Entering the Temple
Direct experience and being with what is.
I love temples. I love altars. I love every single site of devotion—from an Orthodox church to a small offering on the side of the road, to the call to prayer from the mosque, to the humble shala where my yoga practice might have taken me, to the corner of the room where my grandmother would leave cigarettes and rum for Anaisa Pyé. I will light a candle, and I will kneel, and I will pray anywhere you put me. I just love devotion in all of its forms.
The magic of these places of worship, for me, resides in the way that we tend to approach them—who we become when we step through their gates. Personally, I notice that when entering such a place, my steps slow down, my posture becomes more upright and steady, my breath deepens. As if, from the moment I walk in, for some reason unbeknownst to me, I am awaiting to receive. I shift into a contemplative and fully open state where my senses sharpen, and my body softens. I soften into the silence, I soften to notice the space around me, I soften to witness the people praying, kneeling, chanting.
There is a recognition, perhaps, that whatever takes place in these temples belongs to something greater than myself—and this something greater, in the many forms and names it has taken through the ages, extends its hand over to me and invites me to sit on the floor, or on the wooden bench, or next to an image, and to experience it. The moment I begin to think too much about it, it tends to vanish. If I allow myself to be there without judgment, without going through the history of it, but moving closer openly, in full porosity, then I feel at home.
In my own personal Sadhana, I’ve been working with Lalita Devi the past three months. If you’ve ever worked with the Mahavidyas, then you might be familiar with the feeling of “this one is going to ruin my life for sure.” And I will go into it in a next post, because frankly, it has been a lot. But if you haven’t—to say it in a simple way—you work with a particular expression of wisdom, an archetype, a part of your psyche, devotedly, every single day by coming into relationship with it, and you allow it to bring forth the ways in which you relate to it. The ways in which you resist it, avoid it, identify with it, ignore it, get drowned in it, distort it, or become so attached to it as if your own life hangs from its thread. And this is a very, very, very simple way to put it.
So naturally, I’ve had quite an array of different experiences while sitting down with this particular form of consciousness—to meditate, or to chant, or to draw, or just to listen. And mainly, it has been painful. It has brought me to face the ways in which I relate to my deepest longings, and to the way I replace these longings with harmful dynamics. It’s been a trip. And I have been deep in the pit of suffering.
Being as uncomfortable as it is, I’ve tried every single tool I have to “alchemize” it. I’ve moved as this pain, I’ve chanted to it, I’ve cried, I’ve given up, I’ve journaled, I’ve almost written a book about it. And with all this doing and processing, I forgot the most important thing—I forgot to experience it. To be with it.
And you might say, “But are you not experiencing it if you’ve done all of this?” And the answer, my friend, is no. Not at all.
Because here is the thing about direct experience—it is very much like entering a temple. In this case, the temple is not a church, but your own beating, breathing body. And everything you experience is a doorway into that temple: the constriction in your chest when you remember something painful, the feeling of being out of breath because you long for something so deeply that you feel you might disappear without it, the discomfort in your belly, the shrinking of your posture brought forth by shame.
Desire, lust, longing—
Anger humming in your blood.
Confusion, jealousy, bewilderment,
Swirling in your head.
Catch the first hint as passion rises,
The first quickening heartbeat.
Embrace that vibrancy
With a mind vast as the sky.
You are in the temple.
Go deeper still and rest in essence,
Awake to the infinite spiritual energy
Surging into form.
— The Radiance Sutras
The previous text refers to one of the many digestion practices in classical Tantra. Digesting, as in allowing ourselves to feel into any experience so deeply that it becomes a form of nourishment—that it expands our capacity to be with what is. Feeling it through the energetic, physical, and emotional charge that arises in the body—what Eugene Gendlin called the felt sense. The rawness without the story, the experience without the explanation.
Many of the techniques used to process trauma are, in themselves, ways to allow an individual to cultivate the capacity to integrate smaller doses of a bigger experience in gentle ways. In the words of my teacher, Collette, you “catch the charge of an emotion, as soon as you can, and then sit inside the vibration, its felt sense. And bring it all the way in. Staying with the raw sensation of it is what allows you to become as vast as the sky.”
But we are so used to processing things through our frontal lobe—through words, through logic, through intellect—that we forget to be present with it. To be with our pain, with our longing, with our not-enoughness. To be with the raw felt sense of being a human—alive, in this body, on this earth.
I call it entering the temple. When I feel uneasy, when I feel on edge, when I know that I am in resistance to my experience, then—“oh, we haven’t visited the temple in a while”—and so I go.
I close my eyes and enter through the gateway of body, I cross through the threshold of my skin into this holy place where every experience is held. Most of the time, I sit in the main room, the altar of the heart, and I just listen. I become intimate with the felt sense of my own suffering, and I allow myself to be with it, in smaller doses, in gentle ways.
And the most important thing here is—how do I approach it? Do I still walk slowly? Do I sit reverently? Do I trust and respect that which I encounter? Do I allow myself to breathe deeply, to recognize that something greater sits at the center of this longing? Do I approach it as prayer or as war?
Do I allow myself to, even in the midst of great discomfort and pain, remain fully devoted to life?
In the upcoming months, there are quite a few invitations for us to practice together—to deepen into direct experience and to pray at the temple of the body. One of these is Radiant Body, a 6-day immersion into practice and embodiment in the precious island of Menorca from the 19th to the 24th of October.You can learn more and sign up here.