Unease is a humble sensation. It does not have the drama of fear or the poignancy of grief. It is a lurking sensation in our bodies, an aversion or revulsion that does not command the respect that fear begets.
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Mystery has largely become a romantic notion in our times. Having disconnected it from ancient ritual traditions, mystery becomes a sort of aspirational space for everything we desire, and we do not always find in our ordinary lives.
Ancient ritual traditions that invoked mystery inevitably had rather ferocious deities. This signaled something about the nature of mystery and its experience in our consciousness.
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At the heart of most philosophical and spiritual traditions is the invitation to “allow”. Sometimes words such as acceptance, submission and surrender are also used in this context. These are fraught words because they have associations of compliance and conformity. For many of us these words may bring sensations of disempowerment.
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I find it intriguing that while there is endless commentary about the transitory nature of the times we live in, and about the new era that awaits, these commentaries are accompanied by predictions about how this “new” era will look. People either propose a dystopian future or one that will be a golden era of divinity. I must admit that neither fills me with hope, and this has to do with how we arrive at these scenarios rather than what they propose for the future.
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If truth be told, a visceral experience of strength is not considered “spiritual” in our times. “Strength” is largely understood as something of the mind, a mental resolve, a statement, or narrative of what that means, and a series of actions templated by these narratives. In fact, we even consider strength of the body as oppositional to spirituality.
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I have noticed a curious pattern when I am dancing with women, especially in my Individual program where it is a one-on-one situation. No sooner do we begin to taste anything like presence and expression of Self than they flee towards a myriad of distractions.
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In recent times I have encountered people in my classes who speak to me of their apathy. They share with me that they feel sapped of energy and hold a sense of helplessness. One of them told me that they feel they are standing on a railway platform watching the trains of life pass them by.
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This week I had one of the women in my classes ask me about the difference between expression and action. She wondered whether “work” and “expression” need to be the same, and whether it is possible for them to be the same.
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Like many people I teach, I also hear much about the age of transition in which we are living. I hear eminent people speak about a change of ages, and the coming of a different paradigm of life. I often consider how I situate my lifetime in relation to these cosmic time movements. I hear people share with me how the incessant conversations about ages that are made up of thousands of years can serve to further distance us from the immediacy of our lifetime which is relatively only a drop in the cosmic time.
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A few days ago was my father’s tenth death anniversary. I performed the shraddha or rituals to my Pitrs or ancestors on that day. I am somewhat resistant to the determinism of ancestral narratives. In my own life, I have experienced that nothing needs to pre-determine how our lives should unfold, rather life is a co-creative project between our Yearning and Reality.
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