Creative expression and the "limits" of Body

Photo: Barbie Robinson

We have a popular saying, “necessity is the mother of invention”. Perhaps this comes from ancient wisdom about the archetypal energies of Saturn (Shani) which are traditionally associated with limits and austerity. Sometimes limits bring us to "out of box" expressions of suprising creativity...

The Indian equivalent of Saturn called Shani is also associated with creative energies of dance and music. Indeed, one of the deities of Shani is no other than Shiva, the ancient Deity of dance. So how does an energy of limits, the material and the everyday also become creative and artistic?

In ancient Body-led philosophies, creative energies are associated with the material domains. Aesthetic or artistic expressions are about Body, senses, beauty, pleasure, Earth, and our manifest existence. Sometimes these have been associated with “Rakshasa” consciousness, which evolved from a sense of Body-centred awareness to demonic nature, as philosophies increasingly rejected Body as sacred and intelligent.

Hubris, or the soaring consciousness that is untethered in the material Reality of Body and Earth, may also manifest in our philosophies of “out of body” proposals of “ascension” and “raising consciousness”. Shani reminds us that the essence of our life is the everyday experience of Body, with the attendant characteristics of Death, disease, desire, and sensations. It is also about the everyday activities we must do to upkeep the Body—financial sustainability, safety, community, systemic encounters and the like.

Shani’s invitation is to turn our eyes from the skies towards Body and Earth because that is where our lives unfold.

This does not mean that locating ourselves on Earth and in Body is a reductionist offer. Shani reminds us that it is our Body and Earth that offers sensation, beauty, and enjoyment. Of course, Shani does not propose indulgence—as the strict teacher this would never be His intention. Rather He proposes that in ritual invocations of artistic and creative energies, the everyday and the material becomes sacred expression. Indeed, we reconnect with the inherent Divinity and sacredness of matter through artistic expression.

After centuries of suspicion about Body, senses, and pleasure, it is not surprising that we find this invitation of Shani confusing. And somewhat uneasy. The polarity of austerity and indulgence is an easier lens on Body and the cosmos of Body—either one rejects or controls Body, or one indulges in what is assumed to be unaccountable pleasure.

To experience Shani’s invitation of artistic and creative expression it is necessary to consider the ancient ritual constellations of expression which include dance, archetypes and sensation. It is this ritual constellation that finds the balance that Shani so powerfully represents—the balance between our embodied and mortal Reality and its infused infinity and Divinity.

Shani asks us to attend to the Divine infused in our Body through our senses, our expressions, and the cosmos of the multiplicity of Body’s intelligences including respiration, digestion, and creation.

There is a robustness about Shani’s invitation to attend to matter. Rakshasa also refers to tusks—those symbols of ferocity,

primordiality and rawness. These are not traits we savour in our narratives of civilisation supposedly cleansed of our “barbaric” roots. Yet matter is about getting our hands dirty, encountering mortality, the limits of our embodied Reality which include what Body holds in the seed of our manifestation at this time. We experience them as limits because we live lives that locate Reality not in Body or Earth but in conceptual narratives that are mostly disconnected from material Reality.

The alchemy at the heart of Shani’s paradoxical cosmos is that it is when we inquire into what we assume limits us that we experience how infinity coexists with the finite. In ritual dance, the interplay between Body/Nature, archetypal energies and sensation is the alchemical soup where mortality and immortality, Rakshasa and Deity, and spirit and Body, dance and flow. Here all these definitions that separate and propose dualities dissolve.

And in this dissolution (Rasa) is the experience of Body itself as cosmos and as the Divine.