Shiva: dancing beyond dualities (video)

What we experience in these times is a dismantling of many of our long held assumptions of stability and “knowing”. For many of us these are times therefore of unpredictability—the bastions of our comfort zones are being shaken and, sometimes, destroyed. Our minds turn increasingly towards the same sources of knowing and solutions that have brought us to the chaos in the first place. Because that is what the mind does—it looks to the past for answers.

In the Shiva world, His dance of destruction invites inquiry into the very nature of the mind and its foundational lens of duality. Through this lens we have divided Reality into neat categories of stability and instability, chaos and order, and comfort and discomfort. And we also ascribe values to one half of each duality—for example instability is bad. Shiva’s dance is the movement of the dynamic, “unstable” cosmos, ever unpredictable in essence, even when it can delude our minds with moments of seeming conquest by our duality.

In this practice I share with you a simple invocation of this dancing cosmos in our body. I invite you to enjoy the momentum of “instability”, the flow that emerges when we can be present and rooted to the earth in that “instability” and the freedom of that flow. We assume that the wisdom of the body is different to that of Reality. In ancient embodied wisdom, the body is Reality, in fact it is the most intimate manifestation of the cosmos.

The teaching offers the dynamics of the practice of the Shiva body—rooted and leading with the lower body and weight and fully present to the unfolding of the momentum. The wisdom of this teaching is that if it is possible to find a flow within the movement of instability in our body, what does it say about how we can meet Reality in our lives? Can it offer us a way of being embodied in times of unpredictability—connecting with the earth, with our weighted presence, returning to the intimacy of the body and its alive and fresh encounter with the unfolding reality (as opposed to the tired, old stories of the mind), and freedom to allow that weighted flow to reveal itself without forcing “solutions”?

Padma Menon