The five pointers - Kaňcukas

Part 1 Learning never ceases. I am constantly looking for guides from whom I can glean more gems from the yogic path. I have recently done an online course with a beautiful and stunningly intelligent woman by the name of Kavitha Chinnaiyan … cardiologist, and lineage holder in the Sri Vidya lineage. During the course she explained that to ascribe gender to siva and sakti is only a device, that gender cannot truly be ascribed to them as they are but aspects of oneness, that even to use such a term as oneness, implying as it does that there is a more than one, does not do justice to That which we seek to describe. She also gave a powerful image of how the world becomes manifest – as sakti turns to face siva, manifestation dissolves into the still spaciousness of siva, as sakti turns away manifestation occurs, and sakti turns and turns, like the blinking of an eye, so there is a pulsation in this manifestation, a throb, a vibration, we do not usually notice it, manifestation seems continuous, just like when you run the individual frames of old fashioned analogue film through the projector, the world on the screen seems continuous and you do not see those moments in the frame where there is no picture. This vibration is called Spanda. But the View writings reveal more detail about how this manifestation occurs. Kaňcukas: concealments for manifestation In this process there are five concealments that mask our oneness. These concealments are necessary in order for that which is unlimited to take form. In Sanskrit they are called the Kaňcukas, in iRest®, Richard Miller dubbed them “the pointer sisters”. I will come back to the reason why. The concealments, or limitations, are: Kalā – limited agency (or doing) Vidyā – limited knowing Rāga – limited perfection = desire/craving Kāla – limited time – sequential time, divisions of time, passing of time Niyatī – limited space – localisation and causality We can easily see these in action. There is so much more I need to do. There is so much more I need to know  I so much crave that … < insert latest craving here> (holiday in Bali, new car, chocolate bar, better body) I just don’t have time, am running out of time, I have a past, I anticipate a future  I don’t have enough space, I need a bigger house, closet, kitchen etc – or I am too big, I am too small, I am in the wrong city, I am not happy unless I am at the beach etc iRest® founder Richard Miller calls them pointer sisters as they are like signposts with an arm pointing both ways. This way – manifestation, embodiment and the sense of being incomplete That way – lifting through the veils to recognition of true nature as always whole, nothing needing to be done, omnipotent, omniscient, perfection, eternal and infinite. Between recognition and the Kaňcukas of limitation is Māyā, laying like a strata of cloud that conceals the sun.  Have you ever had the experience of taking off in a plane on an overcast day? The plane leaves the ground in dull conditions and enters the cloud and things are even duller. Then there is a moment when the plane breaks through the cloud and you find there is brilliant sunshine above the clouds. Our perception is like that. When embodiment happens and a sense of I develops, that "I" loses the sense divine Oneness and feels separate and different to everything else. This is like living in dullness. When you break through the clouds you awaken to the brilliance of non-duality. Sink below the clouds and and you are in the realm of limitations and a sense of separation. So they are pointers because as we can recognise them as they are present in our lives we can also take them as reminders or pointers to who we really are. These limitations are never a voiding of the unlimited attributes of the Divine Oneness. The limitation of infinite power is not impotence. It is just enough of a limitation for dimensions and linear time and action to be possible, preconditions to manifestation and embodiment. So meeting the Kaňcukas is not to be despaired at, nor are they to be rejected. You are not trying to get rid of them, just to recognise what is on the other side of that strata of clouds, Maya, and what these pointers represent! Try this sadhana, spiritual practice, you can take it on for a week, a month or forever; notice the action of the Kaňcukas in your life, and you might journal how they affect you and reflect on how they might be pointing you to your true self. In Part 2 we will look at each of these in more detail. Go to Part 2

What the heart most yearns

I have not been able to write in this blog for about six months. It hasn't been because of any crisis, I just had nothing to say. Usually these posts are drawn out of me as a need to be seen. Then by writing once a month for a long time I began to feel an obligation. But for six months there has been nothing needing to be said, or feeling ripe for saying.

