Reverence and Coherence

This path yields two distinct kinds of fruit: Coherence and Reverence.

 

Coherence, or wanting what I want, is what creates personal power. Most of us want and don’t want; take steps toward a thing and then take steps away. Do things that build in one moment and do things that destroy what we have built in another. Psychological-speak would call it self-sabotage, but it’s often less dramatic than all that – it’s just the way we move, in breath and out breath. Personal power is the result of the vectors of the will being aimed in the same direction with consistency.

 

There is an aspect of this that is anti-life. Life ebbs and flows. Life inhales and exhales. A coherent will does not, it does its best to transcend the breath. The same way that in meditation we might fix on the breath, in order to find in us what doesn’t move with the breath. The attention remains as everything else ins and outs. Honing the attention and honing the will are similar movements, and both bring us power.

 

Reverence; from the old Latin – to stand in awe of.

Personal power is tempered by reverence. Our capacity for reverence, to stand in awe of life, to be moved, touched, and connected is what determines both the quality of the experience of our life, and the emotional content of our days. Life without awe is empty and meaningless. We focus only on ourselves and cultivate power over.

 

Tantra and Yoga connect the microcosm of the being with the macrocosm of the Universe. That brings me coherence and yokes my personal power with its original source. But it also brings me into resonance with the pulsation of life present in my own body and in everything else. It reminds me of simple wonder, the joy of being alive, and my interconnectedness with the All. The goal is the gauge, if I am doing a practice of some kind, it should be bringing me both.

 

The Peak and The Mundane

Admittedly, I chase peak experiences like a pro. I want it intense. Sometimes it seems like I don’t really mind suffering, as long as I walk out with a good story. I am not above any of that. I also know it to be a total trap. Part of a spell cast over us all about how life should be, what makes things meaningful or important. A spell that tells us our bodies should be eternally beautiful, that if we don’t want to rip the person’s clothes off in every instant we’re not in love, that anything that doesn’t bring methamphetamine high isn’t real. It informs our story about how love should feel, how our work in the world should feel, how our daily life should feel, and where we should invest our energy.

In contrast to my peak-chasing, most of my practice is boring. So fucking boring. I sit to meditate and watch my stupid mind play the same VHS it’s been watching for decades. I chant the same chants. I move through the same sequence of asana. I perform the same rituals day in and day out. Anyone who knows me well, knows I’m married to practice, and it is as mundane as any twenty-year marriage could be. And I realize that yes, there is habit; yes, there is another layer of me feeding another layer of my identity as Little Miss Sadhak; yes, there is the magical hope that it will unfetter me from the shit-shackles of samsara. But, at the core there is love. The kind of love that is the base of any marriage that lasts; the willingness to keep showing up, the faith that you are investing in something of value, the tolerance of the mundane, and the commitment to having reverence for all of it. Allowing it not to be fireworks, allowing it to just quietly live and breathe beside you, to hold you up and to transform you in ways so innocuous you barely perceive them.

Slow and steady doesn’t sell. But without a steady, stable practice, nine million peak experiences in medicine ceremonies, meditation retreats, or workshops like mine, won’t be able to really cause lasting change.

We are all practicing, consciously or unconsciously. Whatever you do repeatedly becomes your practice. And whatever you practice you become an expert in. Scrolling Instagram (which I do way too much) is a practice in diffusing our attention. We practice being half in, giving our bodies but not our hearts, numbing out, distracting ourselves. We practice being bored, dropping what we have in the hope of something better. We practice for life that we wouldn’t want.

This photo of me mid-process; throat covered in lep, sleep deprived, starved, and so alive, is what I show – the peaks. For every one of these peaks, I’ve got about 600 hours of nodding off in meditation, bored and distracted while chanting a Kavacam, having a war with myself to get on the mat. I had a year’s worth of preparation for this process and will have two years of integration. An hour and a half sit a day. Ain’t nobody taking pictures of that, but that is where the magic actually happens. Those moments where I enter the same portal as every other day, and in that mundane and unspectacular there is love. Everyone wants fireworks, but what is it to stoke the same fire relentlessly? To tend to it; let it warm your house, cook your food, dry your clothes. What is it to find the sacred in the mundane? What is it to practice commitment?

I felt more like a creature than a woman for the month I spent in this process, more elemental than human. I am still unable to get my hands clean. The combination of wire scrubbers and constant wood gathering has left me with millions of tiny cuts that filled with lep, sanskar, haldi, kum kum, and earth, giving me dirt tattoos. I was pushed and stretched to limits I didn’t dream I could reach, kneaded, battered, and almost defeated, but not quite. Starved, force fed, baked in the noon sun, morning cold showered, dragged from my bed eternally early, smoked out, hosed off, covered in everything imaginable, hosed off again, then wrapped in saris and asked to receive guests.

