Yearning and the wisdom of pain

Photo: Lorna Sim

Desire and pain are the villains in many spiritual philosophies. The destination of a spiritual inquiry is often proposed as freedom from pain—a state of being where we are gifted with an eternity of painless bliss. What underpins this proposed state of bliss is liberation from the tumultuous waters of our feelings and sensations—“non-attachment”. This free-floating state of non-attachment is suggested as delivering peace, stillness and, most importantly, painlessness.

And then there are philosophies which take the opposite stance and centralise pain and suffering as necessary for “enlightenment”. Indeed, enlightenment itself is proposed as a traumatic event for the body and the mind. I often have people in my programs who speak of modalities where their bodies are stressed and, in my view, a kind of trauma is almost induced through physical practices. This is offered as the “awakening” of the divine. The pain is the certificate into the enlightened club.

In these scenarios of duality, the invitation of ritual dance is a complex and nuanced one which can easily be overlooked without skills of subtle observation and perception. What if pain is neither to be rejected in fear nor to be invoked in martyrdom? What if pain is an inevitable experience of life and we are invited to be in the room with this experience with the fullness of our attention?

Yearning is a multi-dimensional sensation. Among its many dimensions include pain, memory, longing, absence, intimacy, and joy. Yearning is a confluence, a constellation of sensations, just like the constellations of stars in the sky. Ancient astrology mapped the sensation cosmos across all of manifestation—our bodies, Nature, and the skies. The “psychology” of stars as Jyotish or astrology is the invitation to experience reality through the lens of sensation. Through this lens, it is not about developing roadmaps to “solve” sensations, rather to develop an intelligence that is complex and able to perceive the intelligence of a multi-dimensional movement of Reality.

The presence of pain in Yearning may be as sorrow, absence, betrayal, or loss. This pain is a continuum with the great waters of life itself with its movement between birth and death. In ancient Indian myths, the quest for immortality is what brutalized even the most noble of people. Indeed, the very quest arose only in demonic characters. When such people even held the illusion of immortality, they wreaked havoc on Earth and on all other life. They inevitably met a brutal death at the hands, very often, of the Divine Feminine or the Goddess.

Holding the ultimate pain of mortality is the poetic or artistic intelligence. These are the great waters of sensation. The Kavi or the poet/shaman/dancer was the first seer. The ancients held the revelation of ritual art because it was only through artistic expression that it was possible to be in the room with pain.

I remember times in my childhood when I witnessed the ritual wailing of women when there were deaths in the family. These were women who were the traditional holders of this ritual and poetic expression in their bodies. They were invited to homes where death had occurred. Through their wailing and their dance, they manifested the deep pain of the family in wondrous and beautiful “performance”. Rather than a fear of pain or needing to solve pain, it was a transformation of the pain into something universal. It allowed the pain to flow into the great waters of life, to find its rightful and meaningful place in the constellation of sensations, and in this way to reveal its divinity. This was not a cathartic process to “purge” the pain, it was to reveal the intelligence and wisdom of this sensation in the larger constellation of life itself.

We yearn for immortality. We yearn for love, peace, company, stability, rest, and to know definitively what life has in store for us. Rather than struggle with this Yearning, dance and other ritual artforms simply allowed us to taste the wondrous fragility of life as the Divine revelation. It was not in the rejection of pain that the Divine was located, rather it was right in the heart of that pain where our life’s transience and vulnerability renders us human and Divine in the same moment.

The stories of many Deities hold experiences of loss and pain. Consider the story of the popular Deity Krishna. His childhood, youth and adult life were tumultuous. Woven into the tumult are also stories of romance, joy, and valour. I have found great solace in these narratives which belie our templates of duality that seek to “solve” the architecture of our sensations into simplistic good and bad emotions. Most importantly, Krishna’s own life as a manifestation on Earth is finite—He is said to have died at a very young age. This does not in any way undermine His divinity, on the contrary it affirms that the fullness of life we have as the movement between life and death, is divine in its poignant finitude.

In our times, we have denigrated artistic practices as the least important of all activities. Perhaps our increasing fear is at least partly due to the loss of ways of ritual and artistic inquiry that held a deep intelligence about sensations. In Rasa philosophy of dance, sensations as Rasas, are the Divinities. In moving the multi-dimensional constellations of these Rasas, we discover the intelligence of this architecture of Reality. Fear, anger, desire, pain, wonder, laughter, and valour—all these are interconnected in this intelligence. Without the wisdom of any one of them, the experience of Reality remains incomplete and unintelligible.

The Rasa philosophy provides an important invitation in its tradition. The God of Death, Yama, is the Deity of Karuna or compassion. When I have danced or taught this Rasa, it has never failed to reveal how pathos and pain hold the unfolding of true compassion. This is not entirely the “wounded healer” archetype. Like all Rasa experiences, words are inadequate to describe the experience. Rather than as a “wound”, dancing the Rasas reveals the energy of all sensations. As an expression of beauty and creativity, the energy of pathos and pain connects us to the cosmic movement of this sensation. Pain becomes within and without us, a “truth” that is not inflicted on us but is a universal experience.

And that is what humanises us, not as saviours or healers necessarily, but simply as living beings that share the experience of pain with an ant we may accidently stamp under our feet, or a plant that we may consider a weed and destroy. We may still have to prune the plants in our gardens, but we may do it with a sense of gratitude for their sacrifice and beauty that nourishes us every day of our lives.

It also inspires us to match that beauteous offering with our own lives in simple and humble everyday actions. That may be what alleviates the loneliness and fears that come from the hubris of our self-proclaimed position at the top of Reality.