Endless Days In The Deep Subconscious: My Experience Of Vipassana.
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Inhale, exhale. I lose, I gain. I dissipate and collect. I fragment and solidify. This is the power of self.
This is the magic with which we are imbued. The metaphysical dance of primordial knowing. The rhythms are within us, the movements orchestrated in a synchronicity of chaos beyond comprehension to even a conscious mind. I wake at night and realize that my body has disappeared beneath my hands.
I delve into meditation and find my hands have disappeared in my lap. As we shift and coalesce, our solidity is but an illusion. Our senses are the instruments that play the melodies, and when we forget the message we can return to them — the songs that guide us on this journey.
*****
In his discourses, Goenka advises that Vipassana is a deep surgery of the subconscious. I know not what has been removed or created, but the ugliness and irrationality of thoughts I observed showed me what monsters lay hidden in our psyche.
Some afternoons, the sound of the meditation bell made my stomach turn; a deep sense of foreboding filled me as my insides screamed not again. But on we marched, warriors each one, and faced the unconscious battles that had been fought within us for years.
The war against ignorance appears to be needed around us in the external world, but as with all things, the battlegrounds are within us, and this is where we must begin our path to salvation. It is a path that requires constant diligence, constant awareness, an understanding of equanimity. But most of all, it is a path that requires love.
Love for ourselves that disarms the weaponry of fear, sorrow and misery. Love that shines patience upon our misdemeanors, forgiveness upon our egos and rage, nurturement for our fragile healing, light for our secret darkness.
Nothing within us is beyond repair. As we woke from the deep slumber we are trapped within, as we spoke again, fragile, confused and stripped bare, we saw the world anew. We saw the world, perhaps for the first time. We found space for ourselves within and realized how precious this space is and why its cultivation is the key to our liberation.
Inevitably, I know I will cave; that I will forget, and remember, and forget again. But in this there is certainty. I know I will never always know, and I know I will never be forever trapped in ignorance. This is the only knowledge in which I take refuge.
So often we lose ourselves in the visions our mind creates. We act out in life as though playing a role in a film that we have scripted, reacting to imagined scenes and living up to role models we have fabricated from self-doubt. Rising as thoughts, they engage us, and we are left caught within the imagined identity we believe we must have.
Truth is, we can have no identity and any identity. We are no one and everyone.
Shifting like the wind, dancing like the trees, filled with manifest creation, we are.
How magnificent a being to balance within these fragile polarities, the existential tightrope; the field and the observer of the field; infinite expression and individual cognition; omnipresent observance and linear perception; metaphysical and material; ancient and newborn; dual and whole.
Across the polarities, every possibility, we expand and contract, a silent pulse in the magic of perfect chaos. And sometimes, when no one is looking, we slip across the edge and find these polarities joined in union. An infinite sphere of all that is.
*****
Nithya Iyer is a dancer, choreographer and writer engaged in the exploration of dance, sound and breath as an alchemical process. She is a constant explorer of the void within and the creator of BoN Rhythm, a movement practice that explores the union and power of our physical and energetic structures through movement. A classically trained South Indian dancer in the style of Bharata Natyam, Nithya regularly performs at the Chandrabhanu Bharatalaya Academy, finding solace in the ancient arts and geometric rhythms of the temple dancers. Whether with body, words or presence, Nithya is grateful to be on the path to her authentic self alongside so many beauteous beings. You can follow Nithya at her blog or follow BoN Rhythm.
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