An ideal place for meditation
at Brahma Kumari Centre Frankston Vic

My practice has been ever deepening, as it does.

And of course I got so very busy preparing everything in advance for the big trip I took in January. There was simply no time for the reflection it takes to allow these posts to emerge as I put things in place that allowed me to be absent for three weeks. Over the past nine weeks my yoga students on Tuesdays and Saturdays have been coming on that journey with me as I answered the inevitable question, "How was your trip?" fully and honestly.

The trip was a pilgimage led by Christopher "Hareesh" Wallis, a Sanskrit scholar and initiated Tantrik Yoga practitioner with whom I began studies last year. In the combination of Hareesh's scholarship, his practice, extraordinary teaching gift, enormous generosity, his energy and good humour I have discovered offerings that are speaking right to my core. To say that the pilgimage through Tamil Nadu was life-changing sounds like a cliché, but it is true nevertheless.

Thank you to all the students who came on that journey during our yoga classes together over the past nine weeks.  Reliving it with you has been a great consolidation for me and I hope some of its immensity was translated through our classes for you, and you caught the flavour of "How was my trip?". And as we reached it's conclusion something else happened. The Christchurch attack rocked us all to the core.

The Arunachaleswara Temple at Tiruvanamallai (pictured here
 from the Arunachala Mountain) is aligned ona lay line East to
West straight to the heart of the mountain.
Om namah sivaya.
The mantra came alive in me at this temple.

In a video post after that event, Hareesh shared something really special. A Sanskrit prayer for the wellbeing of all. Hareesh posts a lot, and they are all gems of teaching. But this one had a special spark, and was in response to those dreadful events in Christchurch where 50 worshippers were murdered at prayers in their mosques by an extreme right, Australian born terrorist. We were all horrified. This is not who we are. Our hearts were crying.

Three heart to heart chats, with a teacher, a friend and a student contributed to the shift. I must proclaim my own heartfelt yearning and in that public proclamation fully confess, and be, what it is I am called to teach. And I really began that ownership in my Sunday morning class.  Thank you dear people who were present at that Sunday Meditation Body and Mind. I felt totally vulnerable and your support was wonderful.

You can listen to Hareesh's words through the link below, but here is a paraphrase of what he said, a rough transcription, please forgive inaccuracies:

No one can doubt that we are in challenging and troubled times, especially politically and environmentally.  No one who is paying attention can doubt that this quickening, this intensification, can only increase over the next decades. We don’t know what the outcome will be for the survival of our civilisation, of our species, of our planet, and it can feel as if we are standing on the brink sometimes, as we look at the rise of tribalistic ideologies and wondering if humanity will be able to overcome this tribalism which is an instinct in our brains to our evolutionary biology. And of course, the unknown factor here is awakening. In the time of quickening and intensification there are more opportunities for spiritual awakening. And awakening is what allows us to truly transcend our divisiveness within us and between us.  It allows us to transcend this tribalism, it allows us to transcend even our evolutionary instincts and to see ourselves in each other, despite all our differences. Also in a time of quickening and intensification, prayers offered from the deepest heart are more powerful.

"Awakening is what allows us to truly transcend our divisiveness within us and between us. It allows us to transcend this tribalism, it allows us to transcend even our evolutionary instincts and to see ourselves in each other, despite all our differences."

And then, the translation of the first stanza of the prayer:

May the wicked become good. May the good obtain peace. May the peaceful be freed from bonds. May the freed set others free.

It is the perfect storm. In class for the first time I publicly declared my heart's deepest yearning, and I said these words:

I dedicate my practice to awakening. I dedicate my teaching to awakening. 

Oh it is such a long, long time I have known my heart's true yearning. But for a long, long time I also dismissed it as a ridiculous fantasy, or not for the very ordinary folk like me. Engaging with the teachings of Richard Miller through iRest® have shown me it is not pie in the sky. Early flashes of insight were not imagined, and those flashes actually meant I could not not pursue it, no matter how long I looked in another direction. The very ordinary like me (or you) can attain to awakening, to freedom from the bonds of forgetting who we truly are.

