Full Class Video: Discovering the Dance of Shiva and Shakti
Topic 1: Finding sensation in our foundations: Taking the first step into a Dance of our movement potential.
Summary: The Dance of Shakti is the yogic practice of using the physical aspects of manifestation, Shakti, to connect with the invisible field behind the Cosmic Curtain, Shiva. We begin this dance by first finding sensation in our foundations— playing with stability and instability, and feeling how our awareness is always there to guide us towards growth.
The Space of Awareness
Intro to the Dance of Shakti
This training is called Dance of Shakti. What is the dance we are referring to? On one level this is a training to help you unlock your creative potential when sequencing your postures, but that is only half of the journey, because where does that creative potential come from, what is behind the cosmic curtain of our creativity?
The Path of Shakti: The Yogic Tradition describes all of manifestation as a play, a dance, between shiva and Shakti. Shakti is what we can interact with and see, Shiva is that which is behind this cosmic curtain. Its similar to looking up into the night sky— we see the stars, but we don’t necessarily see the space between the stars— the stars are Shakti, manifestation, the space is Shiva. The dance of our practice is learning to use the stars to see the space, of using Shakti to see Shiva— of using the physical aspects of your life and karma to see the spiritual side. As the Vijnana Bhiarava teaches, “So the path is Shakti, the path is not Shiva. Śiva is being understood by Śakti. Energy is the means by which you can understand and enter in the state of Śiva.”
Moving with Feeling: On our mats, this dance is the practice of using your postures to feel the space of your awareness. This doesn’t mean you move more or less, it simply means you move with feeling, that you fully experience your movement as you move. This is what creates the Dance of Shakti— moving and feeling simultaneously.
You might have heard the beautiful scientific explanation of how the matter in our body is all star dust, stars that exploded billions of years ago and the molecules of which are our own bodies. This is Neal Degrass Tyson level info, so it’s real science, not just a story.
But you might then ask yourself, where did the stars come from? What made their molecules? Science tells us that these stars are born from space itself— not the empty space that we see with our minds, but the space that is full of potential energy. Science calls this space dark energy and dark matter, and we are told that 96% of the universe is composed of this dark matter. This means that only 4-5% of the Universe is composed of matter as we know it.
Rudi’s Ratio: This recalls Swami Rudrananda’s teaching that if we could bring 95% of our energy inside we would actually flourish and move through our life more skillfully than our normal method of having 95% of our awareness outside of ourself. Amazing that Rudi intuited this scientific reality long before it was even a notion in the field.
“Like the jelly beans in this jar, the Universe is mostly dark: about 96 percent consists of dark energy (about 69%) and dark matter (about 26%). Only about 5 % (the same proportion as the lighter colored jelly beans) of the Universe— including the stars, planets and us—is made of familiar atomic matter.” (CERN)
This training seeks to help you use the movements you make on your mat, and in your life, to connect and reconnect with the source of that movement inside of you. It’s not about one or the other, its about the dance between them.
Expanding our Experience
The space between the stars on our mats: In a typical yoga class, we give our students cues to place their body into certain shapes, Sort of like how a number of stars together create a constellation. But there is a joke about constellations, very few of them look like what they are called. For the constellations to make sense, we have to fill in the space around the stars. And what we find is that what we love about constellations is not just the points of the stars, which are essential, but the shape around it, the story, the experience. Our favorite teachers tend to be the ones who can not only point out the constellation correctly, that is giving cues that position the body in safe and supportive way setting you up for success, but also these teachers fill in the shape around the postures— either with creative anatomical cueing, metaphors, imagery or simply a tone of voice that produces a certain state within you. This is the dance of Shakti, the practice of using manifestation to inspire an experience— they work together. Anatomy and Experience.
Though this is an intuitive part of our practice, we can work on it directly and become better vehicles for this ‘other half’ of our cues, the other half of the experience. This is not about filling that space with our ego, but learning how to tap into that space of awareness and allow it to fill itself in.
Just how much space is there?: Before we talk directly about that process, it’s good to take moment to acknowledge just how much space there is around these asana constellations in the sky, because when we look through the lens of science, we see that the space around the stars is far greater than the stars themselves.
