We’re All Family Here
Vibrational catalyst Panache Desai has helped thousands of people around the world to access soul connection, inner peace, and oneness.
Panache Desai is the best-selling author of Discovering Your Soul Signature, A 33-Day Path to Purpose, Passion & Joy, now translated into ten languages. He has appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday and teaches at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York; Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts; and teleclasses and in-person events worldwide. The World Peace Prayer Society and the Infinity Foundation have presented him with awards for his contributions to world peace and the advancement of spiritual growth and consciousness.
Panache grew up in London in an Indian family with strong spiritual connections and practices. As a child, he was told by various spiritual masters that he was here to help transform the world. In his early twenties he moved to the United States to try to understand this destiny that he kept being told he embodied. After traveling across the country and meeting many different spiritual teachers, one New Year’s Eve all alone in Los Angeles, he had an extraordinary experience of the Divine that changed his life forever. He saw the world and everything in it as an infinite ocean of light in which all beings are loved absolutely unconditionally. The power of this immersion in God shifted everything within him, and that loving divine energy flows through him now when he interacts with people in his programs. Their lives, too, are changed forever.
I first met Panache in 2011 and have participated in dozens of his programs and events since then. From the very beginning, I could see that he carries ageless wisdom and deep compassion in his 37-year-old physical form. It pours out of him in everything he says or does — in his voice, his touch, and his wonderfully irreverent sense of humor. Through laughter, tears, and pure love, people are shifted out of their accumulated emotional density and into soul connection and oneness. Panache interacts with individuals at the level of vibration: he’s like a tuning fork of divine connection and love. His soul and the other person’s soul align energetically, and in that coming together, profound life transformation occurs. I have experienced it myself and have watched hundreds of others experience it as well. That awakening and connection at the soul level affects not only everyone in his programs but also everyone their lives touch as well. This is global transformation, one soul at a time.
Panache and I recently talked about his work as a vibrational catalyst, the energy of 2016, facing crisis in life, and the planetary changes we are all experiencing.
Peggy Kornegger: You grew up in London, but when you were in your twenties, you moved to the United States, where you subsequently had a profound experience of God, or the Divine. Could you describe that experience and how it has shaped your life since then?
Panache Desai: For me, the Divine showed up as an infinite ocean of energy with no beginning and no end, and in that experience, I realized that there’s no judgment, no prequalification, within divinity at all. I also realized that the Divine in its infinite nature was relating to us as individuals in whatever way that it could. It was taking whatever form we required in order to have a relationship with it. This experience completely transformed the way I lived my life—so much so that I am now able to perceive the love and the divinity that is present in every single person.
Also, as a result of this revelation, every experience I’d had in my life that I couldn’t reconcile immediately was brought into resolution because I could see that all forms of pain, denial, or separation that I had bought into were, in fact, a part of my greater development. This experience has become the foundation of my message, and the energy of this infinite presence of love has become the undertone or undercurrent that permeates every single thing that I have the honor of sharing as a part of my expression in the world.
Peggy Kornegger: Many people call you a spiritual master or avatar, but you prefer the term “vibrational catalyst.” Could you explain what you mean by that and why you prefer it?
Panache Desai: I think titles render us inaccessible, and the grander the title, the more inaccessible we become. I’ve always considered myself to be an old friend, somebody who is here lovingly holding your hand, walking this path with you. My role as a vibrational catalyst really is to help you integrate any and all unresolved emotional content within so that you can unleash your authentic expression in this world. Because it’s only our unresolved content that is keeping us from knowing ourselves as abundance, health, and love. It’s keeping us from the peace that is our experienced enlightenment. So, as a vibrational catalyst, I am able to hold a space of connection that allows you to know yourself as the truth of who you are. It also facilitates an accelerated catharsis, an expansion of possibility and synchronicity in the individual’s life.
Peggy Kornegger: You have said that life changes don’t occur at the level of the mind but at the level of energy — what you call “vibrational transformation.” You expressed it as “Change your energy, change your life.” Could you say a bit more about that?
