My New Year wish: No return to status quo!

I have always been curious when people are advised to “return” to their former states of being after sessions of meditation or some other inquiry practices including dance. And this has seemed rather self-defeating when the intention of these practices is transformation and not returning to status quo.

Yesterday in one of my individual sessions we were invoking the smoke practice of the archetype Dhumavathi. This is a powerful practice when it is invoked as ritual dance. It invites embodying the experience of Body beyond the form to which we have attached it.

As “smoke”, the essence which remains after Body is cremated, we are invited to consider the nature of Consciousness that is of Body and emerges from Body. This Body is other and beyond the labels which we use to limit our experience.

After the practice, which invokes the Rasa of an entirely “other” material experience, the woman said to me that it was taking her some time to “return”. I asked her what that experience of “return” held for her—was it to the status quo that was before the session? We reflected on the expectation that a transformative practice paradoxically holds our inherent habit of a return to “status quo”.

Some people speak of “integrating” the revelations of the practice into their “normal” lives. I find that “normalcy” is often the same as status quo. Or we may use the term “daily life”, which holds within it the assumption of a templated version of what that life entails. In these perceptions, revelation remains marginal to status quo. We may instrumentalise revelation to help us deal with the status quo, or to improve it to strengthen its paradigms of success, gain and definition.

Perhaps this is what drives the recreation approach to self-inquiry. We may consider spirituality as a holiday or retreat from “status-quo”, a break from the often dehumanising templates by which we are asked to move through our lives.

A return to “status-quo” approach stops short of radical overturning of the status quo, a chrysalis movement where the very architecture of our experience of Body is smelted in the fires of our inquiry. The transformation of Reality begins with transformation of our experience of Body. Because Body is the terrain where Reality unfolds.

I invite women to attend to the unfolding after each session. I suggest a spacious interval between the session and the takeover by the templates of life. In this interval I suggest simply paying attention to the sensations of Body, the feelings that emerge that elude definition.

In these times, attending to Nature takes on a new significance, indeed I sense that the very purpose of these body-led traditions was to reveal a state of consciousness that allows an infused connection with Body and Nature. We are not objectifying or “looking at” Nature/Body, rather we are within this terrain as the sentience that infuses all manifestation—birdsong, the smell of Earth, the movement of trees, the constellations in the sky, the scented essence of Body.

Something in that confluence of unfolding and attending just after the body-led invocation brings the alchemical insight of revelation and allows this to embed itself in our Consciousness.

These times of attending, both in the session and after, provide no “information” for our mental consciousness. It does not provide solutions, strategies, and answers. Rather it shifts something in the very foundation of how we perceive Reality. In that shifting our quest transforms and the movement of our life is revealed as flow, a co-creative unfolding that is abundantly supported by Body, dance, Nature, Seasons and Cosmos. This is the intimacy of Truth as a living, unfolding, dynamic sensation and not as an ideology.

From a status quo of “knowing” and the dominance of conquest by knowledge, to allow revelation that is a river in eternal flow is uncomfortable for our mind-dominated Reality. Therefore, we may dip our toes into transformative inquiries but retreat or return to status quo soon after. We may choose aspects of our inquiry to bring into the status quo and that may well be enough for many of us.

However, when any part of the constellation is excluded, the fullness of revelation remains unavailable. Already we manage and narrate Reality to match our self-interested ideals of hierarchy, survival, and control. If there is any returning in self-inquiry it is to return Reality to its constellation nature. A constellation does not respect linearity or duality of any kind. As in constellations in the cosmos, diverse matter co-exists with diverse characteristics, movements, and intelligence. So also in our Body. So also in Reality.

So my wish for 2023 is to become aware of this default setting of returning to status quo, to what I already know, to what is familiar to me, to what affirms based on previous knowledge or experience. My wish is to be the river that has no yesterday’s flow.

And may the river Goddesses bring flow, ignition, freshness, adventure and breath in 2023 and beyond to all our lives!

Photo: River Goddess Saraswathi by Barbie Robinson