Goddess Maatangi Indian dance huntress practice for when you are feeling lost

In this video I guide you through the Indian dance Maatangi practice of the huntress. The archetype of the hunter or the huntress is an ancient and universal contemplation practice in the Divine Feminine. The hunter/huntress is the state of consciousness that has to dance with danger in order to bring nourishment to the community or tribe.

Maatangi is the Goddess Wisdom practice of the wilderness or forest. In this practice, Maatangi as the hunter is the dance of matching the secret and hidden dangers of the forest. In the dance the huntress and the hunted merge as they share their consciousness.

The practice requires intense alertness, multi sensorial focus and complete presence. The practice of the huntress is for those moments in your life when you feel part of yourself is exiled in the wilderness. Rather than resisting or retreating in fear, the invitation of this practice is to dance with the wilderness and match its danger and its mystery. In this dance is the transformation and wisdom that emerges from our sensation and not from the mind. For background about Maatangi and this practice go to https://youtu.be/WbB6BykaUqQ

About Moving Archetypes and Padma Menon Moving Archetypes is a channel dedicated to ancient Goddess Wisdom practices and philosophy from India. Renowned Indian dancer, teacher and philosopher Padma Menon is the founder of Moving Archetypes. Born and raised in India, Padma is a pioneer in practising ancient Indian dance as a Goddess Wisdom practice. She has spent a lifetime mentoring women to reclaim their sacred selves through this ancient women-led practice. In each episode, Padma delves into a practice or philosophical aspect of ancient Goddess Wisdom from Indian culture.

Goddess Maatangi huntress practice for when you are feeling lost transcript

SPEAKERS

Padma Menon

Padma Menon  00:00

Today I am really happy to share with you a practice of Goddess Maatangi. This is the Huntress practice. Now I have a video which explains the background to this practice. I'll put a link to that in the details section. And I invite you to check it out so that it will give you more of a background to this particular practice. 

Maatangi is the goddess of the forests. And one of our practices is about Maatangi as the hunters. It’s important to remember that the Huntress in ancient traditions is not just hunting for gain or for power, but to provide food for the tribe, or the community. Always in the goddess wisdom nothing the practices, works when you bring self interest to it. It's always for the good of the larger life and consciousness and Divinity.

Okay, so let's start with the Huntress practice. So the first thing I'll just show you, with your left hand, you're holding the bow and the right hand is hold it like this, if this is difficult, So with this, you're pulling the string off the bow. With this hand, your right hand, you pull the string of the bow and the left hand is the bow. So that's the upper body. 

What we do now is we get into the core movement for the Huntress, which is you step back on the right leg so you lean as you're pulling that string. It's not about the releasing, it is the hunting, the ongoing hunting, the dance between the hunters and the prey. 

The bow is strong and ready to be released at any moment. And then you're stalking your prey. Now it's important to know what kind of prey so here in this practice, we are stalking a beast, a large, dangerous beast, something that potentially can attack and eat. And so the Huntress is the food for the beast as much as the beast is food for the Huntress. Okay, you start following the beast, trying to be very light of foot, quiet. The beast makes sudden movements. You're always ready, the upper body stretched and ready.

04:17

The stretched tension, tautness and the lightness in the lower body. Absolutely. light in the lower body, the constellation of the body. We were not just in the story but in the sensation of that practice. We are multi sensory. At the same time, it's like we've got eyes at the back. Every pore in the body is sensing 200% awareness. 

Start dropping the story. And going into the sensation of your body. The openness in the upper body, the tension, the stretched alertness, and the lightness. Dropping into that sensation of the weight, the timing of that lower body, that non linearity. So who is the prey, who is the Huntress in the stance? 

When you feel like you're really with the sensation of those movements, I invite you to pause the video, and just allow what's coming to you from that from those sensations. So it doesn't have to be the same thing. Go from the lower body, that's always a really good way to initiate movements coming out of the practice, just dropping in and see what are the movements coming to you from the lower body. And maybe the arms will be different. Or maybe there might be the same thing. I'm not suggesting the movements, but allow that lower body to lead you. 

And then let the movement come from the lower body into the upper body, it's really important to be without judgment, open. Just even if you're repeating the mantra, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, that's really helpful. Because those movements will not emerge if we are sitting there with our mind judging and wanting particular movements, and certain outcomes. So the more we can go into the I don't know, the movements are already there. It's just a matter of us being open enough to receive them. So just receiving those movements, and allowing the movements to really just be without any expectation as if you're playing. Just be with those movements. 

And when you feel like those movements have really fulfilled themselves, put the video back on and just come back into that basic physicality of the Huntress. Just feel that and just gently release. This is a beautiful practice to do when, on the days when you have the sensation that you’re in a forest, in a wilderness where you're feeling like there's no roadmap and you just want to meet that sensation. Remember, the goddess wisdom is not looking for solutions and answers, but it is about matching the sensation of reality and allowing the teaching and the wisdom in to come to you from that matching. So here's the Huntress. And the invitation is to just be in that sensation of not having a road map and being somewhere where you think that it's dangerous because we don't know this wilderness.