Science has shown over and over that our universe and our body’s are mostly space, not matter.
Pea in a Football Stadium: When you look at an atom, it’s amazing how much space there is. One way to visualize this is that if the entire atom was the size of a football stadium, not field but stadium, then the nucleus would be the size of a pea in the middle of the field, and the rest of the stadium would be empty space, the electrons circulating outside the building itself.
Human race in a sugar cube: Another study showed that the actual percentage of matter in space is only 0.0000000000000000000042%. That’s less than one can even fathom.
To help put that number into perspective, the study continues “These spaced-out particles make up only a tiny portion of your mass….If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.”
So even though matter is so important, and defines what we see all around us, it is only a microscopic portion of reality as a whole.
Janam Bandham: In the Shiva Sutras, we are taught not to get to pulled in to the ‘matter of our mind’, as it is only a portion of reality as a whole. When we do get sucked into that matter, it is said to be the source of our suffering. Therefore the Sutras teach “Jnanam Bandha”, knowledge can lead to bondage if we over-identify with the contracted forms of our awareness and miss the expansive reality that surrounds it. It’s sort of like that story, the Princess and the Pea— when our awareness gets too contracted, we can’t seem to focus on anything else, no matter how many mattresses we stack up. When we over identify with a thought, with what’s the matter, we lose the space around that matter.
This is natural tendency, but it need not be—
Merging inner and outer in our yoga practice through Interoception
Redefining our Goals: The essence of the term Shambhava means, having one’s attention within while interacting with the world outside of us. This is essentially the prescription for avoiding the indigestion of knowledge— keeping your awareness inside while you work through your life.
As Babaji teaches: “When I am working out and I am trying to attain a goal, if I get too caught up in the goal, I know that I am not working out correctly. Therefore I focus on the present. I focus on what I am doing right now, and I try to do it correctly…Keeping your attention on what you are doing strengthens you in a way that will give you relief from the debilitating feelings that overcome you now and again….If you focus on your true nature things will get better.”
Surrendering Shape, Embracing Experience: When we are working with yoga postures, or external movements, we are often focused on the shape or the goal, as Babaji was saying, but this external may be missing the point. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t have shapes of poses, or goals in exercise, its just saying that that alone misses alot.
Its like the goblet on this page— we have spent years coloring in this goblet, shading it, etc. Perfecting the external shape. But what we may be missing in this process is the space around the shape— our own personal experience, which is seen in this image as the two symmetrical faces created by the negative space of the goblet. When we are able to hold our focus both on the external object as well as our own personal experience of it, then something begins to shift— our goals and our experience both begin to shift.
Prakasha and Vimarsha: The first step to surrendering the goblet is beginning to redirect our awareness from outside to inside. This is based on the yogic precept of prakasha and vimarsha. Prakasha is the light of awareness that illuminates our reality. Vimarsha is the reflecting back of that awareness to illuminate the source of our being. Without vimarsha, our reality is merely a series of goblets, with vimarsha we learn to use the shapes and movements of our day to re-experience ourselves, the source of the light.
This isn’t a metaphor, its a Neurological and Biological necessity called “interoception”— our ability to tune into the inner awareness generated by our fascia to help us know when we are thirsty, hungry, etc., but also more profound capacities of inner awareness as we know from our own personal practice.
How Does the Interoceptive System Work? Although the interoceptive system is not completely understood, what we know is — sensory receptors (about 90% of these are free nerve endings) throughout the body located in the muscles, organs, bones, joints, etc send neural signals to the insular cortex located deep in the brain. The insular cortex processes and decodes these messages and then alerts us to any changes in our body’s internal state.This area of our brain also plays a role in multimodal sensory processing (combining multiple senses information simultaneously), autonomic control, perceptual self-awareness, and emotional guidance of social behavior. It also helps regulate the sympathetic (fight or flight instinct) and parasympathetic (relaxation response) systems. That is our unconscious movements such as blinking, breathing, flinching, etc.
What Else Is Affected By Interoception? In addition to emotions and self-regulation, interoception affects other executive functions, too:
Self-awareness
Problem-solving
Perspective Taking
Social Understanding
Flexible thinking
Intuition
Studies show that body scans and breathing exercises common in mindfulness practices improve interoceptive awareness when done daily.
