Sadhguru’s Huffington Post piece from last week, If the Feminine Ruled This Planet, Life Would Be About Living, really struck a chord with me. Firstly, a caveat:

When I say feminine, I am not talking about it in terms of male-female; I am talking about it in terms of masculine-feminine.

Yes, but women certainly are implicated. The feminine is under threat, not just by patriarchy and social norms, but from women ourselves. We are not choosing to speak out against the systems which suppress the feminine.

So today, there is a danger that the female is giving up the feminine because survival has once again become the dominant factor. Survival has been pushed up to a demanding scale like never before. In earlier times, survival meant just gathering the day’s food. But today, survival means a BMW, the latest technological gadgets for your children, a summer home, etc. That is very challenging. So as this happens, as the demand for this type of life increases, there will ultimately be no room for the feminine to find any place in society.

There is so much pressure on women to compete like men in the workplace, and then still maintain the household. When I was growing up, my mom worked, but I had friends whose moms were housewives and I envied them. However, nowadays it is a rare luxury if families can afford to have a stay-at-home mom.

So something needs to happen for the feminine to flower within each human being. The feminine should be nurtured right from the start. As many children go into science and technology, the same number should also go into music, art, philosophy and literature. This must happen. If this does not happen, there will be no room for the feminine in the world. So celebrating the feminine is very essential. It is not about “woman,” but rather the “feminine.”

I struggled with the division of disciplines as I was younger. I enjoyed most of the subjects, but found math really challenging. I longed to pursue music, dance, and theater, but it was difficult to accommodate everything. When it came to college and professional choices, it was obvious that intuitive, artistic pursuits could only serve as hobbies, whereas my career would have to be based in the logical aspects of life. A lot of feminist research has been about quantifying the “care economy,” and calls for better remuneration of the jobs that women typically fill.

The very nature of this continual quest for survival is masculine. The masculine is always about conquering something. The feminine is not about conquest. The feminine is about flowering, about relaxing, about living – not about getting. So what’s needed is a shift. If that shift does not happen, we will exhaust the planet too fast. If the feminine ruled this planet, there would be no ecological problems because it would not be one mindless, endless conquest – it would be about living.

What do you prefer: conquering or relaxing?

Not all of Jaipur looks like this...

Recently, I keep starting out my posts with numbers. Perhaps it helps me to establish the landmarks, to measure my success on this uncharted path. For me, these three years are the longest ever time that I’ve been settled in one place since I graduated from high school in 1999. I’m discounting the four years of college because I moved a lot from year to year.

True, I haven’t been in Jaipur for three years straight, either. I have left for at least 2 months every year to visit family, and last year I was hardly home since I spent almost half the time at the ashram or travelling. It’s probably the only way I could’ve survived.

Nonetheless, three years with my stuff in the same apartment, with or without me. Three years of having Jaipur as home base, ready for me when I return. Three year of having pigeons as my closest neighbors.

It was in April 2007 that we came here. I want to be able to say something very insightful about my experience here, a neatly packaged byte of wisdom. But in my stupor of disbelief that I’ve made it here this long, I’m struggling to make much out of it.

Actually, perhaps the real motivating force behind writing this post, behind even the realization itself that I have been here for that long, is that we are most probably leaving Jaipur. I hesitate to give more details because that deserves its own post. But the impending departure certainly has made me recognize how settled I’ve become here, and dare I say it? Attached.

To be honest, I can’t think of things off the top of my head that I particularly like about this place, but to do Jaipur some justice, I will put some effort in and make a list:

1. Central Park
2. seeing Nahargarh Fort from my window

Ok, the list idea is pointless. It’s sounding horribly negative, which has nothing to do with Jaipur in itself–it’s more to do with my own perspective and judgements.

While now I can say that I’m in a positive frame of mind, much of my time here has not been spent in that way. Furthermore, I can say that I’ve come to terms with my previous negativity, and have reached more of a state of acceptance of life, of being here, all the pros and cons included. It’s been a sacrifice, but has held certain advantages. They’ve pretty much cancelled each other out.

Pros include low cost of living, nice apartment, being close to in-laws, being close to Delhi. Cons: difficulty in going out (weather & logistics combined), weather, lack of social circle, weather, being close to in-laws, weather…

Dear Jaipur, you’re too hot and I can’t think properly. You’ve made life difficult for me, but I forgive you.

