The Dance of Shiva

USED AS A SPIRITUAL SACRAMENT, the first thing that cannabis can do is heighten awareness of the trillions of minute tactile sensations that fill and pass through the conduit of your body from head to foot. What is it that you start to feel after you draw Shiva’s sacrament into your lungs and hold it there as long as you can? What is it that this modest plant—that never pretties itself up with brightly colored flowers and grows so rapidly and readily that it’s come to be known as a weed—brings so dramatically to your attention? What is the buzz, the shimmer, that you suddenly feel in your body? Where does it come from? Is it the energy of life, the current of the life force, streaming through your body? Is it the cellular dance, the flurry of constant motion going on unceasingly within the miracle of the human cell? Is it the deep ground state of consciousness itself trying to break through the barrier to its expression and make its presence literally felt? Does it even matter what it is?

When you first start awakening and exploring the feeling presence of your body, with or without Shiva’s sacrament, you become aware of different qualities, textures, and tones of sensation from one part of the body to the next. Some of these sensations are like the shimmer of softly falling rain, dropping down out of clouds of tenderness. They bathe us in their spreading glow, and it’s easy to welcome them. Others are much more challenging in their texture and viscosity. Some are outright painful, and we quickly understand why we’ve been holding back on feeling them. Others may feel too compacted, as if too much sensation is filling up too small a space—the somatic version of a black hole that’s sucked the surrounding life energy into it. Some may introduce us to qualities of feeling and levels of intensity—both ecstatic and frightening—that we may never have realized lie dormant within the feeling presence of the body.

Some sensations may seem completely physical, while others can be accompanied by strong memories, emotions, or insights. The unconscious, postulated the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, is not stored in some remote repository of the brain, but is lodged within the tissues of the body, and this is an idea that makes a good deal of sense as, so much of the time, we are so unconscious of the body. We don’t feel it—its sensations, its flows of energy, its feeling presence. Where better to store the unconscious contents of our psyche than in tissues we’re unconscious of?

Sometimes life crushes us. Sometimes it lifts us up. The imprinted memories of those experiences all get stored in the parts of your body associated with the original experience. If people were to draw a picture of their bodies, indicating where they felt open and happy, where they felt chronic pain, and where they might feel nothing at all, no two drawings would ever be the same.

The dance of Shiva is one of awakening and welcoming back the feeling presence of the body and then letting go, surrendering to the currents and flows of sensation that want to pass through the body, surrendering to any physical movements the body might want to make. Shiva’s path is always about movement. Buddha sits, but Shiva dances, always surrendering to the impulse to move, fully understanding that holding the body still blocks the feeling current of the cosmos and keeps us locked upward, in the egoic mind, unable to drop down into presence.

Cannabis exaggerates whatever it is that’s happening to you in this present moment: the thoughts you’re thinking, the sensations you’re having, the emotions you may be feeling. Sounds become clearer and more distinct. Vision becomes more lustrous and brilliant. But from Shiva’s perspective, what’s most helpful about cannabis is that it can powerfully stimulate the soma, the felt presence of the body. What we’re ordinarily so out of touch with, we suddenly start feeling.

This accentuation of awareness can’t be written off as just an effect of a drug, for cannabis does not in itself create sensations. It only heightens your awareness of whatever’s already there to be felt, and it’s up to you whether you want to play with this heightened awareness and let it guide you on a path of healing, opening you to a consciousness that embraces feeling presence.

To enter into the dance of Shiva is to embark on a journey of feeling presence, to ride upon its current like a bareback rider on a horse, letting it take you wherever it needs to, trusting that the current has an innate intelligence, and that it wants to heal you by reconnecting you to your felt nature. And so you yield and follow where the current wants to take you. As body comes alive in sensation and breath, as it awakens and melts through the barriers of physical tension that keep sensations muted and the life force restrained, mind awakens and melts as well.

INVOCATION

“Bom, Shiva!”