Panache Desai: Well, the existing transformational paradigm of “change your thoughts, change your life” was a good start, but it didn’t really allow for the depth of exploration that is required in order for us to make a sustained and permanent shift in our lives. Ultimately, everything in our reality is an energy, and our emotions are nothing more than energies in motion. When we can just abide in this truth that everything is energy and end our inner resistance to feeling and experiencing everything that constitutes the human experience in its totality, we no longer offer ourselves any resistance at all internally. That allows us to surrender our resistance to life, which then allows life to show up dynamically.
An inner shift in energy, or accessing a beautiful state of being, allows you to shift your psychology and then in turn shift your reality. And that’s the new transformational model and paradigm. That’s what allows us to move into alignment with our heart’s deepest desire and to live there in every moment.
Peggy Kornegger: And you feel that vibrational transformation is going mainstream soon, as the way for people to change their lives….
Panache Desai: I firmly believe that in an industry that is populated with solutions and answers, when something actually delivers on its promise, it immediately starts to stand out. Now, almost nine years into this, I’ve had the honor of seeing over and over again how changing your energy and changing your life has impacted individuals: in bringing families back together again, in helping people unleash their creativity, in helping people embrace their sexuality and every aspect of themselves that society has taught them to judge or in some way feel apologetic about.
As we explore this “change your energy, change your life” phenomenon, and it touches more and more people, it’s beginning to reach the point where it can be accepted by everybody. Initially, when something starts and is new and innovative, it’s only ever embraced by a few. But over time, the few become many, and we’re on the verge now of having a critical mass of people who have received the benefits of vibrational transformation. It’s going to become commonly known that when we change our energy, we can change our lives and that all things are possible with love.
Peggy Kornegger: People who experience the divine energy, or vibration, that comes through you, in person or during teleclasses and webcasts, have strong physical reactions as well as profound life transformations. What is occurring when that happens? What are they experiencing and what are you experiencing?
Panache Desai: The body reflects perfectly everything that is unconscious and unresolved in the individual. Everything that we have to feel is within us. So what’s happening in that interaction is that you are elevated into your highest expression. For example, when I see you, I see you in your completeness, and then everything within you moves into alignment with how I see you, because I see you as the truth of who you are. I see you as somebody who is limitless. I see you as somebody who is healthy and whole. I see you as somebody who is the embodiment of love. And the more I am able to hold this vision for you, the more you grow into the acceptance of it as the truth, and then it becomes your reality.
Energetically, when love is present in your experience, it brings up everything within you that you have in some way interpreted to not be love. So on phone calls, when I am simply being in this place of vibrational communion with people, their anger, sadness, fear, belief systems, ideologies, and everything that is unresolved within them begins to be brought to the forefront of their awareness to be felt and integrated. For me, I’m in this state of peace and connection, an absolute state of love. I am just loving whomever I’m with so profoundly, so completely. In that, they are opening up to loving themselves, and they begin then naturally to return to harmony.
Within that is the manifestation of crying, anger, shaking out fear, old traumas and hurts coming to the surface. Again, what they are experiencing is the process of vibrational transformation. It’s the integration of every unresolved emotional wound or trauma that the individual has experienced that keeps them trapped in the past. Vibrational transformation frees them from the memory of themselves so that they can relate to the reality of who they are now.
Peggy Kornegger: My experience of you, and I’ve witnessed it with others as well, is that you are feeling what I am feeling, what I have felt. And that allows you to step into that place of complete empathy and understanding that helps people feel their emotional density. Is that an accurate description?
Panache Desai: That’s 100% accurate. For me, there’s never been any sense of separation between myself and the world around me. That’s what allows me to be of service and support in the way that I am. For example, when I used to do individual sessions, it was almost like I would relive every past hurt, past trauma, or past abuse that somebody had gone through. And in my willingness to feel and experience it, it would dissolve in them.
So my experience is one of being with the individual and feeling what it is they won’t allow themselves to feel. Feeling it with them. It’s very much a practice of resolving everything within myself but understanding that in resolving it within myself, I am resolving it within the world. The other person that I’m with is me. They’re an aspect of me. Through my willingness to embrace the aspect of me that I’m with, harmony, completion, and balance is restored in everybody.
Peggy Kornegger: In your book Discovering Your Soul Signature (Spiegel & Grau, 2014), you write about how each person has a unique soul imprint that defines them. What exactly is a soul signature, and why is it important?
