Yogini Vighneshwari: the great Disrupter

Photo: Dr Richard Barz

Yogini practice is a space of radical transformation of perception and nowhere is this more palpable than in Yogini Vighneshwari. This Yogini evokes the Vedic archetype of Ganapathi as the essence or epitome (pathi) of tribes or communities (Ganas). The paradigms that operate within spaces of community bring both harmony and disruption because that is the nature of paradigms that are built on the principle of duality.

The very experience of community or tribe is only available as an alleviation of disruption, from within or without. Disruption is thus an inevitable attribute of the community paradigm.

Disruption can only be languaged in inadequate ways in our usual paradigms. In the Rig Vedic verses on Ganapathi, he is stated to be invoked only through aesthetics and only by those who are practitioners of contemplative arts. The perception of the intricate workings of community and disruption is the space of aesthetic contemplation. This perception that can see beyond paradigms is itself the Brahman or the Consciousness insight, the experience of complete alignment with the totality of Reality.

Dancing the constellation of disruption in the Yogini space is a revelation into the heart of Distrution as a force of the way in which we have storied life. Yogini Vighneshwari’s physicality with the heaviness of her stomach and the elephant head is an experience of the continuum between human and animal paradigms—the tribe is also a flock or a herd. Neither community nor disruption is a particularly sophisticated paradigm, because they connect us with lowest and the highest of the animal world.

Some of the early texts on Ganapathi write of experiences of pounding on clumps of mud, dreams of drowning in waters or being jostled in a herd of donkeys (notice the donkey on which the Yogini stands), the feeling that one is being followed by someone or that, despite one’s best efforts, one is not able to hold out against an enemy. When we dance these movements, we penetrate past the storying and fear and perceive disruption as a force of the self-same narrative that holds community and other harmonising spaces.

It is that unflinching perception into the core of experience that is radically transformative. And that is contemplation.