Archetypes Meaning Feelings: How Indian Dance is an Archetypal Transformation Practice
It is through the use of archetypes that Indian dance becomes a spiritual practice of transformation. The Rasa practice, where feelings are embraced as part of spiritual practice, is underpinned by archetypes or Deities. Embodying the archetypes in association with specific feeling states connects our individual stories and feelings to expanded and elemental experiences. Indian dance, and the philosophy that underpins this dance, proposes that our feelings are made of the same essence as Reality, Cosmos or Consciousness. When we step out of our limited stories and into the archetypal domains of the powerful Deities, we end the separation between us and the experience of Divinity, Consciousness or Reality.
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Archetypes meaning feelings: how Indian dance is an archetypal transformation practice
Speaker: Padma Menon
00:00
When we approach Indian philosophy as a spiritual practice, the archetypal dimensions of the practice
become really important. In fact, the archetypal dimensions are vital and they underpin what makes
Indian dance become a spiritual or a transformative practice.
00:44
Aarchetypes, meaning in Indian dance refers to two different aspects of it, the feeling constellations and
the physical constellations., Bby constellation I mean, where there is a coexistence of multiple elements
in the same moment. Now, these elements may not always be congruent, and that is what makes a
constellation, quite complex and multi dimensional. In other words, it's almost impossible to make a
story out of a constellation, it is only possible to hold it as an embodied experience, because there are
polarities coexisting in the same moment.
01:35
So, the feeling constellation is called the Rasa rustle practice. And the Rrasa practice is where feelings
become archetypal practices.
01:49
Let me give you an example to show you how this works. In our ordinary lives, we feel anger, now that
is called Krodha crada in Sanskrit, and this is the anger that we know about, you know, we have we
have a name for it, we have stories about it, you know, we know why generally what makes people
angry, how people express their anger, and we also have a value about it. Generally, it is felt that anger
is not a good thing, that it needs to be controlled and itsit’s destructive.
02:27
Anger, or Krodha Crota, as a Rrasa becomes Raudra. router, Raudra router is ferocity, its rage, its fury,
and there is something elemental about Raudra loutra. We know this because when we look at the
Rrasa, there is an archetype or a deity that is attached to the Rrasa. So for Raudra Rasa route rather,
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai
the deity is Rudra. Rudra is an elemental force as a deity or an archetype. Rudra is the force of
thunderstorms unleashed, it's the force of an uncontrollable forest fire. So it is
03:08
an primordial force a wildness, a rawness, of wildness, that cannot be tamed, that cannot be controlled,
cannot be converted into meaning or into a story or into any kind of purpose. So there is a
03:28
it's like, it's something that is beyond our mind and beyond our understanding. So, that is the ferocity of
Rudra.
03:37
So, when we move from Krodha crada into this archetypal Rrasa experience of Rudra,
03:48
we see how have an expansion feeling of feeling that we can claim at an individual level which has a
limited story. And, you know, we may have fears around it, you know, good and bad and all sorts of
values around it, but it connects us into this expansive, elemental experience, that is the very essence
of nature or reality. So, the proposal in Rrasa, as it is in the philosophy that underpins Indian dance
practice, is that everything in us even at the most subtle level of our feelings, is of the same essence as
reality. So, any feeling in us, any feeling, even the most mundane and ordinary of feelings, can become
this expansive, elemental experience of unity with the cosmos and with reality.
04:52
And of course, this is the transformative aspect. So archetypes here.
05:00
are not symbolic. They're not metaphorical. They are actually invitations to embodied practices that
transform us from the limitation of our little story that separates us from that experience of nature of
consciousness and of reality, and connects us into that freedom or expansiveness. tThat is cosmic in
dimension.