvikalpa bhava [a calm mind] comes about by Shambhavi mudrä in which even when the senses are open outwards, the attention is turned inwards towards inner spanda or throb of creative consciousness which is the basis and support of all mental and sensuous activity, then all vikalpas or thought-constructs cease.”
The Shambhavi Mudra, and the Witness practice, may be the key to unlocking a new level in your practice, a calm mind that can reveal the Self.
The Challenges of Training the Mind
Even though it is natural for our mind to turn within, and a calm mind is our true nature, it may not feel that way when we practice. This is because our minds may be “out of shape,” so to speak. We are surrounded by so many distractions in our daily life, and oftentimes we follow those distractions. This is what is meant by “doom scrolling” on our phones—the downward spiral we often see ourselves doing but feel powerless to stop.
In other ways, our media can set certain thought patterns into motion that circulate in our minds endlessly, creating worries and concerns about everything from our community to the world itself. But of course, this has always been the challenge set forth by the yogic tradition. As Shiva Sutra 2.10 describes it:
“This happens to all yogīs. This losing awareness is the great crisis in the yogīc world. All yogīs generally experience this state of losing awareness.”
Training our mind is indeed the work of our practice. To better understand the mind and its training, we can take a slight diversion to talk about the structure of the mind according to the yogic tradition.
The Mind as a ‘Smart’ Camera
To understand this, you can think of your mind like the camera on your phone. The lower mind (manas) collects data endlessly, like a camera lens left open. Have your ever left your phone in camera mode accidentally and then felt it hot in your pocket, that’s because this level of externalization takes a lot of battery power. Data collection can be draining, and indeed when we are stuck in the lower mind, we often feel spun out. The data continuously gathered by the senses is infinite, and without any organization, can seem quite chaotic.
Your phone camera recognizes faces, though, it is scanning the data and organizing it, focusing it literally and figuratively. This is much like the function of the Ego, the Ahamkara, in the Yogic understanding of the mind. The ego organizes and categorizes data, helping us recognize images, recall information, and store memories. However, the ego must also “assimilate and identify with” the information it gathers. As the Introduction to Kashmir Shaivism teaches:
“An individual cannot think or speak of the object unless they realize that it is something similar to an experience of their own in the past.” (24)
This means that in order for us to perceive something, we must associate ourselves with it, relate ourselves to it, ie. Become it on a certain level. This is the balancing act of the Shambhavi Mudra and the Witness Practice. As Babaji taught earlier, we can’t ‘close our eyes to the world and things that are of it,’ which is to say we need an ego, an organizing factor to function in our reality. But we don’t have to over-identify with it, and that’s where the practice comes in. We can function in both worlds simultaneously, and become happier and healthier because of it. As Shambhavananda teaches in Spiritual Practice:
“The ego is a necessary part of living in the world, but I don’t take it seriously.”
Awakening the Buddhi
Which brings us to the higher mind, the discerning faculty that allows us to use our mind but not be dragged in circles by it, the Buddhi. As the Shambhavananda Yoga text Sacred Journey describes it:
“Buddhi is intellect or intelligence, the mind’s digestive fire (or agni). It is buddhi that consumes information and processes our experiences. Buddhi is the higher mind’s capacity to discriminate. It makes decisions and gives the lower mind its orders. If buddhi is weak, then we become the victim of our habitual patterns. If buddhi is very strong and developed, it serves its highest function, that of discernment. A sharpened buddhi is an important tool in spiritual growth because when buddhi is trained and polished, it has the ability to separate itself from the effects of the instinctive mind.” (20)
Returning to our phone camera analogy, the buddhi is you—the one holding the phone. It is the individual who can choose whether to take the photo or not, to use the phone or not, depending on their overall discernment.
When you’re tired and you know that your phone is going to drain your energy, but you reach for it anyway—that is a malfunctioning buddhi, or rather, an exhausted gatekeeper letting in all the riff-raff. Ultimately, the buddhi is our mind’s ability to discern between distraction and growth—it’s our mind’s ability to detach, surrender, and witness our reality while still being engaged with it.
Witnessing as a Training Ground for the Buddhi
As we all know from having phones, we are constantly training ourselves to work more skillfully with them. We all know that our phones have the ability to elevate our awareness or drag us down into our patterns, depending on the fullness of our awareness when we use them. Now we see that the Buddhi is a big part of that process, and what’s even more important, that the Witness practice, and the Shambhavi Mudra, is quite literally a workout for our buddhi! While we interact with our external world, which is unique to our karma, we bring our attention to the heart, remembering the fullness of our awareness and ensuring that our actions will serve to elevate us. This is the role of the Buddhi, to recall our higher nature amidst the senses and mind, as the Intro to Kashmir Shaivism puts it, “The Buddhi, in other words, is the memory of the Universal ‘All-this.’” (24)
So we don’t have to turn off our phones or our lives to practice the Witness, although taking a retreat from both occasionally is a great way to keep your buddhi in shape. We simply have to engage our practice in a light and regular way throughout our day, allowing all the circumstances of our life to be our buddhi training ground.
This is also one way of understanding Swami Rudrananda’s teaching of “using one’s life for growth,” as we begin to use each situation of our life as an opportunity to detach, surrender, and witness. As Sri Shambhavananda teaches:
“At first your co-workers may wonder what you are doing, but eventually you will be able to turn inward on the run… Keeping our energy inside gradually allows us to become more and more balanced. Over time, keeping our energy inside becomes our natural state rather than something we have to reach for.” (SP, 33)
Conclusion
The witness practice is far more than a meditative technique; it is a way of living that bridges the gap between the external and internal worlds. By cultivating the buddhi, our higher mind, and learning to engage with life from a place of surrender and detachment, we create a foundation for spiritual growth and greater functionality. The wisdom of the Shambhavi Mudra reminds us that true clarity comes not from rejecting the world but from embracing it with open eyes and an open heart. As we integrate this practice into our daily lives, we simplify our experiences, strengthen our awareness, and discover the profound possibilities that lie within and around us. Through consistent effort, the witness practice becomes a natural state of being, guiding us toward a life of greater harmony, insight, and joy.