For example, a study of interception in 2011of 214 college aged females showed that faulty interoception, meaning the inability to feel an inner sensation such as your heart beat, correlated directly with negative body images and eating disorders. This study showed that by simply taking time to feel their internal environment, they healed themselves of eating disorders and low body image. Other studies in the field have also found correlations between faulty interoception and anxiety and depression, such as the 2016 Study that showed practicing meditation, ie. Developing inward focus and cultivating interoception, before working out helped people with symptoms of depression more than working out without cultivating this inward focus.
Heart Beat Test: your heart is animating your body but how often do you tune in to feel it? What’s amazing is that the simple act of turning your attention to your heart beat can also tell you that your thirsty, or hot, etc. This is because you are tapping into what science calls “interoception”, you ability to feel within. We get so externalized in our life that we miss alot of these signals till they are too late, when simply stopping for 1 minute would have easily informed you of what was needed.
TEACH Heart beat test
breath/ heart beat/ temperature
chair pose - try feeling your heart beat. notice if directing the attention inward opens the door to noticing other things
sensation of what is contacting the mat, gentle awareness of pressure, massage.
side body rolling
Interactions with balance— micro adjustments of the foot for example
Once you have a sense of interoception, you can begin to utilize it while moving in new and unique ways. This helps to tone and grow your interoception, as it allows you to stay connected to it for longer periods of time, as well as allow the interoception to begin to inform your movement itself.
Interosurfing Exploration
Surrender & Interoception:
Vimarhsa/Interoception Takes time: The reflective awareness of Vimarsha, or Interosurfing, takes effort over time to work its magic. We are really attached to our goals and our shapes, and even though surrender doesn’t mean that we will lose them, it often feels like we will— so we cling tighter.
As Babaji Teaches: “It is as though you are holding onto a big anchor at the bottom of the ocean. All you need to do is let go, and you will rise to the top. But we like our anchor, and we are very attached to it. We have put time and energy into creating our persona, identity, and limitations, which are the building blocks of our anchor. Our life has become a process of building and hanging on to this anchor. Spiritual growth has to do with the total annihilation of that process. On the one hand, it seems silly that we would not let go of that anchor; but on the other hand, to let go of it is the most terrifying thing in the world.That is the nature of surrender. It has to do with opening up to your limitations and simply releasing them.”
Releasing this anchor is what the reflective awareness of Vimarsha and Interoception are all about. We have to be willing to move, rock, feel and play within our movements to stay in touch with the space surrounding those shapes. By doing this we allow our practice to rise up from thie inside out and spontaneously support us in ways that we could never have intended. In fact, the postures of our practice all arose from this spontaneous inner space, known as Kriyas, or spontaneous movements that release the energetic blocks and kinks within us.
Yoga from Within: Which is why Lineage Teacher Swami Muktananda writes that only when we do yoga from the perspective of spaciousness inside can our practice truly begin to benefit us:
“The specific postures and movements that occur in an individual are precisely the ones they need for the purification of their system. When we practice hatha yoga on our own, we often do not know which exercises our body actually needs, so we may practice pastors that are unnecessary or even harmful to us. But when hatha Yoga occurs spontaneously through the action of the kundalini, we automatically perform whatever posters are appropriate for us.” (Where are you going, 63)
Goals for Class: Over the next few classes we will be starting to put these teaching into action on the mat. We will begin today by learning to explore the foundations of our postures from this spacious inner awareness, and then take that same approach to the primary movements of our asanas, and our explorations within the postures. This will naturally open us up to work with spaciousness in our transitions, sequences and eventually class planning itself. In the end, this isn’t really a new idea, or new practice, but rather it is integrating the strongest and deepest aspects of our meditation tradition with our daily asana and movement practice. In this way, we will truly learn how to use so much more of our life for spiritual growth, as we are in our bodies, moving through our lives, 100% of the time.
Homework for this Topic:
Generate space in your foundations by:
Exploring what’s contacting the earth
Testing your foundation with a pulse
Adapting and responding by extending/shifting/shortening stances