Kshetra: Invoking the temple of the Body

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

Looking to transform the external is often like changing the cast of the same play—it may transform things marginally but the script is the same old script. The Kshetra invocation of the body is an invitation to turn our offerings towards our consciousness and its divinity. In the very act of this invocation there is radical transformation within and without.

I have been invoking the Kshetra body in my courses in these times. And we experience that the intelligence of Reality is the intelligence of the body. Everything about Reality starts in our own bodies—multi-dimensionality, sensation, pulsation and flow. Freedom from Time into timeless eternity is also en experience of sensation. Otherwise it is merely a thought or a mind-led experience that replicates known roadmaps and stories.

Kshetra body is body as landscape. We map the Earth, oceans and the cosmos on our own body. From this originates astrology and many other knowledge domains. Our body, like Earth (also called Kshetra) has directions and the directions have divinities who signal certain sensations (Rasas). Ultimately these are sensory experiences and not to be manifested as literal stories. The invitation to attend to how we experience our bodies differently when we consider the body a landscape just like the Earth body.

When we traverse the landscape of our Kshetra, we feel its diversity. Our body is not a limited and defined site. It is an expansive landscape with changing seasons, unpredictable weather and diverse movements in each region.

When ancient traidtions proposed freeing the body from a limited identity, it was not a rejection of the body, but instead an expansion of her sensation domain. This manifests the minute we can allow the Yagna body, which is the body as an offering to Reality without any self-interested stories and definitions.

Our Kshetra bodies connect us to the cosmos, just like Shiva’s dancing body is the cosmos. The invitation of Shiva’s dance is not metaphorical, but is an incantation that makes the cosmic intimate in the temples of our own bodies. Shiva's dance is the body as Kshetra or the temple of the cosmos.