Giving permission for fullness and completion
Photo: Geoffrey Dunn
Yesterday one of the women in my group classes reflected how she felt she could have experienced more deeply if only she had practised regularly. We are coming to the end of our Shiva courses and we were sharing our experiences of the invocation.
I invited her to consider each encounter with the dance as a complete event, as “purna”. “Purna” is a rich word with many nuances including full, ended, accomplished, self-indulgent, selfish, strong and plenty. In other words, it can appear to the mind as self-indulgent state of completeness because the mind thrives in incompleteness. In fact, a mind-led movement towards contentment will usually be conditional on external circumstances.
Our incessant seeking is the mind's life blood. The essence of the Goddess herself is a languid and self-indulgent sensuality. In more masculine philosophies this state of being has been portrayed as evil and shameless. A woman who is not in service of incessant demands is to be condemned as immoral!
These sentiments of incessant achievement and progress have dominated spiritual traditions for centuries. Philosophers were celebrated for winning intellectual debates, and spiritual mastery became a common expectation. When the Divine has no hierarchy and time, how can we apply competitive approaches to divine invocation?
The mind’s mastery is to keep us incomplete and seeking. In fact for many of us this becomes our consciousness. I often invite the women I dance with to reflect on the label “seeker” because seeking is a never ending activity that keeps us busy for lifetimes. Indeed we even have narratives around needing millions of lifetimes to "achieve" the experience of the Divine!
After the class the same woman shared with me how the “permission” to be “purna” transformed the class for her. She said that it allowed for a richness and multi-dimensional experience that was a revelation to her.
The Divine is an intimate, infinite, experience always complete in the moment. Comparison is an irrelevant lens here—what we did or did not do yesterday does not matter. Nor does it matter what we will do tomorrow. The only thing that matters is the offering of our attention to the encounter in this moment.
And that encounter is “purna” unconditionally. And that is Shiva, the Divine or Reality, emergent and co-creative with us and pregnant with infinite possibilities.