The unbearable howl of authenticity

Photo: Barbie Robinson

Taken by the scorching and exulted roar, my lunatic lamentation consumes me

May this affliction strike those who do not observe committed devotion

I honour this burning ever increasing in intensity that is this affliction.

Homage to Rudra, homage to the affliction…

Tormenting and scorching you render the cosmos yellow

I honour this ochre-dawn rapture, the affliction that is savage.

-Atharva Veda invocation to Rudra

Rudra is the wild, savage Deity that howls into the night and, like a violent storm, uproots that which is unmoving, tears apart that which has congealed into the paralysis of permanence, and barrels down into our structures that resist transformation. Rudra turns form into movement, emotion into its elemental nature of water, fire, earth and sky, and returns us to the terrifying fragility of our hearts.

Rudra locates affliction or disease in the conflict between our authenticity and the narrated Reality which we impose upon our self. The site of the affliction is the heart. Rudra’s shattering howl in the loneliness of the night is the heart’s cry for recognition and manifestation.

This is no sentimental heart of Valentine’s Day pinkness and flowers. This is the raging heart, weeping over the thousands of betrayals over centuries of mind-dominated Reality. It is the heart that has been silenced by measurement, linearity, instrumentality and separation. It is the heart that yearns to reunite with Body, senses, expression, matter, and pleasure.

The deities, often invoked as the Guardians of the door, or the divinities that are located at the threshold of our descent into the cave of our self-inquiry, invite us to begin that descent from our heart. Rudra is one of these deities. However, the archetypal constellation of heart they hold is quite different to our romantic notions of heart.

The heart in this invitation needs nothing that we have accumulated in our life, including our expertise, status, techniques or wisdom. Indeed the more we have accumulated, the greater is the obstacle to hearing the call of the heart. In one of my Individual Programs, I work with a highly accomplished woman who is an expert in her profession. When I invited her to simply feel her heartbeat, she was not able to do so even though it was after a dance session when the pulses are stronger in the body.

Turning to the heart is to remove all the clothes of our stories and stand naked and open to the cosmos of the heart itself. Our authenticity is inherent within us, and is woven into the many intelligences of our Body. The authenticity is the dance with Rudra, the co-creative and emergent expression that cannot be “recorded” as a template or definition. This is not identity, but a sensation (Rasa) that flows, births, and dies in each moment.

In the ancient texts we are warned not to call Rudra by His name, so fierce is the necessity to relinquish definitions of all kinds. Authenticity is not a defined and set destination, rather it is a dance that must be reignited in each encounter with our Rudra hearts.

There is terror in Rudra’s invitation and Rudra’s cosmos recognises that terror. The heart must howl its scorching lamentation, but there is the earthy power of the Bull and the sovereign nature of the Lion that underpins this dirge. This is a multi-dimensional cosmos where heartbreak, rage, bodily strength, beauty and pleasure of creative expression, and divine invocation, co-exist in equal measure. We must dance all dimensions of this cosmos, and this is only possible in freedom from the mind’s linear stories.

When I invoke Rudra by myself or with people in my programs, every encounter holds the unexpected confluence of pain, the pleasure of exuberance that is freed from the shackles of domesticity, and the sensation of truth that is beyond and before words and thoughts. People inevitably say they cannot find words to express their experience, and that is as it should be in Rudra’s world of no-names.

Authenticity is excavated from Body. It is not awarded by communities, families, or ideologies. In the solitariness of the cave, we must dance with Rudra, even as we are in terror and unease. We must join our howl with the howls of the ancient wolves in forests long destroyed by our human kin. Our individual shame, rage and grief melt into Rudra’s savage and wild roar. We may realise that our howl is universal and inevitable. And that it was birthed along with the elements and the Deities.

We do not solve our quest for authenticity. Indeed it is when we divest ourselves of paradigms of solutions and outcomes that we are in Rudra’s presence. Authenticity is Deity and Dance. Authenticity is the “ochre-dawn rapture”, which is ever birthing and ever dying, just like the ephemeral Dance itself. When we can bear to turn to Rudra, we experience the root of our “disease” as the conflict between the primeval cry of our heart to manifest in beauteous expression and the brutality of paradigms of separation and duality which, in every moment, suffocate this cry.

Rudra is the ancient “healer” because He returns us to the leonine sovereignty of our heart’s intelligence. Fragile, fierce, flowing, and free, Rudra dances our authenticity as the meaning and purpose of this beautiful, transient gift of embodied life.