The importance of body as the site of ritual invocation

Ancient rituals were embodied invocations of connection to place. They invested a place with sacredness and made it a “site” of manifestation. This site is called Kshetra. Kshetra is also the ancient Sanskrit word for body, Earth and the temple, suggesting stunning continuum between all these domains.

In ancient dance, connections are made to specific elements of Nature. For example the invocation of the tree is an important movement. The tree is a beautiful presence in Nature. A tree stands rooted in a place, people gather under its shelter to hold meetings or rest or even to meditate. Many spiritual teachers are depicted as seated under a tree when they become enlightened. A tree invests a place with meaning, feeling and story—it holds a sacred constellation that is archetypal because it is not connected to a specific time or a specific personal story.

When we invoke the tree in us, we find the sensation of our body which transforms it into Kshetra. The body becomes the ritual site. Like the tree, the body is invested with meaning and sensation, and story that is as archetypal as the tree. The tree in us awakens the sacredness of our bodies as that which shelters us, connects us to Earth and all other bodies, and invests us with the expansive story of that connectedness rather than the limited personal story.

Kshetra is not a thought, it is a sensation that emerges from a body-led invocation. It is a sensation- story because it cannot be narrated as words. It moves within us just as the wind moves the branches and leaves of the tree. Or just as birdsong emerges from unseen quarters.

A site is a microcosmos of reality—it makes the cosmic intimate. Kshetra is our body rendered cosmic while it is tethered to Earth in a material way. This connection to place in ritual has been eroded when rituals have been disconnected from their cultures and re-created. In India, even today, certain trees are worshipped as specific Goddesses. This matters because that invocation in that place tethers people to the material dimensions of ritual—the tree that is an everyday presence in their lives, their bodies, and the Goddess that they know intimately through many generations.

In our times, the connection to place is challenged every day. We are offered “virtual” spaces as reality, which remove us from material body and place into an immaterial experience. Every event in such realities is information-generated and imposed on our sensorial bodies. Place becomes “virtual” and we float in this ether, untethered to our immediate material sites—our bodies, our home and the tree in our “village”. In such an untethered space, ritual in its fullness of body-led invocation is impossible. And so we atrophy into disconnected and individual experiences.

Invoking the Kshetra body is a radical invitation for it brings the site of ritual into our own bodies. We carry our bodies with us. We can invoke the Kshetra body in us without any external permission at any time and in any place. We carry the ritual site with us in this Kshetra invocation.

Ancient dance is the movement of the Kshetra body. Dance situates the site of sacred manifestation in the intimacy of our own bodies. Our body is that ancient tree, the archetypal banyan or Ashwatta tree, which stands in the village square and endures across time to remind us that timelessness is a material experience in our own bodies.

The intimacy of place is a vital need of our times because it grounds us in the material truth of reality—we live and die in our bodies and not in a virtual reality.