It took a long time for me to process that culture shock–perhaps I am still–but one thing I know is this: The conversation is dynamic between an individual and her environment and just as it would be absolutely absurd to respond in a conversation with your friend with the same one line, it is absurd to respond to life experiences with the same old line. To be engaged in this narrative with others, our environment, our religions…requires creativity, expression, and risk. This is what I think. What about you?

Life can be so contradictory, whenever we form fixed opinions it has a way of proving us wrong, if we’re open to it. Otherwise we remain stuck and suffer.

What is required?

Fluidity. If you try to cling to your old beliefs and habits, you will end up missing all that the new place has to offer. You will close yourself to any possibilities of exploration. You will become lost in translation as you search for a meaning which computes with your preconceived notions.

Willingness to laugh at yourself. To look deeply and acknowledge that so much about you is unconsiously shaped by where you have grown up.

Listening, openness. Even if you don’t understand the what or why, acknowledging the universal humanity in others.

Appreciating the diversity of experiences. Humility in seeing that there are many rights and wrongs as shaped by place and time.

This thing we call life can be so complicated! Or so simple.

For my dissertation at LSE, I wrote about a UNICEF project for girl’s education and questioned its assumption that education was automatically empowering. A contact of mine currently at the LSE, Layla, has posted some very interesting research–conducted by the LSE, no less–that again brings these questions to my mind:  Cleverest women are the heaviest drinkers

Those with degrees are almost twice as likely to drink daily, and they are also more likely to admit to having a drinking problem.

“Reasons for the positive association of education and drinking behaviours may include: a more intensive social life that encourages alcohol intake; a greater engagement into traditionally male spheres of life, a greater social acceptability of alcohol use and abuse; more exposure to alcohol use during formative years; and greater postponement of childbearing and its responsibilities among the better educated,” says the report.

The article doesn’t mention stress–and that alcohol happens to be society’s most acceptable and easiest available antidote. What would be helpful to look at is how women’s involvement in “traditionally male spheres of life” is inherently stressful; even more helpful would be examining methods to eliminate stress so that this kind of abuse need not happen.

Granted, this research is from the UK with notoriously high rates of alcohol consumption. But still, it’s quite tragic to think that the most educated and qualified women are wasting their potential by getting sloshed.

Is it because they cannot handle the pressure of being in such high positions in society and conforming to roles with which they are not comfortable? Is inebriation a more empowering alternative?

At the tail end of a panel discussion on women’s participation in environmental policy, held in conjunction with the 54th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women meeting earlier this month, Polk uttered a word often considered wise to avoid in women’s advocacy: population.

“The population is at nearly 7 billion right now. We’ve eaten just about everything we can eat out of the ocean and off the land,” Polk told about 60 women at the gathering, hosted by the New York-based interfaith organization Temple of Understanding. “We can forget about any rights-based approaches if we have too many people, because we’ll all lose all our rights.”

Sadhguru puts it a lot simpler:

The biggest disaster is that human beings have multiplied irresponsibly like never before on this planet.

Here is an excerpt from a talk by Sadhguru during the first Sathsang in the Linga Bhairavi Temple on 9 January 2010, which I had the privilege of attending:

This is not making sense to you, isn’t it? That is the whole problem: The boundless nature of the existence is denied to people simply because they are crippled by their limited logical sense. Just give yourself to what is happening; chant, dance, work, kill yourself in some way; because unless the educated, sensible “you” dies, you will not know what this is. Unless you become as uneducated as me, you will not know what this is because this is something else. You cannot educate her; don’t ever try that.

She is wild and fierce. This culture always encouraged the feminine, the women, to be fiery and wild. You should see the ancient literature in this country, where poets are saying, “What to do with a domesticated woman?” [Laughs] We domesticated women because we wanted to breed, raise families and things like that. So, here is one that you cannot domesticate. Wild, very fiery, but absolutely compassionate. These are not contradictory qualities in a being; all these things come together.

