Generally, we think of life as a linear movement, we start somewhere, and we gather and collect and accumulate skills, money, experience, happiness, and we land up somewhere, which is more than where we started. If we don't have more than where we started, we consider that as, as a failure. And we want to rectify it. We want to figure out what happened, why didn't we? Why aren't we when we say better? Why aren't we better than where we started and better is always almost always about something that is more Are we more happy? Do we have more money? Do we have more skills, do we have more experience? And yet when we consider the archetypal movement of life, the suggestion is that life is an ebb and flow.

Read More

As a teacher of a practice that is spiritual, I contend with what I call a recreational attitude to philosophical or spiritual inquiry. It is something that must accommodate itself around all the other activities of life. Work, family, holidays, birthdays, shopping, visitors- all other “obligations” must be met before a spiritual activity. Or, which in my view is far worse, spirituality is a “rest” from the other obligations of life. It is a respite so that one can return to the more important business of living refreshed and reinvigorated.

Read More

The earliest invocations of water in Indian archetypal wisdom call her Amba or mother. As the maternal dimensions of consciousness, water invites us to attend to the particular nature of the maternal as an archetype and not as we have narrated this in our technocratic reality.

Read More

I call the nature of the body in an archetypal embodied archetypal tradition, the poetic body, because we approach the body itself in a poetic way. We want the body to be inspired by something poetic, we want the body to be infused by something poetic, we want to experience it and we want to express it all in this poetic way. In fact, the poetic vision or the poetic intelligence was the essence of divine intelligence.

Read More

Lightning in archetypal traditions is often associated with very fearsome deities who have the power to create cataclysmic events that can affect the whole cosmos. In Indian tradition, there is a deity called Indra whose weapon is the thunderbolt, and he is feared for his powers to create huge weather events and bring about great change.

Read More

I adored my teachers in dance, philosophy, Yoga, martial arts, and literature. Finding inspiring teachers is a blessing I have been honoured to have in my life and almost makes up for all the turbulence in other quarters! Each time I studied under a teacher, I aspired to be like them—a dancer, philosopher, Yoga guru, or a writer. For a while I would be thoroughly distracted, pursuing the next aspiration as my “calling”.

Read More

I have been preparing my next course, which is called Invoking the ancient waters: dance as the secret intelligence of water”. I have been dwelling in the domain of the archetypal intelligence and teaching of water. I'm going to share some reflections with you around the water archetype, and importantly, what it offers for us in our times.

Read More

Water is essential for life. And water is also essential as an archetypal invocation. Water deities are present in traditions across the world. We've got Neptune, for example, the goddess Aapah in the Indian tradition, who later morphed into the masculine deity of Varuna.

 What is really interesting about water is that it holds the archetypal invocation of consciousness. And it suggests that this great mystery of consciousness, the source, from where we all come, is not actually very distant to us.

Read More

Who Am I? is a terrifying question. We really want to land an answer to that very quickly. So when we pose it in the ordinary domains of our life, we want to say, I am a dancer, I'm a writer, my mother, I'm a CEO, I'm a social worker, whatever it is, but we want to really have a definition. And usually that definition, especially in the times we live in, is by what we do in the world. What we do in the world seems to define who we are.

Read More

Animal archetypes play an important part in allowing us to experience the intelligence of nature. What is interesting about animals as archetypes is that it's not about imitating the animals.

Read More