At first, like we all do, I fought it. Tried to find ways to anticipate what was coming, to prepare myself, to hold it together, to avoid the suffering. After a while all that stopped. I let what was coming come. 50 lbs of weight on my back as I try to hold bow pose for 4 minutes? Ok. A Yagna the size of a house fire? Ok.

Because this is how life is; it feasts, and then it famines. It comes at you with its full weight and your only choice is to rail against it or to soften into it. That’s literally all there is. Every time I do this work I gain a wonderous cocktail of softness and resilience. I feel wire brush scrubbed clean. I feel soft and indestructible at the same time.

Slowing Down in the Face of Resistance

We are often taught that barriers should be blown through, mercilessly annihilated. Sometimes it's true, sometimes a thing is so deeply stuck that the only solution is to run at it with everything you have. Sometimes, though, it’s a long game. 

 

Resistance is a blanket term given for the feeling of no that arises in response to a task, a person, a movement, ideology or anything else, really. Sometimes resistance is a wise messenger arising from a deep truth in us. Sometimes it’s the whisper of a fear that if we tried to do it, we would fail, or it would be painful, or difficult. Sometimes it’s total laziness. Sometimes it’s insecurity. Sometimes its a kind of internal possession; the self-sabotage in me looks at a thing that could bring me somewhere good and says “Nope”. 

A Case for Practice

There are questions that repeat, that come out of most people’s mouths eventually in my line of work. Many of them orbit around a moment when we realize a repeating pattern in our lives, and recognize that we are the ones unconsciously recreating the repetition. And the question, asked with fervor and resolve is:

“Ok, what do I do?”

The Case for Feeling

One of the most empowering things you can offer another human being is a way to amplify their capacity to stay grounded in their own feeling. Agency comes from the ability to withstand the intensity of your own emotional reality without trying to flee from it or blame it on the outside world. When we are firmly grounded and connected to how we feel, we are able to create clear boundaries, understand the impact of our surroundings, to stand firm in our truths, and to trust our intuition.

Karma, Manifestation and Privilege

Manifesting is a buzzword, found all over the interwebs and spiritual circles, that describes a practice of focusing on something and having it effortlessly come, whether it be a relationship, job, parking space, or the perfect sweater. The idea behind it being that we are in an abundant universe and whatever you want is yours for the taking as long as you have the right attitude. I wouldn’t even disagree. I may just add a caveat.

Laziness, Paralysis and the Cheetah

It’s implied that your worth and your ability to produce are somehow interchangeable, that the more that you create, the more value you have. My inbox heaves at the hinges, filled with other people’s productivity. New courses, insights, offers, compelling tales of success. Insult compounds injury when half of the courses, insights and offers orbit the theme of wringing every molecule of action out of your day.

How do you know you are safe?

The family that lived below me had just gotten an absurdly fluffy cotton ball of a puppy. He was too much. One could hardly bear it. He nipped you excitedly with jagged little fangs and the pom-pom of his head was barely distinguishable from the pom-pom of his tail. They named the creature “Tiger” in English, despite the fact that only the cousin’s husband spoke a word of English and the rest of the extended clan only communicated in Hindi. I had lived in this apartment for something like four seasons and came to regard them as my own extended tribe. Grandfather’s house sat perched above the two-story sprawl that we all shared, directly on the top of a hill. Behind Grandfather’s house was a road, the kind with cars on it.

The Lost Art of Feeling

All the techniques that really work are simple. The difficulty comes in getting past the resistance needed to actually apply them. Meditation can take a million forms, but the essence is to engage an observer to watch what takes place in the experimental field of you. I’ve been meditating for years and often lack the discipline to disengage from my thoughts, let them go and observe them. I have the discipline needed to sit, that I do every day, but WHAT I do while I’m sitting there meditating is another story. I’m the one that comes out of a meditation retreat with a detailed game plan for the next three years that “came to me” while I was “meditating”.

Tending to the Bones

Tending to the Bones

I swear that this is the last time I am going to refer to yet another moment as the beginning of 2019. We’ve had the Times Square New Year, then the Chinese Earth Pig New Year and now, the Astrological New Year. But it stops here. 2019 is happening. It’s official. It really can’t get any more started than this.

I could explain all about what all the positions of all the planets mean, but rather than that I want to tell you what you need to (finally and definitively) start this year right.

Finally, Some Audios!

Ok, friends, you’ve been asking for it, and I’m trying to get tech savvy enough to get this podcast story together, but until then…here are some ramshakle audios destined to inspire you to Maha Shivaratri greatness. I swear, I’ll learn to edit and everything. There’s part of me that digs the spontaneous flow style better! Let me know your austerity plans in the comments!

And just to give you a little taste of the devotion pouring forth from the temple next door, here’s 18 seconds of pure Bhakti. I recorded this from INSIDE my house. There’s no escape.