The wandering Shiva babas always call out to Shiva, and bring their chillum to their forehead in a gesture of prayer as they begin to smoke ganja. In calling out Shiva’s name, they’re also calling out to themselves, to that place in themselves that can come so alive in felt presence. “Come, Shiva. Wake yourself up in me.” Through inhaling Shiva’s sacrament, they know that the herb will stimulate feeling presence in and through their body, just as it did for Shiva. And they’re open to submitting to its effects and surrendering to its current, just as Shiva did.

For other people, these kinds of rituals may feel forced and unnecessary. No matter. The path of Shiva is not a path of enforced rules and regulations. It’s a path of letting go, taking responsibility for yourself, trusting in yourself, so that you’ll know if a formal invocation works for you or not. The important thing is that you take your first toke, start opening to the feeling presence that begins to emerge, and surrender to its impulse to move. Inhaling Shiva’s sacrament and holding it in your lungs is the true invocation.

I always encourage people who want to explore using cannabis, not just as a beneficial drug but as a spiritual sacrament, to begin by taking what I refer to as a “homeopathic dose.” It’s not about smoking joint after joint. Just take one toke, perhaps two or three at the most. Shiva’s practices are powerful, so most people don’t need a great deal of the THC, the principle psychoactive component in cannabis, to launch them onto Shiva’s path. Start by taking just one toke. And then relax. Maybe you’re sitting in a comfortable chair. Maybe you’re reclining in bed. Maybe you’re already standing. Just relax.

Shiva is said not only to have smoked cannabis, but to have consumed it as a drink as well. As anyone who has experimented with both knows, the effect of smoking is almost immediate, while the effects of eating the herb—either in food or beverage form—take a longer time to feel. And the quality of the sensations and feelings that emerge are different as well. Smoking gives you an almost immediate buzz. Taking an edible (a food infused with cannabis) or drinking bhang slowly builds a strong presence of sensation over time—less vibratory perhaps, but deeply felt. Both work well for exploring Shiva’s practices. When you smoke or vaporize, though, the effects are almost immediate, and Shiva’s dance begins right away. When you eat or drink cannabis, you generally don’t start feeling the effects for forty-five minutes or an hour, and so the dance begins some time after the invocation.

Invoke Shiva.

Relax.

And let the dance begin . . .

The Sutra of the Dancing Shiva^*3

Bom, Shiva!

Come to standing,

balancing on both legs,

like a tree swaying in the breeze,

swaying slowly back and forth,

back and forth.

Hear what’s here to be heard.

See what’s here to be seen.

Feel the body coming back to life.

Sensations start humming.

Energies get stimulated.

Your sensory fields become heightened,

swaying back and forth.

There are two doors.

One leads you

to the mind that thinks thoughts.

The other takes you away from your thoughts

and into the body that feels sensations.

Without discrediting the consciousness that thinks thoughts,

choose the second door for now.

Go in.

Wait . . .

and just receive

whatever you start feeling.

Whatever you first start feeling is the doorway

and all you need to do is to walk through,

right into the sensation.

Any embellishing of the doorway,

somehow thinking that it should be different from what it is,

only blocks your entrance through.

So start from exactly where you are,

walk through the door,

and then just allow

whatever wants to start happening

to happen.

As soon as you feel something

somewhere in your body,

welcome it,

relax into it,

and watch as it starts changing and morphing

into something else.

Maybe the texture of the sensation will change,

maybe it will build,

maybe it will feel as though you’re dropping deeper into yourself,

maybe you’ll have a sudden insight

or be faced with a chronic dilemma.

What wants to emerge in your body

when you walk through the doorway of sensation,

relax,

feel,

and yield in this way?

Like a tightrope walker whose life depends on it,

start playing with balance.

A shaft of sensation

runs through the vertical axis of your body.

Playing with balance

releases blockages to this shaft,

layer by layer.

When you play with balance,

you don’t have to brace yourself

against gravity’s pull,

but can feel supported,

buoyed up,

by it instead.