Some people distil their Heartfelt Desire to a single word. Mine has been distilled as a feeling for a very long time, but when I turn it into words it is longer, one word does not seem to express it all, at least in English, how big it is! And in the last twelve months the first line was added to it.

Here it is, my heart on a platter. What does my heart yearn?

Stable in awakening

Awake … to Awareness

Open … to Openness

At one with Oneness

Manifesting as loving kindness and compassion.

I am not pretending that my reason for being is anything less. And to the degree that I have been freed from bonds, it is my duty to set others free. And that is the reason why I am called to teach. No pretending.

Which doesn't mean that I will not lead many wonderful movement classes where we stretch and strengthen and explore yoga posture, hathayogasana. Or that I will not also be dedicated to sharing how you might move more freely and with less stiffness and pain. Only in every class I teach I will no longer pretend that my personal goal is anything but being fully awakened, and as far as I have explored that path and fully embodied it, I am a teacher of that path.

Well it may have been obvious for some time, but it is also true that I have tried not to scare folk off with all this spiritual stuff.  But hey, it is who I am, it is my calling, now I am owning it.

What is your true heartfelt desire, your yearning? Are you, like I have for so long, not fully acknowledging it? I have to say, it feels totally liberating to have put it out there.

Here are the words and translation of that lovely Sanskrit prayer.

Durjanaḥ sajjano bhῡyāt

Sajjanaḥ śāntim āpnuyāt

Śānto mucyeta bandhebhyo

muktaś cānyān vimocayet

May the wicked become good. May the good obtain peace. May the peaceful be freed from bonds. May the freed set others free.

Svasti prajābhyaḥ paripālayantām

Nyāyyena mārgena mahim mahīśāḥ

Go-brāhmaṇebhyaḥ śubham astu nityaṁ

Lokāḥ samastāḥ sukhino bhavantu

Blessings on the subjects of those who are ruling, and may these great leaders rule the earth in a just manner. May food always be the lot of animals and spiritual practitioners. May all people be happy.

Kāle varṣatu parjanyaḥ

Pṛthivī śasya-śālinī

Deśo’yam kṣobha-rahito

brāhmaṇāḥ santu nirbhayāḥ

May it rain at the right time. May the earth have storehouses full of grain. May this country be free of disturbances. May spiritual practitioners be free of persecution.

Sarve bhavantu sukhinaḥ

Sarve santu nirāmayāḥ

Sarve bhadrāṇi paśyantu

Mā kaścid-dukha-bhāg-bhavet

May all be happy. May all be healthy. May all see only auspicious sights. May no one have a share in sorrow.

Sarvas taratu durgāni

Sarvo bhadrāṇi paśyatu 

Sarvaḥ kāmān avāp-notu

Sarvaḥ sarvatra nandatu

May everyone surmount their difficulites. May everyone see only auspicious sights. May everyone have their heartfelt desires fulfilled. May everyone everywhere be glad.

Svasti mātra-uta pitre no astu

Svasti ghobhyo jagate puruṣebhyaḥ

Viśvam subhῡtaṁ suvidatraṁ no astu

Jyogeva dṛśyema sῡryam.

May blessings fall on our mother and father; blessings on the animals, the people and the earth. May everything of ours flourish and be an aid to wisdom. And long may we see the sun.

Om śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ

Om peace peace peace

You can watch Hareesh's post and hear his beautiful voice intone the prayer here

Different views and details of a box made at a Sankalpa workshop
in 2018. I placed this box on the altar during class when I shared my heart.

Navaratri

First published in "On the Mat" 2013 

While traditions vary across India, the festival of Navaratri honours the Goddess in her different forms, mainly as Saraswati, Goddess of learning and culture, Lakshmi, Goddess of wealth and prosperity, and Durga, Goddess of strength, courage and encompassing the ferocity of a mother in protecting her young.

Maa Durga

The word navaratri literally means nine nights, and the festival of Navaratri lasts nine days and nine nights. It occurs during the first nine days of the bright half of the month of Aashwayyuja in the Indian calendar. In our western calendar it is a "moveable feast" like Easter is, because the western calendar is not linked to the phases of the moon.

