Monday, November 8, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
The Peacock Pose:
Dance with Divinity
Overflowing with rich symbolism, the image of a peacock displaying its fan of feathers has been as cherished as a rising sun, a picture of the heavenly constellations in the sky, a hundred eyes and the wheel of immortality, just to name a few. Byzantine art depicts the peacock as the soul and its beautiful, incorruptible status. Islamic thought associates the peacock-eye with the Eye of the Heart. This unparalleled, majestic beauty in the spread and shivering plumage of a peacock has mystically lured civilizations throughout history into regarding it as a link to the Divine. Appropriately, Yoga also engages it in mayurasana, or the peacock pose.
As peacocks are known for their uncanny ability to digest snakes, poison and all, this pose leans the entire weight of the body on the elbows, which press into the stomach, greatly benefiting digestion. Here the internal meditation is on the digestion of subtle poisons such as anger, greed and lust. In Tibetan Buddhism. the peacock symbolizes one’s victory over poisonous tendencies, and the serpents it consumes represent one’s venomous obstacles and imperfections, or kleshas, which are equally capable of killing us. Successfully digested poison is then naturally transformed into beautiful splendor, as the peacock shows us in his lovely plumage. As a purifier of poisons peacock feathers are regarded as perpetually uncontaminated and therefore used in many sacred rituals of various traditions.
Peacocks are known for their wonderful, restless dancing just before rainstorms. It is a dance that has inspired sages to contemplate the soul’s fiery restlessness within this world. Great saintly thinkers of India have compared God to approaching rain clouds, rolling in thunderously, to extinguish the fire of separation from the sacred. It has also been said that the mere sight of a saint approaching, makes a spiritual aspirant dance madly, like a peacock that has spotted an approaching rain cloud during the monsoon season; plumes fully spread.
A great amount of focus is required to balance in mayurasana, similar to the absolute focus a lover offers his or her beloved. Choosing a mate for life, peacocks have also come to represent fidelity. In the arid Rajastani hills of India, the sight of peacocks dancing with their consorts is regarded as a favorable fertility omen, and despite the birds’ tendencies to disrupt crops, they are never killed. In fact, the faithful peacock is India’s national bird. It is this concentration of one’s heart on a singular point that one engages in mayurasana, when raising both legs up vertically to resemble a peacock’s open tail. This is a feat that becomes impossible without the accompanying necessary strength. Thus pairing faithfulness with strength protects one’s senses from wandering, informing the practitioner that the balancing poses in Yoga, such as the peacock pose, aim at creating equilibrium between the inner and the outer, the heart and the body, this world and the next. This dual nature in the human psyche, its innate tendency to dance between the two planes, is typically depicted in Persian art by two peacocks standing at either sides of The Tree of Life. Like peacocks, the yogi aims at never losing balance throughout the course of this “dance” of life.
Dancing peacocks are perhaps not depicted anywhere in literature as delightfully as they are in the Srimad Bhagavatamˆ. In beautiful Sanskrit poetry, this ancient text describes the way in which Krishna’s flute playing inspires wild dancing in the peacocks of Vrindavan. Melodious sweetness emerging from his flute decorates the forest breezes. Sounding like the soft thunder that precedes rain, the enchanting sound spreads the tails of peacocks into shivering half-mandalas and sends the birds dancing around him to the rhythm of love. Then that gorgeous cowherd, the color of rain filled clouds, becomes a dancing axis for the restless flock, arousing their divine ecstasy. Naturally moved to reciprocate with Krishna, but finding nothing of value to offer him, the peacocks shed their own precious feathers. This offering of feathers is symbolic of renouncing vanity and pride, as they joyfully abandon their most precious asset: their beauty, to please Krishna. In return, Krishna is significantly moved, taking one of the magnificent plumes and placing it upon his head as an ornament. Devotees of Krishna comment that it is, because Krishna sees the eyes of his consort, Radha, in the peacock feathers, that he so relishes dancing with them. The peacock feather is as inseparable from Krishna as is his flute.
Mayurasana, as other Yoga postures, ultimately finds its deeper existence in the way it provokes the practitioner to minimize the separation between his or her soul and the supreme divinity. The sacred path of passionate love relates this experience to the anticipation a lover feels just before meeting with his or her beloved. As it is unnatural for the soul to exist as a separate being from the supreme Soul, it feels excruciatingly painful for lovers to be apart. The wonderful, restless dancing displayed by peacocks when the sky is full of rain filled clouds is thus a dance of spiritual anticipation. It is with this exciting anticipation of making a spiritual connection that yogis move in their practice of the asanas.
In mystical theology medieval Hindus depicted this anticipation felt by both the soul and God, as they enter deeper and deeper realms of intimacy with one another, by decorating an enormous sacred image of the divinity, known as Jaganatha as a peacock. Today, this sacred image is carried out of the ancient Orissin temple onto a chariot, en route to meet his beloved consort. This spiritual parade, the Rathayatra, is the most attended, annually held festival in the world. Each year the priests struggle with placing this large sacred image of Jaganatha on his chariot, as he dances madly, his feathers trembling, intensely eager to unite in divine Love.
Regular practice of Yoga naturally arouses this very eagerness in its practitioners. The peacock pose, rich with alluring meditations from the loftiest esoteric arenas, invites those desiring to dance with divinity to stimulate his their own desires to dance ! The bird’s greenish-blue, regal plumage mirrors the color of the heart chakra; a color that is thought by many cultures to be a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow. For Sri Caitanya, known to be ˆavatara or incarnation of Krishna who experiences the intense devotion that Krishna’s consort Radha has for him, the bird’s bluish-green neck plumes triggered his remembrance of Krishna’s bluish-green complexion at the time of loving union with his most intimate devotees, and left him rolling on the ground in trances of ecstatic love. This experience is the ultimate samadhi of all Yoga.
Copyright ©2010. By Catherine Ghosh
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