Only those who were born in a moral class – they are so moral, nobody can be born like this, but it happens – [laughs] they think compassion and fierceness cannot go together. They think love and vengefulness cannot go together, but that is how life is. That is how nature is. The most beautiful is always the most dangerous. Have you seen a cobra close-up? It is the most beautiful thing! One extra step, you will be dead – that is how it is. One moment of unawareness, you will be dead, but it is the most beautiful creature you can see. So, that is how life comes, and Linga Bhairavi is just pure life; life in its fiery, highest possibility, but untamed.

She is a roar. She is like a scream. She is not gentle, nice, that kind. You can never domesticate her. “So, what is the use?” That is the whole thing; there is no use – just life. Life is not a utility; life is a phenomenon that needs to be experienced. Life is not a milking cow that you could milk so many liters of milk from; life is just the most fabulous phenomenon that we have known – or we have not known, [laughs] whichever way it is. To manifest this phenomenon in as many ways as possible, that is ultimately the only work. “What is the use?” No use.

I am writing from the Ashram in India, in an attempt to describe what I have just lived through…which is the birth of a Fire Goddess; a miracle of such significance, that part of me is still unable to comprehend or get my head around it.

The incarnation of the Divine Feminine into her own temple, here next to Shiva in the form of the Dhyanalinga in his own temple, gives us a place of embodied union between masculine and feminine that is sacred in a way that I know I simply will not be able to find words for.

There really is no way for those of us who do not have access to other dimensions as the norm, to understand what is possible at the fundamental level of creation, by a Yogi who experiences everything as a part of himself, who solidifies mercury with his bare hands and sits there moulding it as if it was clay before locking energies into it at a level of power that will throw you on the ground or blast you heart open into utter spiritual devotion for the mystery of life. This man literally crafted a feminine force out of creation itself, “a woman with the man taken out”, a being who would balance the silence and awareness stimulating power of the masculine Dhyanalinga with all the fire, chaos, beauty, compassion and wild raving ecstasy of the unbridled feminine. ‘His’ is the awareness, ‘Hers’ is the humanity. I don’t think I would ever have believed such a thing was even possible had I not participated and literally felt her birthed into creation.

Sadhguru said that we would all be playing the role of midwife if we sat with enough intensity and devotion. 5000 of us (350 Europeans the rest Indian) chanting and meditating, calling her, accessing wild energies to add our combined force to the matter in Sadhguru’s hands, all relayed to us from inside the Temple by multiple big screens. Hours of hard graft…just like being a midwife, over 3 days, late into every night with maximum 3 hours sleep and then back into the devotional process. I wish I could take what I have seen and what is in my heart and somehow place it in yours so that you could feel what I am feeling.

She, like Shiva in Dhyanalinga has her energies held in a mercury core that is behind her statue, although Sadhguru has energized the rock in such a way that its energy will never dissipate, unless, amazingly, she is not treated properly, or if a man tries to take over the temple, and then she will leave in a rage that he says you do not want to be anywhere close to! This is a women’s temple, to be tended only by women, but open to everyone. The only one of its kind, ever.

You have never seen a female deity so worshiped, so bowed down to, so blessed…Sadhguru wept as he brought her into reality and then sang chants to her in a voice so filled with love and devotion it was like hearing an archetypal love song from behind the veil of time, the same song that lives hidden in the very core of our own hearts…and then it was as if the night sky just fell into our laps and became profoundly alive. Immensity just landed, throbbing, and there she was. I am in tears again just writing this. How privileged am I, are we for being part of something of this nature, to have moved it through our bodies, lived through that intensity. There she is, in her own temple, tended by beautiful women, her priestesses, who have rituals for every stage of life; colourful, vivid and very real and beautiful rituals full of dance and fire and song, so so different from the austerity of Dhyanalinga.

For myself, as someone who has done a fairly convincing job of embodying the archetype of the wounded feminine, it was a new world to be faced with levels of devotion towards the feminine that placed her back into her rightful position, especially here where women are so subjugated…but for the whole world to have such a mighty charged feminine energy being worshiped and honoured with levels of reverence, carved out the grief in so many of us all and replaced it with permission to value within ourselves, what has felt so battered and unsafe for so long; the Goddess within…true feminine power, unashamed, uncensored. My body didn’t know what to do other than sob for hours, as if emptying out the old story and pain to make way for a new infusion of beautiful feminine energy.

