Knowing and forgetting

Photo: Barbie Robinson

“Even those who touch on the knowing, fall out of it so easily!”

-words from Individual program participant

Women in my individual program often share with me how they aspire to hold the Goddess sensation all the time, but it seems as if they fall out of it, sometimes even without them realising that this is what has happened. However, this remembering and forgetting, or “knowing” and falling out of it, is the very heart of the dance in the Goddess tradition.

Shiva’s role in Goddess dance is to be the movement of mind from the falling out into the “knowing”. This flow is the very reason dance is the modality of the calling, because it is only movement that can become a flow between two states of being. The Goddess tradition is utterly pragmatic and embraces the nature of our mind to resist any consciousness that is beyond its limited paradigms of control.

Sometimes I notice how when women start their individual program with me, at around the sixth or seventh week, they start to fill their days with other spiritual pursuits. They find they have no time for the embodied dance expression, but instead they are busy with other techniques and practices or events where there is a roadmap of set actions. Dance invites embodying the unknown and unknowable consciousness, which is the Divine. The closer the mind gets to this proposition, the greater is its resistance and flight. And the mind is the greatest trickster, so it comes up with legitimate distractions to avoid a manifestation over which it has no say.

I invite women to be compassionate to this natural behaviour of the mind. I also invite them to recognise the resistance without going along with the mind’s trickery. I know this is my own life. Even after more that forty years of this tradition, the knowing and the falling out is also my own truth.

And it is so because invoking the subtle and simple manifestation of the unknowable Divine is not a given dimension in our mind dominated reality. This is not new, it is an ancient truth, as ancient as the mind, the Divine and the Goddess. That is why we have the Goddess and Shiva and their dance.

In Shiva’s dance, the union and loss is both manifested. Shiva, as the mental consciousness, holds the poignant yearning in Him for aeons before He remembers and turns to the Goddess. The Goddess always yearns for Shiva and calls to Him. Shiva, like us, often wanders across the wilderness, howling His yearning into the night.

And then, in a moment of grace, in Shiva’s wondrous dance, He remembers and turns towards the Goddess. Then He falls away again, and returns—and so on it goes in eternity. This is our dance as well, this “knowing” or tasting the Rasa of union and inevitable falling away.

So long as we have Her grace to remember or be reminded, we can always find the Shiva of our minds and feel Her arms around us again.