Panache Desai: As individuals, we are a manifestation of infinite energy. We’re just expressing it uniquely. Just as no two signatures or fingerprints are the same, who we are as an expression of divinity is entirely unique to us. That’s our soul signature. It’s authentically who we are, our essential self. It’s our greater reason for being. In discovering our soul signature, we begin to once again reconnect with the truth of who we’ve been created to be.
Once we’ve discovered it, we can then be empowered to unleash it and express it in the world, to then serve as an inspiration for other people to do the same. So discovering your soul signature is an opportunity for you to move out of judgment and into love, and in doing so, then become a love-delivery mechanism in this world for other people who have yet to remember that that is their essential nature.
Peggy Kornegger: What is Panache Desai’s soul signature?
Panache Desai: Love. I’m just like a 5-year-old in a 37-year-old body. I just am love. And I’m happy to say that now I am more comfortable and at ease in being that love than I ever have been in my life. I fully recognize that my willingness to be love is all that’s ever required in any moment and that my willingness to just be myself has the capacity to transform not just my experience but the lives of all the people that I come into contact with. So I am love.
Peggy Kornegger: I feel that, most definitely. You have called 2016 the Year of Soul Emergence, or Divine Emergence. What do you mean by that, and how does this year differ from other years?
Panache Desai: We’re at a point now in our development where we are ready to own our authentic selves. The world is reaching a crescendo, and all of the unworkability in our human experience is being brought to the forefront of our awareness. As much as this is happening on a global stage, it is also happening in our lives. We are really being made real and honest. This year of Divine Emergence is unfolding in the way that it is because we have access to more love and more presence than ever before.
I believe at some juncture in this year people are going to be able to shed the illusion of separation completely, and embody the oneness that they are, living in connection with that to the point where they no longer abandon that connection even for a moment. There’s a union that happens, and the union cements them in an expanded state of awareness, energy, and consciousness.
Peggy Kornegger: What you’ve just described is very powerful, and the energy seems to be increasing all the time, affecting people’s lives whether or not they’re on a spiritual path.
Panache Desai: Yes, because we’re all part of a collective tapestry, and the more we remember ourselves as the truth of who we are, the more that provides a doorway or an access point for everyone else to do the same. That’s the magic of being human. One individual human life has the capacity to impact 7.2 billion others. That’s really the greater blessing of our willingness to fully be all that we are, to live what we’ve come here to live, to share what we’ve come here to share. Because that in turn allows everyone else to begin to do the same.
This year is really a year of coming into a level of empowerment and owning who we’re here to be. I’m experiencing it as a quickening—everything seems to be happening a lot faster. The level of resistance that I once used to experience is no longer present. People are just ready. Those people who can be all that they are now are finding me. This is increasing in frequency, and it’s increasing in numbers, to the point that I believe we are reaching a crescendo. That crescendo is going to lead to the greater crossover into more of a mainstream expression and dynamic.
Personally, I am very excited that all this is happening because I knew that there would come a point where we’d be able to shed fear, lack, scarcity, and separation as a way of being and authentically—and almost immediately in some cases—remember the oneness of all life. When that happens, it also facilitates the bigger expansion into a more mainstream conversation throughout North America and the world.
Peggy Kornegger: The other side of this increasing energy and expansion is that many people are experiencing challenges or crises in their lives now, whether as individuals or as communities, like the recent shootings in Orlando. I know you and your wife, Jan, faced a major health crisis with your baby daughter Celeste last year. How do we navigate our lives at times of crisis? And what role does crisis play in our greater evolving?
Panache Desai: Crisis is a catalyst. It really shows us how connected we are, and it also brings into our awareness everything that we have yet to embrace as a part of our experience. For me, crisis served as a doorway into surrender. With everything that was going on with Celeste and all the surgeries, the only option I had was to surrender. In this surrendering, I was able to remain calm and present in the midst of everything that was happening to this little days-old infant who was plugged into every kind of machine that you could think of. I allowed her journey to be her journey and to simply be there in support of her in an environment that was very stressful and highly emotional.
