Play is the antidote to flight from presence

Irrepressible play spills over in the midst of serious austerity! Photo by Barbie Robison

I have noticed a curious pattern when I am dancing with women, especially in my Individual program where it is a one-on-one situation. No sooner do we begin to taste anything like presence and expression of Self than they flee towards a myriad of distractions.

Recently I have been invoking Saraswathi, the archetype of creative expression, with one of the women in my program. Like many women who I have the privilege of accompanying their invocation, she is a talented, brilliant, and intelligent person in her own right. I learn much from her, as I do from all the people I dance with.

Her inquiry was into the nature and expression of her creative energies in her life. When we begin our inquiry there is no template that we apply towards a solution that we have already formulated. The very nature of true inquiry is to hold it open for whatever may emerge. This is often not the case in the way in which we approach inquiry in almost all knowledge paradigm of our times.

We usually bring to inquiry what we already know, including our preconceived ideas about what is knowledge, truth and the like. Therefore, there is no truly free space in which revelation can emerge. After all, revelation cannot be something that we already know!

To allow freedom is a practice that requires attending. The Sanskrit word shraddha is a beautiful way of considering the nature of this attending. It is at once intense, devotional, committed, reverential, trusting, and desirous. It is sensation and feeling drenched attending that is not about analysis. This kind of attending is not something that appeals to our mental consciousness. Our minds are analytical domains, applying paradigms of duality (like-dislike, comfort-discomfort, community-loneliness) to curate Reality.

Ancient ritual inquiry traditions knew to a high degree of sophistication the inevitable movement of the mind in these practices. Their modalities are fine tuned to “dancing” with the movement of the mind in such situations. The constellations of movement, ritual, archetype, pleasure, and sensation create an interplay with our mental consciousness that is not confrontational or controlling.

Control, mastery and conflict are the natural skills of the mind. To state we control our minds is an illusion. When we work in the paradigms of control, mastery and conflict we are in practice under the control of the vagaries of the mind’s curation of Reality. It is worth considering where we are in our history as humans which may reflect the conquest of our consciousness by the mechanistic curation of the mind.

To return to my story, sometimes when we allow shraddha to manifest, our long history of conquest by the mind counters this experience with flight. This flight is by no means unsophisticated. Our mental consciousness is also divine and wondrous in its power. When we are in an emergent dance with this power, it is as beauteous as the lovemaking between Shiva and Shakthi. The mind and its energy are not the villains—we just need to dance to enliven the fullness of our consciousness so the mind can be animated in its proper place.

The ways in which flight manifests is by people seeking all sorts of other practices which reinforce paradigms of control, mastery and competency. Or they may suddenly develop the need for joining new communities and groups. Shraddha is a space of intimacy and subjectivity. This is not to say that it is anti-community, it simply means that community building is not the purpose of shraddha. We come into our subjectivity and its intelligence when we allow the space and time to “taste” (Rasa) the fragile yet intense unfolding of our universal subjectivity.

Yes, the paradox is intended for it is in our primordial subjectivity that we taste the universal and cosmic. When we participate in community with this foundation of shraddha we have the intelligence to hold spaces of nuance and complexity without signing up to wholescale ideologies simply to belong to something.

We yearn to be free to express the fullness of who we are. That freedom emerges in shraddha and proposes a dance with our mental consciousness rather than being directed by the mind’s accumulated knowledge and paradigms. Flight is an ancient movement of the mind, as old as consciousness itself. Ancient wisdom recognised this response and approached it with non-judgmental playfulness, thus eluding conflict, and control.

Then we have our vexed relationship with play. Sometimes people tell me that they do not like play. They feel silly. This is especially potent for women perhaps because the culture holds an implicit notion of women’s “silliness”, and we feel we must counter it with fierce intellectual seriousness. We dare not “play” as women. Our determination to be masters of linear approaches in part stems from this underlying cultural attitude. I sense this through my personal experience as well as the many women I have taught over the years.

Play in ritual traditions is not competitive, nor is it childish. It is a space where we can explore true adventure by letting go of expectation and being open to wonder. Without wonder there is no space for anything truly new or revelatory.

When we dare to play, we inhabit the domain of consciousness before thought. Before we “know” it our minds are dancing in constellations of narrative, sensation, and movement. What’s not to like about this alternative to flight!