Monday, February 13, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Creative Play As Yoga
All around us, whether or not we are attuned to it, our universe swirls with the exciting energy of creative processes. Everywhere, from the mingling of DNA to the unpredictable shifts in the paths of stars, creative forces animate the dynamic evolving of life as we know it. Ancient tribes stretching from the foothills of the Himalayas to the great Brazilian jungle, identified these natural forces as communications the universe was having with itself- outbursts of expression that simultaneously seek to experience life, and to be experienced as life.
Ancient yoga texts record this phenomenon as divine consciousness desiring to delight in itself. For this purpose it divides endlessly into individual units of consciousness made of the same eternal substance, and all yearning to participate in this same delightful dialogue. Yoga, becomes our entrance into this divine dialogue, and our individual creative energies serve as the fuel that animates and moves us into a satisfying relationship with the universe and those who inhabit it.
Creativity was once that most unique, potent arena in which one reached beyond oneself, by diving within oneself. It was our connection with transcendence. Before the crackling fires of antiquity, in colorful streams of emotional dancing and drama, imaginative storytelling and song, our species’ creative explorations and discoveries swiftly captured the rapt attention of others. For creativity was seen as shared mystical experience, opening new dimensions and delivering alternative perspectives of reality that any one of us could potentially access.
Like the creative imagination, yoga asks that we entertain infinite possibilities beyond rational thought, and exercise new ways of being. Yoga beckons us to posture our consciousness in relation to alternative realities and vistas. It is our link to realms that exist beyond our ordinary sense of perception. It reconstructs our beliefs and plays with our experience of the mysterious, so that we may move harmoniously through our lives.
This harmonious, forward movement is akin to the direction in which Arjuna moves after his conversation with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, where he realizes his old perspectives were crippling his progress. Arjuna’s anxious stagnation at the beginning of the text represents the way consciousness becomes paralyzed by uncreative thought. For life, by nature, is not stagnant. Instead, life is always creating and recreating itself.
Yoga is meant to draw force from the creative core of life and counter stagnation by integrating every experience that life places before us (even the most difficult ones) as part of our practice, our sadhana, the unfolding of our consciousness. How we each transform our own crippling perspectives, or samskaras, will reflect in how we each engage our own unique and original creative resources. The way we each resolve conflicts in our lives and navigate through our own battlegrounds will differ from person to person. Yoga honors these differences as part of what enhances divinity’s experience of us.
In the forth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, the supreme, divine consciousness, as Krishna, speaks of his own creative force as his atma-maya, inseparable from his very self. Creative force is therefore an innate part of the very nature of consciousness. In an interesting contrast to the Abrahamic version of God as the creator, who is then exhausted by his creative process, Yoga texts describe a God who is energized by his own creativity. Creativity, after all, is consciousness at play, and Krishna is the God of infinite playfulness, or leela.
During the imaginative play of a young child, a sophisticated, spontaneous dialogue occurs between both hemispheres of the brain. The slow rhythmic alpha and theta waves of the right brain, which stimulate creative thought and open consciousness to the subconscious, communicate in perfect harmony with the fast beta waves produced by the brain’s left hemisphere, translating them into action. Neurologists tell us that this state of playing powerfully stimulates brain development. There are only two other times in which adults can neurologically duplicate this optimal state for evolving consciousness. The first is through surrendering to one’s own creative process, and the second is while practicing yoga. The two are so closely connected, it’s almost as if the universe is asking us to come out to play.
This playful, creative energy has inevitably adorned the characters of the world’s most attractive and influential spiritual personalities. It has inspired them toward inventing new and innovative presentations of ancient teachings. It has filled them with the confidence and courage to appear somewhat iconoclastic, while preserving and protecting the essence of their respective traditions. It has engaged them in dialogue with universal consciousness, that has been as meaningful and valuable as the conversations they’ve had with individual units of consciousness, or the souls in this world. And consequently, their faith in their own creative force has given rise to communities of others who are inspired by their joyful, playful example.
Unlike the isolating practices of most mystics, tucked away in caves, the creative processes of play and Yoga always move one into expression, or sharing. Creativity is generous by nature. It begs to interact with community. It does not isolate. It does not reject the world, but rather engages it as part of creative play. Creativity is a harmonious marriage between matter and spirit. It expresses, through the senses, everything it encounters beyond the reach of the senses. It has the power to grip spiritual sentiments and pour them into musical instruments, or splash them onto canvases or release them in dance. Creativity engages the ingredients of this world to communicate spiritual substance. It does not entirely discard the constituents and relationships of the temporal realm, but rather, weaves them into portraits of eternity.
Creative expression thus invites dialogue. Like the dialogue in the Bhagavad Gita, creative expression actively engages others and sparks their own creativity by attuning them to the vibrational frequencies in which their own creative expressions will thrive. And within spiritual communities, the varieties of these expressions can be endless, as inspiration is clearly contagious!
Ancient cultures understood the synergistic relationship that creative expression inspired in humans, to be as essential to life as the relationship sunshine had to flowers, or rain had to vegetation. Humans clearly thrived in societies that stimulated and supported creative inspiration. Long before scribes and literacy, and the politics of education, religion and government dominated and determined which ideas were worth transmitting and imitating, and which weren’t, creativity had its own authority. From sharing between intimate family members to sharing with whole tribes, audiences believed that creative expression was how infinite realms communicated with us. As such, creativity was the vehicle used to dive into the mysterious divine, and return with vivid and exciting reports of one’s findings. Creative inspiration was seen as the universal breath we all shared, animating and nourishing healthy communities.
The most ancient of all symbols of sharing is the circle. It is also a symbol for consciousness and eternity, and we find it at the center of yoga texts as the rasa-mandala. The rasa-mandala represents the ultimate creative community and is composed of unlimited flavors of consciousness delighting in tasting itself, swirling around as masculine and feminine forms. In this sacred circle, individual personhood is what flavors each original creative expression, increasing the delight savored by the participants with each revolution. For supreme consciousness is known as rasika-sekara, the one who enjoys all of love’s flavors. And this flavorful variety is produced not by an exact cloning of the dancers, and gurus before us, but through the creative expression of our own unique love. And the more playful, the better, for when Krishna dances with the Gopis in the rasa-mandala, the yogi sees divine consciousness playing with itself, as a child plays with its own reflection in a pool of water.
Copyright © 2011. By Catherine Ghosh
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