If you stay standing through balancing and relaxing,

rather than through bracing and tensing,

you can relax tensions in the body

that keep sensation and breath imprisoned

and block the current of the life force.

But you’re not a fence post.

You’re alive

and life is movement.

Constant movement

through time and space.

It never stands still.

So . . .

As you keep playing with balance,

the body naturally starts to move.

You won’t know how you’re going to move

until you do,

until you respond to the feeling presence

and feel how

and at what pace

it wants to move you.

Let the swelling flow of sensations,

like the tides in the ocean,

be the force that moves you.

Follow the feeling.

Ride upon the body’s sensational tides.

The more you let the body spontaneously move,

surrendering to the current of sensation—

an arm here, a leg there

a swoop, a dip,

a yawning stretch,

a forceful thrust—

the more sensation keeps flowing,

body stays alive,

and you don’t retreat back into the thinking mind.

Let yourself move

like a cat waking up from a long nap,

like a leaf in a stream,

like the branches on a tree

through which a wind is blowing.

Ecstasy is ex-stasis,

leaving frozen stillness behind

and surrendering to movement.

What happens to you

when you’re no longer the thinking mind

but the moving body,

when you’re no longer lost in thought

but lost in movement?

The dance of Shiva

awakens the currents

that want to pass through

the long shaft of your body

Individual sensations,

once aroused,

mass together in undulating waves.

Waves build in intensity

and crash upon the shores

of the body’s physical boundaries.

From one moment to the next,

like a sea whose motions never stop,

the river of the body’s sensations doesn’t just shimmer,

it flows,

building and subsiding

just like the flow of tides.

The felt currents that get awakened

are the handmaidens of evolution

as they ask that you keep yielding,

through calm waters and rapids alike.

Let the currents move and move through you,

trusting and knowing

they are moving you in the direction of your healing

along the trajectory of your personal evolution.

Shiva’s great gift to us

is the understanding

that awakening happens through movement,

constant movement,

no matter how subtle,

one motion feeding into the next,

the body continuing to move,

never coming to standstill.

A rush of sensations emerges

and moves you

and then the next layer of sensations surfaces

and the next,

layer after layer

until your body comes alive

throughout its entire length,

fluidly and fully,

its blockages resolved,

your body uplifted,

filled with grace,

your sense of self filled with the glow of presence

merging with the fullness of nature . . .

. . . which then allows the next deeper layer of holding and resistance

to come to the surface for you to feel and surrender to,

over and over and over again,

layer after layer,

wide open one moment,

contracted back down the next,

like the expansive and contractive motions

of a single-celled amoeba.

Watch what happens when you become lost in thought,

as you will,

just as you mostly do whether you’ve taken Shiva’s sacrament or not.

At those moments,

when you become aware that you’ve become lost in thought,

what’s happened to the feeling presence of your body?

Hasn’t it receded again

back into the unfelt?

Hasn’t the natural expansive radiance of the awakened body

become more contracted back down and into the physical body,

where it gets lodged as compressed tension?

Hasn’t your breath suddenly become shallower,

more constricted?

And, then, what happens to the thought

when you remember to reawaken the feeling presence of the body,

when you pass your attention through the body,

inviting sensation to come back to life once again,

to billow and blossom?

What happens when you yield,

once again,

to the current that wants to move you?

Thought and sensation cannot coexist.

When you can keep the sensations of the body alive and felt,

the conventional mind that knows only the language of thought,

but is estranged from the language of sensation,

has little ground on which to stand

and proclaim the exclusivity of its perspective.

Sometimes your sensations

expand to fill the sky.

Other times they may crush you.

Just trust the sensations,

and trust their cycling nature.

Expanding.

Contracting.

Like the pulse of life itself.

The expansions can be heavenly,

the contractions frightening.

Don’t be scared.

Trust the sensations

and go wherever they’re taking you.

This is the dance,

riding the current of the expansion until it changes,

riding the current of the contraction until it resolves,

layer upon layer,

always moving.