Crisis also serves as a doorway into authenticity. It allows for humility, support, empathy, and compassion. It challenges every false façade that we have of self-importance or self-aggrandizement. Ultimately, it’s a leveling of life that occurs, and as a result of this leveling, we are then promoted. Crisis comes to elevate us. It comes in this extraordinary heart-wrenching package to help us open our hearts to more love, more light, and more connection than ever before. Crisis has played probably one of the most important roles in my development as a human being.
Whether it’s a health challenge or a mass shooting—regardless of the external circumstances or form of crisis—when it arrives, actually we would be best served to surrender to it and allow crisis to work its alchemy deep within us. Because, in truth, crisis is in some ways supporting us in coming home to our hearts. It’s empowering us to live in a more generous, more compassionate, more patient, more empathic and grateful way than ever before.
We take so much for granted. In my life, so much has happened to me so quickly. I went from traveling to living rooms with my backpack, donation box, and boom box to being a leading figure in spiritual and personal development in the world in a very short period of time. All of this happens, but we don’t actually take the time to develop and mature. Crisis really stripped away any and all things that I had taken for granted. It stripped away my sense of certainty, and it really allowed me to open up to gratitude in a very powerful way so that I could be grateful for everything, all of the incredible blessings I’ve received.
The shift that came about as a result of crisis was a shift from me feeling that I had to be Panache Desai, like in some way it was expected of me because I have this capacity for transformation, this capacity for love, to simply getting to be Panache Desai. I’m now grateful for the fact that I get to be me and in this way serve. That I get to live my life and my daughter’s here. There’s a magic that you begin to access that you can’t even begin to fathom until death pays you a visit. Everything with Celeste and almost losing her has really brought me to life. I’ll never be able to thank her for that. I’ll never be able to articulate in words what her choice to go through what she went through has done, not just for me, but for my entire family. It has fundamentally altered my life forever.
To experience it all has been both amazing and heart-breaking. It challenged every area of my life and really had me re-evaluate and question how I was living and how I wanted to live. It brought everything into perspective. My family is of paramount importance, and I now know why I’m alive. I’m open again. I’m accessible again. I’m happier and more at peace. My relationship with my wife is better than ever, and we are more in love than we ever have been. My relationship with my parents is also better than ever. And I get to be the person who shares this message and this gift. It’s been profound. I’m so grateful to Celeste. I will never be the same because of her and her choice to be my daughter and experience this incredibly hard journey.
There was a moment one of the nights before Celeste was going to have a major surgery when we were at the Ronald McDonald House. I was looking for the teakettle and couldn’t find it in our kitchen, so I walked over to the other kitchen. There was a family there, and they were having a very tender moment with their son, who had health challenges. They looked like people who were living a very hard version of life, and I didn’t want to interrupt. The mother saw me and broke the conversation with her son. I said, “I’m really sorry to bother you, but do you mind if I use the kettle?” She looked at me and said, “Sweetheart, we’re all family here.” And I just started crying. I realized that sometimes this false sense of separation we have really doesn’t mean anything.
The greater meaning of that statement “We’re all family here” is that we as human beings, regardless of what we have or don’t have, regardless of where we’re from, regardless of what our belief system is—somehow when our children are sick or when there’s a calamity, we find a way through the power of our humanity to come together and love each other. And I will never forget that family. Never. We’re all family here. We’re all in this together. Everyone in this house is hurting. Everyone in this house is dealing with the potential of losing their child. The boundaries of race, religion, ideology, indoctrination, socioeconomic background all fall away because in that moment all that matters is love. And all that matters is the love that we share.
So there have been so many wonderful experiences that I’ve had as a result of this crisis. Every single one of them has served to humble me and help me appreciate this miracle that is life and the blessing that people are in my life. You never know who your angel is on any given day.
That experience at Ronald McDonald House was just one of so many where absolute strangers who didn’t know me, had no idea who Panache Desai was, just loved me and were there for me. They didn’t want anything from me and didn’t need anything from me. They just loved me when they didn’t have to. When someone loves you when they don’t have to, it’s because that’s who they are. It transforms your experience. I will never be the same because of those strangers who just loved me, who picked me up and held me and who were just simply there for me. The vulnerability of that has shifted everything for me in my life.
