It’s all in your head

Tags

Ahamkara, Chinnamasta, Cravings, Desire, Dreams, Guru, Headless, Ida, Kevin Costner, Limitations, Meditation, Nourishment, Pingala, Shakti, Shiva, Spirituality, Sushumna, Waterworld, Wrathful

Little known goddess Chinnamasta, a wrathful incarnation of Ma, who in effect is really Shakti, who’s Shiva anyway… is not as wrathful as she seems. Least, not in the way we Westerners tend to define wrath.

Looking so fierce and scary, she decapitates herself to provide nourishment for her companions, the three of them wandering as they are (but really, are Ida, Pingala and Sushumna).

The other two were hungry (spiritually, energetically?) and so without ego, Chinnamasta removes her head, providing the ultimate life-giving nourishment. In the process, ridding herself of an appendage that often gets us lesser mortals in strife. The ‘home’ of the mind (which has no home in the physical body), the ahamkara (I-maker/ego).

Headless… the very idea, generally considered gruesome, but I sorta know how she feels.

Or at least, my dream self does.

Vivid and seemingly non-stop in my formative years (circa primary school era), a series of dreams, a little bit like one of those American soaps you can pick up on ten years later – ever unfolding at snails-pace with lots of scenes repeated.

Everything submersed in water, a bit like Waterworld, except (thankfully) not starring Kevin Costner and my soporiferous thoughts occurred long before that movie regretfully saw the light of day.

Some water was deeper than others, but a fair bit was only chest high. The name of the game in this world – don’t lose your head.

Had to keep watch for the ‘knights’ (I don’t think they were knights, but they rode on horseback and carried swords). The thing to do if they were around, was submerge yourself fully, hold your breath and wait for them to go away.

Because, we all knew what happened to those who were caught: decapitation.

This water-covered world flooded my nocturnal landscape with frequency. But I’d be doing something a little different every time. Playing with my friends, at school or in some other part of the world I wasn’t quite familiar with. Each time they came, we’d duck. Or I’d duck, if alone. Each time we survived we congratulated ourselves.

Every so often, amidst this night-time play, I found myself in something of a predicament. Caught.

Then, my head was gone. My neck relieved of its weight, rolled off to who knows where.

Curiously, I did not die. In fact, with every passing moment I discovered the freedom of the headless. I could still breathe, and talk and think. I was not my head, my head was not me.

Running through my schoolyard, testing my new way of being. Found a horrified looking friend or two, and tried to say – look, there’s no need for your head! I’m still okay, I’m alive and now I don’t need to hide from the knights!

Was it terror, disinterest or perhaps disdain for something different? Or the lot? They weren’t buying it. They had no interest in this new, headless me.

Sure, it was strange but pleasant and yet, so lonely. No one else wanted to willingly have their head cut off, too. They kept up their ducking and hiding and their noggins on their shoulders.

And I… got bored being the only one with this kind of freedom. What fun is there, if you’re the only one?

So, by the powers of the dreamscape where all things are possible, I found my head re-attached. And life went on…

There’s much of life we think of as occurring in our mind. There’s much we create in our mind we think of as this world, much larger than it really is. Causing confusion and loss.

Loss – of a limb, an idea, thoughts or people from our life, generating heartbreak. We feel it in the chest region (at least I do, and cuttingly so) though that heartbreak is self-created and projected outwards, as though it’s happening to us, instead of coming from us.

Chinnamasta’s messages are many, but include the idea of self-love and self-sacrifice for the benefit of many, which in the end, benefits you, too.

Doing away with the need to duck and hide, and assuming the worst when, for all we know, there’s more freedom on the other side than we can ever imagine from this vantage point.

I know now, what it is I crave.

