Celebrating the Night of the Great Shiva

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

Happy Mahashivaratri to all!

Tonight is the long night of Shiva, the invitation to return to the intimacy of our body without any distractions of the day of the mind. On a moonless night, we are asked to dance His Tandava, the dance that is at once the devolution of the mind and the emergence of the manifestation of action that is beyond division and fragmentation. The creative and destructive polarity is in the same movement and both are intrinsic to the manifestation of a being that is beyond that polarity.

Shiva’s invitation is intimate for it’s is at the most intimate level that we experience the cosmic and the divine. His absorption in the cosmos of His body suggests that it is when we return to the body, which is the site of our daily reality, that we can transform our cosmos. In that transformation is a cosmic ripple beyond what we know and perceive. Like Shiva’s Tandava which is a passionate manifestation of His energy and consciousness but also the essence of the movement of reality at the same time.

When I was a child we used to stay up all night to invoke Shiva. One of the things we used to do was to roll on the ground. As kids we loved this abandon of chanting and allowing the body to simply move of its own momentum in the lamplight. Years later, as an adult, at a difficult time in my life, I did the shayanapradikshana or rolling around the temple grounds in Guruvayur temple. This was an offering of my resistance and a commitment to flow with the divine guidance just as the body simply rolls when one allows the momentum of its weight on the earth to lead.

Shiva is the dancing body that turns towards its divinity. His dance is the bridge between the constricted mind-dominated reality we live in and the expansive body-led perception that liberates us from division and splintering.

I invite you to dance your Shiva body today in some simple way. I invite you to simply allow the dance to emerge, inspired by the movement of a tree, a birdsong, or the rain. In doing so we answer Shiva’s ancient howling across the wilderness and assure Him that we remember His dance in our bodies.