Shiva comes at a time when we are in throes of a mind-dominated reality that is increasingly remote from its organic and material reality. For centuries we have sought to mechanically construct realities that separate us from Nature and Earth, having forgotten that Earth is our own consciousness and the fullness of our self.
Read MoreIn this video I share the archetypal and ancient story of the Churning of the Ocean, which is the opening of Natya Sastra, the 4000 year old text on Indian dance. I also share the practice of churning as consciousness cleansing movement.
Read MoreIn this video I share is my personal practice. I invoked Earth in the ancient wisdom of the Atharva Veda, the more than 8000 year old compilation of invocations that signals the embodied dance I practice. The oldest hymn to Earth is here, holding a moving acknowledgement of Earth’s intelligence, Her unfolding movement as Truth and Her infinite abundance. The ancients also recognise Her ferocity, not separate from anything, not punishing, not moral, but simply Her nature.
Read MoreIn the Shiva world, His dance of destruction invites inquiry into the very nature of the mind and its foundational lens of duality. Shiva’s dance is the movement of the dynamic, “unstable” cosmos, ever unpredictable in essence, even when it can delude our minds with moments of seeming conquest by our duality.
Read MoreMeasurement attempts to tame the ferocious energy of Reality, its matted locks flung across the cosmos, its wild and unpredictable dance and the awe-inspiring beauty of its unleashed infinity. None of this is measurable or even knowable by the mind.
Read MoreThere has been much discussion lately about the “tipping point” of our relationship with Nature and Earth, which of course is our Reality. And on individual levels many of us have also felt the urgency of recalibrating our place in Reality. People have been speaking about how we have created Reality as a “machine” or how the mind is “mechanistic.” And they have been speaking of the “wild” as being the way to balance this soulless reality we have created.
Read MoreIn this video I share a beautiful Prayer to Goddess Earth. This is a traditional prayer which is used to open and close dance invocations. This sets the nature of the ancient dancing body as that which holds Earth Consciousness—that is the Kshetra or Body that is simply the field for the manifestation of Goddess/Nature. In such an embodied consciousness, there is no archetype of human and other. There is simply Life that flows through all manifestation and of which we are a continuum in every possible way.
Read MoreIn elemental flow there is a fluidity, just like the storm. In this fluidity there is Truth beyond the simplistic duality of the mind. This brings to us the teaching that what we feel is shared in the consciousness of the world and that we are not alone. This sense of community is beyond the community of the mind—it descends like a visceral truth about which there is no doubt. Then birdsong brings teachings, and a humble blue tongue lizard in your garden will share her restlessness at an impending storm.
Read MoreThese times in the consciousness of the world are not for walking on egg shells about the nature of an inquiry of unconditional freedom. We have tamed the ferocity of this inquiry to make it palatable, but in doing so we lose its very reason for existence—to make us unconditionally free. And here we are in these times where bypassing inquiry has created a forgetting of what it is to hold passion and urgency in the body without any care of its external affirmation or solution.
Read MoreNon duality is an embodied sensation and cannot be “created” in the mental consciousness. Ancient embodied traditions held the space of the experience of non-duality which provided a context for the mind’s operation through duality. The greatest gift of a practice of non-duality is that it offers spaces of embodied inquiry into our own responses to Reality.
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