Don’t do yourself the disservice of thinking

that there’s some kind of final destination of embodied resolution,

some kind of holy grail of body and mind,

that you’re striving to arrive at.

The dance of Shiva is about riding the current,

staying in constant, unbraced motion

in response to the current,

celebrating your participation in the current,

surrendering to its pushes, pulls, and swayings,

day after day,

a practice of celebrating the wonder and grace

of the feeling presence of the life force,

always and ever moving in the direction of healing.

So you’re not trying to attain some far-off goal.

You’re just letting yourself exult

in the feeling presence and current that’s being stimulated now.

You’re just letting yourself dance,

riding upon the currents of change.

After some time,

the effects of Shiva’s sacrament start subsiding,

leaving your body.

You may want to lie down on your back

and just relax.

Or not.

Only you can dance your dance,

and it’s the discovery of your dance

that keeps propelling you onward.

I awaken the feeling presence of the body,

and I surrender to its current.

So strongly can cannabis awaken feeling presence throughout the body that it could be considered a medicine to treat acute somatophobia, in which we become a thinking head completely cut off at the neck from the felt presence of the body (what it would say on its promotional label might read something like “helps you reconnect with your felt nature and open to the healing energies of the organic world; helps you actually feel these energies as a flow of constantly changing sensations whose awakening brings the body back to felt life; gets you in touch with the lived reality of your body in this moment rather than the ideas you might have about reality in your mind.”).

Once you take Shiva’s sacrament into your body, feeling presence starts coming back to life. As more and more masses of sensation keep coming forth out of their unfelt shadows, you also start becoming aware that within the sensation is a motive force, an urgency to move in some manner as a natural response to that awareness. Shimmering sensations flow on their own gentle stream, and you can ride along easily on their current. Compacted sensations of constriction, tension, and pain will generate a more intense current, and the motions that occur will naturally be different.

An East Indian teacher of mine once told me, in response to a question about the extremes of contracted pain and expansive openness that I would move between: “The energies informing each are exactly the same. It’s just that with one the energies are flowing, with the other they’re stuck. When you feel overflowing with bliss . . . dance. And then when you feel in great pain . . . dance. Just don’t expect the one dance to look like the other.”

Every sensation is equally precious. This is easy to understand when feeling presence becomes unified, radiates expansively outward, and merges with the larger current of nature, but much more challenging when—perhaps immediately following such an opening—a layer of deep contraction surfaces. If you try to detour around the layers of painful contraction, you’ll only block your passage through. If you let yourself feel everything—the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly—the current keeps moving. The practice is just to keep allowing the currents to move, to keep passing right through body and mind, healing pains, resolving tensions, and exposing ever deeper sedimentary layers of holding and tension to be felt, surrendered to, and released, not unlike how the layers of an onion can be peeled away, in their own time, so that there’s nothing left. Who do you become when you make your way through all the layers of holding in your body until there’s nothing left?

Your physical body is made of the elements of earth, but your experiential body is composed of sensation. When we’re off in our minds, with thoughts thinking themselves and our body sleepy and removed, sensations are likely to be dull, perhaps with specific areas of chronic pain, and sometimes, if the thought is so very captivating, we may just not feel any sensations at all.

Your Shiva body is your physical body awakened, composed of earth elements but vibrantly felt as awakened flows of sensations and currents of felt energies. When you feel into an area of your physical body that feels taut, tense, or overly still, the natural impulse of the body is to move in response. Through the motions of a spontaneous stretch, the tension dissipates, and the current of the life force can be felt to flow more freely again. Holding the body still, holding back its innate impulse to move, blocks the current of the life force just as a lock in a canal blocks the flow of water, so, as Shiva’s sacrament starts making itself felt in your body, let yourself move. So often we hear people saying—at times in their lives when they’ve perhaps fallen into a kind of rut—that they feel stuck. Doesn’t it make sense that the way to deal with feeling stuck is to start moving?