~Svasti

Child-like wisdom – part 2

Tags

Child, Energy, Healing, Inner child, Love, Photo shoot, Raunchy, Repression, Scotch, Sushumna, Wisdom

Read part 1 first

~~~~~~~~~
Who was this girl, I wondered? I simply didn’t recognise myself. It wasn’t the costumes. This girl seemed confident, relaxed. She looked good. No, she looked great. Sexy.

She doesn’t look how I feel about myself. Who is this person? Did taking off most of my clothes liberate something? So carefree, so in love.

I could see… invisible layers of protection that I usually wore, were missing. Why?

Suddenly wracked with pain, sobs bubbled up from the depths. It was very confusing, I had no idea what was going on.

And then came the voice. Calming and knowing. As though someone was in the room speaking to me.

Go and lie down on your bed said the voice. Do it now. Get comfortable. Its time to look within. That girl in the pictures is you but to be her, you must let go. You must wake up.

Who was I to argue at this point in time?

I surrounded myself with cushions and pillows, like an island.

Here’s what you’re going to do. Close your eyes. Turn them inwards, down. Take them from your head and send them down inside your body. Find the pain. Once you’re there, you need to look at your life from your body’s perspective.

That might sound completely nuts to anyone reading this, but it made some kind of sense to me at the time. So I did just that.

I visualised my eyes coming loose from their sockets and travelling down my spine. Unsurprisingly, they settled in my belly region. Ah, so this is where repressed emotions live (kinda knew that)!

Perhaps I was in some kind of trance by this stage, but I “met”, well… a five year old version of myself! Or something like that.

We held hands, and we replayed the events of my life to date. Not the pleasant things ofcourse. We were here to look at the pain. The things that made me feel small, less than.

They flashed up one after the other. But this time I felt it deeply within my body. No suppression, no isolation. Fear and pain unplugged.

And the five year old me howled. The way a child cries when they think they’re truly alone and abandoned. She was scared and sad and no one heard her cries. Not ever.

I knew it was my job to help her. To make her feel better. To look at each event and say sorry for not noticing before. But I see it now, and let’s get through it together.

Every new scene brought hysteria closer to the fore. There weren’t too many, but enough: heartache, betrayal of trust, fear and disappointment. From each episode, an unresolved piece of the hurt had lodged itself deep within my body. I might not have been aware of it, but five year old me was. Until now, it had been her burden to carry in silence.

Hours went by, but eventually the pain subsided. From the top of my skull to the base of my spine, I distinctly felt like a wind tunnel had been erected. Sushumna. A sense of spaciousness pervaded.

But more than that, I now knew that deep within resided my child-like self, perpetually young and trusting. Wanting to be known, to be heard and loved.

Awe and wonder filled my waking moments, aware I’d experienced some kind of spontaneous energetic healing.

By the way, those photos were a hit! Originally I was going to post them to my love, but soon afterwards I was given instructions to go and pick up a plane ticket and get my ass over to the UK! To deliver them in person and share the last few weeks of his trip whilst his mate did other things.

Interestingly, this experience had a much further reaching impact. A little shy, the first night after arriving, I handed over my pack of photos and an accompanying letter and went to have a shower.

No surprises there – he loved them! But on a deeper level he got it – he could see the transformation I’d told him about.

For as I cast off the buried pain through that night, it seems my heart also grew lighter. More free.

With fewer layers of protection, it was easier to connect to the man I loved. Whilst, erm, sex had always been a good thing, I now seemed to have a whole new level of sensitivity and feeling. He noticed the difference too.

Poetically, I guess you could say my inner castle walls came tumbling down…

I’ve since come to believe that we all have this “inner child”. They represent who we are at a very basic level. They are our innocence, our trust, our belief in good things.

When our inner child constantly deals with repressed pain and suffering we start to close down and feel the need to protect ourselves. In doing so, we cut ourselves off from the world and even those we love. A vicious circle, but one we have the power to do something about.

Ofcourse, after I was assaulted, I had to go through a similar journey. Well, perhaps somewhat different. But nonetheless, I’ve had to shed the accumulation of emotional and physical pain stored in my body. To free my inner five year old once more.

~Svasti