Food as the archetype of Body and Earth

Photo: Lakshmi in the kitchen by Barbie Robinson

Just as many condiments are infused in cooking and from which taste of that food emerges, so also Rasa is the taste of dance that emerges from our invocation.

-Natya Shastra text on dance (circa 500 BCE to 500 CE)

“…in the name of food we are destroying the very foundation of our ecosystems upon which we depend to feed the world….we are still driven in this space to extract the wealth of nature…and now has resulted in a systemic way of killing the planet in the name of food.”

-Regi Haslett-Marroquin, activist for regenerative agriculture

Some of us grew up in cultures where the proposition that everything is conscious was alive, at least in philosophy if not in practice. From the age of seven, before every dance class and every performance, I offered a prayer by touching the Earth and putting my hands to my eyes thereby seeking her “Kshama” or endurance and forgiveness for my stamping feet as I danced on Her. Many indigenous cultures hold the wisdom of the aliveness of Earth in more day-to-day contexts.

On a recent podcast with a group of farmers who were discussing the dire state of industrialized agriculture and food, one of them said that he only realised that soil is living when he was in his forties. He said that the realization changed his agricultural practices and improved his yield. The eminent writer and Jungian analyst Thomas Moore recently suggested that we would have much more soul in our lives if we could allow the animate consciousness of the Earth and Nature to be experienced as Truth.

The Natya Shastra text on ritual dance in India calls the central intelligence of dance as Rasa. While Rasa is a complex and nuanced word, the text explicitly locates its connection to the world of food. The intelligence of dance is in essence a sensation just as the taste of food is a sensation. In a well-cooked meal, we must not be able to dissect the taste into its components. I remember listening to women in the family cooking and they could tell just from the scent of the food whether all the spices were in right balance. If the scent of one spice stood out, it was not a well-balanced meal.

Each dance movement is not one thing but many things in the same moment. Rasa is to taste the many as a sensation without splintering it into its component parts. The “training” to hold such an experience is also the required training to meet the multi dimensionality of Nature without fragmenting it into its component parts.

To meet the consciousness or aliveness of Nature requires a particular intelligence. It requires a transformation of our own consciousness to mirror Nature’s consciousness. Ancient ritual traditions were spaces of this transformation of consciousness.

Mirroring Nature is not the same as describing Nature or even imitating Nature. It is an intimate apprehension of the Rasa or the essence of Nature, the life force that is immanent within all matter, including our Bodies. Dance is a rich wisdom of this intelligence with its archetypal invocations of animals, trees, birds, Earth, planets, Deities, sensations, and the elements. Each invocation holds a philosophy text within which is revealed as sensation when we are humble enough to be attentive to its unfolding.

While Regi Haslett-Marroquin speaks of regenerative agriculture, he also speaks of food that is “free of guilt and dishonour of treating the soil like dirt” in an extractive approach which is driven by profit. The Earth is a living system who is intelligent and self- sustaining.

In archetypal dance, Body is Earth. Our first experience of the intelligence of matter is in our Body. Like plants, our Bodies have complex systems which dance together to enliven us. This is not the narrated body of our mind-led paradigms but the archetypal Body whose aliveness is gifted to us as sensation. A sensorial experience of Reality is what makes its consciousness an intimate truth and not just an ideology.

The first ritual when the dance invocation begins is to surrender self-interest, which is another way of defining profit. There is no possibility of meeting the animate intelligence of Nature when we approach Her with a profit motive. And there is no Rasa from the dance when we approach it with self-interest.

Rasa as the central intelligence of dance connects the world of food and dance in other ways. Dance is as necessary as food. Just as food does, dance connects us to the whole ecosystem of soil, plants, weather, Body, sky, water, planets, and the unknowability which moves within all these domains. We may call this unknowability as Deity, or it may be called luck in more banal contexts. Dance can connect us to these elements because Body is of the same elements. The first experience of Earth is Body.

The source of Rasa philosophy in dance comes from ancient Vedic text of Atharva Veda. In this text, Rasa is what ensures a healthy Body and consciousness. Arasa, or devoid of Rasa, is as good as dead. The Atharva Veda is often called a text of healing incantations, which is a reductionist and mechanistic way of interpreting this ancient wisdom. When approached through the lens of Rasa philosophy of dance, we must overturn our usual assumptions of Body, health, healing, and food.

For example, all plants are referred to as medicine. Indeed, this is also true in many indigenous traditions. This is not the same as the instrumental tropes of healing that we follow in our times which are drenched in self-interest. The archetypal healing is to return to balance with the whole, within and without. There cannot be health that is disconnected with the life force of Nature and Earth.

At the heart of enlivening ourselves so we can experience the aliveness of Nature is the intelligence about sacredness. Like so many words, sacred has also lost its ferocity and meaning. The sacred as I experience in the dance invocation is a constellation of offering untainted by self-interest, Deity, Body, senses and expression or action. These are the components of Rasa intelligence. It is through expression, or action, or manifestation of Rasa, that we become one with the life force of Nature.

We are not in relationship with Nature. We dance Nature.