The mind’s mastery is to keep us incomplete and seeking. In fact for many of us this becomes our consciousness. I often invite the women I dance with to reflect on the label “seeker” because seeking is a never ending activity that keeps us busy for lifetimes. Indeed we even have narratives around needing millions of lifetimes to experience the Divine!
Read MoreThe ancient practice of Deception in the form of Divinities who were bandits and rogues (Skanda, Rudra) held more depth than meets the eye—like Deception itself! The purpose of this practice was manifold and one of the most important teachings was to encounter the multi-dimensional nature of Reality.
Read MoreIn ancient traditions, a multi-sensorial, embodied presence in Reality was the foundation of perception. Skills, competence and “knowledge” were built on this foundation. The archetypes that signalled this approach included hunter and robber. Ancient ancestors of Shiva included Rudra as the hunter-robber and other earlier forms as the deceiver or rogue. We cannot come to these archetypes with our usual ideas of logic, which call for linear thinking and conventional lenses such as morality. Neither is it true to say that these archetypes are therefore illogical and immoral—it simply means that we have to approach them through embodied traditions.
Read MoreTonight is the long night of Shiva, the invitation to return to the intimacy of our body without any distractions of the day of the mind. On a moonless night, we are asked to dance His Tandava, the dance that is at once the devolution of the mind and the emergence of the manifestation of action that is beyond division and fragmentation. The creative and destructive polarity is in the same movement and both are intrinsic to the manifestation of a being that is beyond that polarity.
Read MoreWomen in my individual program often share with me how they aspire to hold the Goddess sensation all the time, but it seems as if they fall out of it, sometimes even without them realising that this is what has happened. However, this remembering and forgetting, or “knowing” and falling out of it, is the very heart of the dance in the Goddess tradition.
Read MoreDance in many ancient cultures is the original prophecy, the original revelation of our interconnectedness to Earth Consciousness. Dance connects the dots through sensation, that cosmos that lies deeper than thought, in the intimacy of the embodied consciousness that pre-exists the mind. This cosmos is revealed through the Deities that dance through our bodies when we approach them in freedom from everything we know.
Read MoreSome of you many know that last night was a full moon night. For those of you who connect with astrology, the full moon was a significant event, adding to the intense energies of change and chaos of the times we live in. This is a story of how I received a Shiva teaching for these times from a group of possum visitors.
Read MoreUnraveling is a central practice in ancient spirituality. My philosophy teacher used to call it unlearning or dismantling. I like the word ‘unraveling’ because it connects with the movement sensation. All the words allude to the essence of spirituality which is not about acquiring, not even spiritual “information”, but about unraveling the stories we carry with us so we can be present and attending to the movement of reality in the moment.
Read MoreFor centuries women’s roles have manifested the service principle and asked a sacrifice of their passion, presence and unfolding, in service to this service principle. As mothers, wives and daughters, many of us as women have implicitly and explicitly been required to service the very foundations of the kind of societies we all live in today. These kind of service models are deified as Mother Goddesses who are infinitely giving and ask nothing but childlike affection in return. It is women’s unpaid (or underpaid) and unseen work in domestic and care giving roles that sustain the kind of lifestyles held as aspirational all over the world.
Read MoreWhen the ancients proposed dance as a lens of Reality, they were not simply being poetic and imaginative. They knew something essential and vital about the nature of consciousness and how to transform this so we can live within Earth Consciousness and not separate from Her. And dance, poetry and myth are necessary in this radical transformation.
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