West Bengal celebrates Navaratri as Durga Puja. Kolkata (Calcutta) probably derived its name form Kali, another name of Durga. The last three nights and days are given over to magnificent welcomings of Maa Durga to her earthly home. Huge displays of earthen sculptures of Durga with her sons Ganesha and  Kartika, and Saraswati and Lakshmi are erected as the focus of large communal prayer meetings followed by mass feedings and cultural celebrations. On the tenth day they are taken in a procession to a nearby river where they are ceremoniously immersed.

Dancing Dandiya in tradiational dress

In western India, especially in the state of Gugarat, people spend the nine nights in party mode, dancing the garba and dandiya dances all through the night, with a puja for the Goddess and food served for everyone present. Women dressed in beautiful brightly coloured clothes with a wide skirt, blouse and scarf draped gracefully, dance the garba, a graceful dance in circular patterns, moving in a big circle around a central pot containing a lamp. Men and women participate in the dandiya, which features bamboo sticks held in the hands that are brought together, either one's own or another's, as the intricate patterns of the dance proceed.  The dance commences slowly but as it progresses the tempo increases to a frenzy.

In Mysore in the southern state of Karnataka, the biggest day is Dusshera, the tenth day after Navaratri, when the city turns on a parade to celebrate Chamundi, a form of Durga, and her victory over the demon. Chamundi is the family deity of the Maharaja of Mysore and the parade features the palace elephants decked out in all their glory,hoses and courtiers, who wend their way throughout he city and all the way to Chamundi Hill which overlooks the city.

A typical golu display

Many places throughout India have a custom during Navaratri of erecting tiered displays of dolls called by various names such as golu, kolu, bombe habba, bommala koluvlu. The displays are erected in the house on an odd number of tiers (usually 7, 9 or 11). Just like we store our Christmas decorations and get them  out from some high shelf, or from under a bed where they have languished for a year, so too the golu dolls emerge at the beginning of the festival, the steps are arranged and the dolls displayed. Deities are displayed on the top tiers, and depictions of householders lower down as well as animals on the lower shelves. Women and children visit each other during this festival to view each other's displays, sing some bhajans for the goddess and take home packages of prasadam from that house (often the day's sundal, see the recipe section). Unlike Christmas trees which can tend to linger for ages, the golu display is promptly packed up at the end of the festival and put away for another year.

The dance of ever renewing delight

I recently spent a week on retreat, in silence, while also being in community. Try imagining sitting in a dining room full of other people and talking to no-one. Many find it impossible to imagine.

What a treat it was! And a week did not seem long enough in the end.

Silence doesn't only mean "not talking". It means "not doing anything that will take you away from the ongoing meditation and stilling of the fluctuations of the mind". Pretty much no texting, emailing, reading the frivolous, like Facebook,. I didn't take a computer, and the only book I had was my handbag sized copy of the Yoga Sutras interpretively translated by Swami Venkatesananda, as it goes wherever my handbag goes. I did indeed open and read it on a few occasions at night and during the long afternoon breaks, finding that it could take me deeper, rather than taking me away.

Another text that might have also taken me deeper would have been the Radiance Sutras had I thought to take it. Many of the meditation practices we did on retreat were from the Radiance Sutras.

The retreat was titled "Embodied Awakening" and was led by a very talented teacher, Anne Douglas. The title indicates that the body itself is a gateway to awakening. As we come into a heightened sensitivity to information of the body we start to open all of our perception, including to the experiences that are beyond the body.

Through repeated body-sensing practices, meditation and Yoga Nidra, and by not interspersing this with the things that would take us away, we began to enter a more awake state.  An awakeness that is awake no matter what the state of the body, awake even if the body sleeps, dreaming or dreamless, and awake in a vaster sense than ordinary wakeful states.

The Radiance Sutras are Lorin Roche's beautiful, modern, interpretive translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra (c.800CE), a lovely text from the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. The title of this post is taken from Sutra 156.

