Consciousness Raising in the Divine Feminine Tradition

In the Divine Feminine tradition of Indian dance, Consciousness raising is a practice that is about bringing your complete awareness into body and its movement and sensation. In many practices of Indian spirituality, you are asked to bring raise Consciousness by coming into stillness or by bringing your feelings into stillness. However, in Goddess Wisdom practices, through specific movement practices, you bring grounded awareness into movement and sensation, particularly in the lower chakras of the body. In this practice of women's dance, Consciousness raising is about "matching" the dynamic and sensation-filled essence of Reality. This is a great practice to undertake when you are feeling as if the ground is shifting under your feet and the last thing you are able to do is to come into stillness. In this practice, you are invited to come into a fluidity with the inner and outer movement and sensation. This allows you to connect, rather than resist, the dynamism of your reality and through this you find a momentum that is life affirming.

Consciousness raising in the Divine Feminine Tradition

SPEAKERS

Padma Menon

Today I am delighted to share with you the practice of Paricchinna. This is a really unique and special practice in this Goddess tradition, Paricchinna is the invitation to bring your consciousness completely into your body. Now, many spiritual traditions do ask you to bring your awareness or consciousness into the body. But they usually do this by asking you to bring your movement and your emotions or sensations into a stillness in order to do this. In the Goddess tradition, you are asked to bring your consciousness into the moving body and into a body that is experiencing sensations. In Paricchinna, we are firstly asked to bring our awareness into the lower body, in the lower chakras, and through  groundedness we are then asked to move into certain types of movements. These movements are those which match the essence of reality as it is proposed in this tradition. And in Goddess traditions, reality is seen experienced as dynamic, and as sensation. So we have certain movements in the practice that connect to the nature of dynamism of reality, these movements, starting with the grounding, they then move into movements of suddenness, movements of spirals, which can create a certain instability in the body. And if you allow the momentum of that instability, you will experience being taken by the movements. So the invitation of these movements is not to control and master the instability. But if we are able to give in through the instability through the experience of groundedness, we can then align ourselves with the momentum of that instability and experience this beautiful sensation of being taken by the movements. The final invitation in Paricchinna is to bring a fragile and subtle attention and awareness into our consciousness. And the way that it is suggested is through this particular hand movement, and I invite you to try this with me, it's this movement here, the movement of your thumb, at the base of your ring finger. Now, if you just do that with me, and see if you can, even for a few seconds, take your complete attention to that sensation there of the thumb at the base of the ring finger. Now, you will notice that you need a really subtle awareness in order to be one with that sensation. So what is suggested in Paricchinna is that even though the movements are so dynamic, through the sudden movements and the spirals, the awareness that we need in order to touch the sensation of these movements is very subtle. And it requires an amount of concentration and hence that invitation to bring the consciousness away from everything outside you and drop it into the body, particularly the lower body and into the weight and into the sensations. Paricchinna is a beautiful practice to do on the days where you experience of uncertainty or instability where there has been a lot of busyness in your day and you carry that uncertainty and instability as a sensation within you within your body. And the last thing that you feel like doing is to resist this reality both within and outside of you by coming into a stillness, then this is a beautiful practice, where you are able to bring yourself into a certain fluidity with that dynamism and instability that is within you and outside of you. And through that fluidity and through bringing your attention your subtle attention to that, you can allow yourself to be taken by the fact that taken by reality that is, in essence, unstable, but there is a beautiful momentum to the unstability when we can move out of resistance into fluidity. So, I hope that you will check out the Paricchinna practice I will put a link to the practice in the details below.