Peggy Kornegger: You have said you want to help end suffering in the world. How do you do that in your life, and how can each of us do that?
Panache Desai: I think the first thing is to understand that suffering is inauthentic and that actually any suffering that exists in our lives is unnatural to who we authentically are. It requires effort and energy to perpetuate the experience of suffering. Suffering constitutes everything that we’re resisting. The more we can come into a place of acceptance, the more we naturally end our experience of suffering. The more we can accept our personality, our physicality, our psychology, our emotionality, the more we can accept who we are as multi-faceted beings, the more we can then end the experience of suffering in our lives. Literally, in ending it internally, it then ends externally to the point where you begin to see life differently, to experience life uniquely. You are empowered to walk on Earth in a way that is open-hearted and loving above and beyond all other ways of being.
Peggy Kornegger: Do you have a sense of what lies ahead for our planet during this period of intense worldwide change?
Panache Desai: Well, I don’t know the how, but when I look at it, I feel like our planet is going to turn golden. What I mean by that is that people are going to end any and all separation, that people are going to love each other, and that people are going to realize that we really are all in this together. I feel like the boundaries of race, religion, nationality, gender, and all of these barriers that we’ve created, are going to fall away. People are going to be empowered to be themselves and to express all that they are. I firmly believe that separation will become extinct within a few generations.
We are on the verge of going through a complete paradigm shift in the human experience. We are going to get to a point where we authentically embody love, and in authentically embodying love, we are going to come together and work together for the betterment of everybody, regardless of who they are, what they have, and where they’re located. The more we can see ourselves in others and the more we can collaborate, the more we’re going to start to resolve everything that we’re dealing with now as a species—all the diseases, all the climate issues, all the inequality issues that are still permeating the landscape of being human. In the moment that we love and accept ourselves, war and all the things that we’ve just gotten used to as part of life will collapse — to the point where the only expression that we’ll be able to offer each other is love.
So that’s what I see as the future. This generation, meaning everyone who is alive right now, is playing a part in that greater remembrance. That’s why I’m so grateful for you all because it’s your willingness to love yourself and accept all that you are that is opening up the doorway for people to love and accept themselves. That then leads to a golden planet. It leads to a planet where everybody knows themselves, loves themselves, and is fully expressing themselves without reservation.
Peggy Kornegger: In my experience, that golden planet effect you describe happens every year at your global gathering in Florida.
Panache Desai: There is a dynamic power in coming together that amplifies everything. The more people that gather together in this place of love, the more we ripple that energy out to the collective. We all get together, we’re all in this exploration of acceptance and love, and we’re beginning to open a doorway for people who are in judgment to begin to shift out of that way of being into acceptance and love.
For me, it’s about bringing as many people together as possible in that shared experience. Because that’s going to turn the tide, that’s going to shift the paradigm. The more people embody that, the more that’s going to be collectively embodied and remembered. Actually it just becomes normal again. It just becomes the way things are. So I’d like to bring millions of people together to make love simply just the way things are.
Peggy Kornegger: How can people live this love in their daily lives?
Panache Desai: You are not broken, you don’t need healing, you don’t need fixing, and you don’t need a teaching. It’s time to work with who you are and embrace all that you are. The more you stop resisting your design, embrace every single aspect of who you’ve been created to be, and begin to accept and love all that you are, the more you become a place of peace, empathy, compassion, creativity, inspiration, and innovation in this world.
It’s my deepest wish that you come to know yourself as the love that I know you to be and that you find your way to express that in this world to serve as a reminder to every other person who has yet to know that they are love as well. All that you want in your heart is entirely possible, and it begins and ends with you. Be that change that you wish to see in the world. Own the greater possibility of love that you’ve come here to express and watch what happens.
Panache Desai lives in Florida with his wife, Jan, and their four children. Details about his book Discovering Your Soul Signature and all his events and programs can be found at www.panachedesai.com. His annual global gathering, “Soul Family Global Reunion,” takes place November 11-13 in Orlando, Florida.
Peggy Kornegger is the author of Lose Your Mind, Open Your Heart. Her blog posts regularly at www.spiritflower.wordpress.com.
See also:
The Pause
Second Sight