I woke yesterday with a heart so carved out and expanded, it felt as if it filled my entire upper body. Everything I looked at broke me open. I have learnt to bow down to the mystery of life through my time with Sadhguru, but now that mystery just got filled with glorious music, flowers, fire and dance, wrapped herself around my being and called herself Mother.

Let the juice of life touch you in every possible way. May your lives be rich, wonderful, ecstatic and, if that is your quality, let that be shared, because it only grows by sharing.–Sadhguru, “Grace Grows When Shared”, February 2010 Forest Flower

I have left this blog for dead many times, but then keep resurrecting it. It won’t let me leave it alone.

It has evolved from being a venue for feminist venting and ranting, to a platform for showcasing the depth of my experience with Isha Yoga. Admittedly, the majority of words are no longer my own, and those that I can muster hardly do justice to the profundity of what I have felt through these practices and my encounters with Sadhguru.

Yet, I must continue to keep it alive, in my feeble attempt to share the juice that I have tasted. The chance that a reader may also catch a drop of it keeps me coming back.

If you had read this blog two years ago, you only would have tasted bitterness. Now, such emotions hardly cross my mindscape; if at all they do, they are quickly passing clouds that don’t deserve my attention.

There was a time when I was aspiring to be an inspiring writer. I wanted to put out a positive message, in the midst of all the negativity I saw in the world. But I myself was looking for inspiration like a weary nomad in search of an oasis.

At the In the Lap of the Master 3-day Sathsang program that I attended in April, Sadhguru said that, for someone who’s parched, a glass of water is like a benediction.

That’s how I felt when I found Isha.

To be brutally honest against the makers of social media (not that I think they’ll start crying heresy against me, a low-ranking BeckyBlabber):  I never saw the point of social media before Isha. Yes, I reluctantly started a blog, but didn’t actually believe people would be interested in reading it. Why my blog, when so many others are out there? How would they find me?

But it’s become such a powerful outlet for me, and for others I see it can be a useful resource. So I push on, despite the fear of embarrassment.

There is a song that I can’t get out of my head recently, based on a poem by Kabir:

Fearlessly I Will Sing the Attributes of the One without Attributes

Using the Base Lotus as the Steady Seat
I Will Make the Wind Rise in Reverse
Steadying the Mind’s Attachments
I Will Unify the Five Elements
Ingila, Pingala and Sukhman are the Channels
I Will Bathe at the Confluence of the Three Rivers
The Five and Twenty Five I Will Master by my Wish
And String them Together by One Common Thread
At the Summit of Aloneness the Un-struck Anahad Sound Reverberates
I Will Play the Thirty-Six Different Symphonies
Says Kabir Listen Oh Practicing Aspirant
I Will Wave the Flag of Victory

Explanation

In this song, Kabir clearly shows the “real” meaning of certain phrases used in ancient texts. Often these are mistaken to be reference to physical places while in reality an internal experience is actually being told.

Fear is the first and biggest obstacle to spiritual realization. And a state of fearlessness shows that a person has actually accepted the environment or physical reality for what it is. In that state of accepting oneness, Kabir says that he is going to expound on the attributes of the ultimate.

Sadhguru consecrating the Linga Bhairavi, Jan 2010

The day’s articles mostly look at women’s status and what can be done to improve it; in India, the big issue is the Women’s Reservation Bill. Though many (including me) decry the situation of women in India, few realize that India is the only remaining country to have maintained worship and rituals exalting the sacred feminine on a large scale. It is near impossible to reconcile the contradiction between the two, so instead I will hail the illogical:

My mind cannot grasp all that it has soaked in over those three days, so I’ve left it to my heart to write this piece, trying to capture just a whisper and a glimpse of the extraordinary kaleidoscope of the Goddess’ birth! May the energy of the Devi bring joy and devotion to all our hearts… 
- Robert Edward Hider, Isha meditator from the UK

While I understood nothing of the process behind the Linga Bhairavi’s consecration (which I attended end-Jan), I managed to enjoy it despite the constant questions running in my head. I cannot doubt her power: I felt intense pressure in my head upon entering the temple, and looking at her was almost like a shock to my brain. Someone expressed it beautifully: it’s like sitting in your mother’s lap, such warmth and compassion.

This is not a call to action for women to embrace their inner goddess. This is not an appeal to conserve traditions. This is a recognition that there’s a whole lot more to life than what we can understand logically–the feminine.