Let me share Sutras 155 -156 with you.

155
Breath flows
Into this body
As a nectar of the gods. 

Every breath is a whisper
Of the Goddess:
"Here is the ritual I ask of you -
Be the cup
Into which I pour this bliss,
The elixir of immortal peace." 

156
The breath flows out with the sound sa,
The breath flows in with the sound ha.
Thus thousands of times a day,
Everyone who breathes is adoring the Goddess. 

Know this, and be in great joy.
Listen to the ongoing prayer that is breath.
Life shall dance in you
A dance of ever-renewing delight.

Perhaps you are put off by this talk of "the Goddess" so lets talk about that. Who is this Goddess?

The text comes from the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. The "Goddess" is, at a story-telling level, the consort of Shiva, who is sometimes called Parvati, but also is known as Shakti. But such terms are actually metaphorical. This God and Goddess are not personalities, they are the Universe, and they are in fact one. The Goddess is the energetic aspect of Consciousness that causes manifestation. In other words, Shakti causes Divine Consciousness to pulse, and matter to come into being. These concepts have a very nice correlation with astrophysics!

So everything is really Shiva-Shakti, and you can experience this, in your body. Your body becomes a pathway to knowing the Divine and a pathway to returning to the knowledge of your True Nature. So the 112 meditations of the Vijnana Bhairava are 112 gateways of the body to returning to your True Nature.

Here in these two sutras our gateway is the breath. "Be the cup into which I pour this bliss", be receptive to the breath, "be in great joy", "listen to the ongoing prayer", "life shall dance in you".

So next time you are lying quietly - in savasana at the end of your next yoga practice perhaps, or even in bed tonight, waiting for sleep, be receptive, open, listen, feel and quietly let this wondrous experience of the breath be meditation and prayer.

There is a poem about how I was feeling when I returned from retreat here.

You might also be interested in a previous post, Siva - Sakti.

Namaste

First published in "On the Mat" September 2011

Namaste - though it literally translates as "I bow to you", some say it signifies "the Divine in me salutes the Divine in you".

First day of September was Ganesh Chaturthi this year. How apt! Lord Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, is propitiated for all new beginnings, and spring is a great new beginning. It followed closely upon the birthday of Lord Krishna, Krishna Jamnasthami, on 22 August. 9 September is Onam, a harvest festival in the southern state of Kerala. Soon arising on the Hindu calendar are Navaraatri, the nine nights of celebration of the Goddess in her many forms, commencing 28 September, and Diwali, the festival of lights, on 26 October.

Always comfortable with paradox, Hinduism has many deities, yet still acknowledges just one Divine Presence. Whether we focus on the Divine Mother, powerful Shakti, the Remover of Obstacles or the Divine cowherd, all are aspects of the one, and the One is everywhere, including in ourselves.

When we salute the Divine in other people and in other life forms, and treasure it in ourselves, we have the foundation of Ahimsa, non-violence and compassion, first of the Yamas which comprise the first of the eight limbs of Patanjali's Yoga. To acknowledge the Divine flowing through us all, how could we not be compassionate.

Shiva - Shakti

Everything manifests as a duality. Can you think of the idea of hot, if there were no cold?

In Indian philosophy, Shiva and Shakti are like this, the one does not exist without the other.

Shakti, from the Sanskrit "Shak" - "to be able", is the enabler, the dynamic force which manifests the Universe.

Shiva is the transcendent ground of being.

Without Shakti, the ground of being remains unmanifested and all that we call our physical reality would not exist.

Different cultures have intuited Shakti by different names, but most have a divine feminine, a Great Mother figure.

Have you ever moved amongst great, old trees and felt an undeniable force emanating, a force that evoked feelings of reverence, even though you may not have had a philosophical or spiritual framework to reference it? At such times we are sensing into Shakti.

In yoga we sensitise ourselves to flows of energy in our bodies. Any flow of energy is Shakti.

So although Shakti is characterised as feminine and Shiva as masculine, both are present within all of us, men and women.