How to Become Your Own Guru: Advice from Panache Desai

Panache Desai, author of Discovering Your Soul Signature, is a transformation catalyst and inspirational thought leader who guides people to their authentic, essential nature. He's appeared with Oprah Winfrey on the Emmy Award-winning series Super Soul Sunday, and was a featured speaker for the United Nations Enlightenment Society. He has collaborated with many renowned spiritual teachers, including Deepak Chopra, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Elizabeth Lesser, and Ram Dass.

1440: You refer to yourself as a "vibrational catalyst" and describe your work as guiding people through "vibrational transformation." Can you explain what these terms mean?

Panache Desai: Reality exists on different levels of frequency or energy or resonance. Transformation, ultimately, is a shift out of the frequency of fear into the energy of love. When we are identified with fear, it leads to an absence of love and intimacy and connection. It leads to an absence of abundance and prosperity and opportunity. It leads to health issues and health challenges. Most importantly, it disrupts our ability to connect with our own soul or love or infinite mystery—whatever name we wish to use. My role has been to provide people a bridge out of their fear and limitation into their limitless potential by changing their energy and changing their lives. The Western transformational framework of "change your thoughts, change your life" is an outdated and outmoded way of how transformation occurs. Every ancient civilization and culture knew that the fundamental nature of all reality was energy, vibration, and frequency. In order for transformation to occur, it has to happen on an energetic level. My role has been to remind people of this truth—to bring it back into the forefront of the spiritual and transformational paradigm—and to update our idea of transformation. Transformation 2.0, if you will, which facilitates the empowerment of the individual to move beyond concepts, ideas, and information into feeling, experiencing, and knowing the truth in themselves.

1440: Does this energetic shift start in the mind or body or somewhere else?

Panache Desai: The soul is the subtlest level—it has a very subtle vibrational resonance. Everybody has one, but because it's so subtle, very few people will be able to connect with it and live in connection and harmony with it at all times. The layer beyond that is the emotional layer. The layer beyond that is the mind. And then finally there's the body. All of these different levels represent different vibrational states of being with different energetic resonances and frequencies. What I've discovered is that actually the mind has no part to play in the transformation of the individual. The shift has to happen on the level of emotion. When we shift the energy at that level, every other level begins to transform.

1440: How can we begin to shift the energy of our emotions?

Panache Desai: Unresolved emotion is creating a density and heaviness that's impeding your soul's ability to inform every other area of your life. So the more you integrate what needs to be experienced and felt within you, the more you start to liberate your soul's potential, and the more you begin to restore harmony in your emotions, in your mind, and in your body. Fear is the root cause of separation—it's why the ego (or mind) has become so dominant in our experience. The more we move away from this energy of fear and the more we begin to accept and embrace and love ourselves—not just as a mental exercise, but as a way of living, as a lifestyle—we begin to access the harmony that's already present, the abundance that's already present, the health and the love that's already present within us.

1440: Once we shift our energy, will we have access to this harmony all the time?

Panache Desai: Transformation isn't a one-shot deal. If you believe that you're going to go to a talk, a lecture, or a seminar and someone's going to wave their hand over you and your life is just going to miraculously transform and stay that way, you're going to be disappointed. It requires commitment, consistency, and repetition. The Western transformational paradigm is centralized, meaning there's an author, a teacher, a practice, a modality—there's something that people have to go through in order to access themselves. What I'm doing is bypassing that. I'm decentralizing transformation and empowering people in themselves. But they have to be willing to do the work.

1440: How do you empower people?

Panache Desai: My journey has been one of embracing an ability to share energy that I've had my whole life. At the age of 23 or 24 I had a direct experience of the divine in its absolute form. That experience has taken me on a 14-year path of integration to where I now feel fully established in the gift and fully established in the energy. I share this vibration through grace, and people can gradually uplevel their energy through presence and proximity. What's happening now is people are very quickly moving into alignment with the truth. They're moving into health and love and abundance, and, most importantly, into the present and into connection, and they're staying there. That's when you become your own guru. Panache Desai will be teaching You Are Enough: Discovering a Life Without Limits from April 17 – 19, 2020 at 1440 Multiversity.