Guest blog by Tulasi Adeva, written after our Yogini Winter Ashram in India
I’m tired. The water of my body is frozen in jagged angles, damming the regular rhythmic flow. Life has been like this for me. A steady weather pattern. The winter then the melt. Eventually, always a period of sun. Teachers have found me through the seasons guiding my body toward suppleness, reminding me that the deep freeze is part of the blossoming. In the endless turning tides, my mind has slowly learned steadiness. Learning to watch weather has cultivated ease.
I dreamt of the mountains long before I ever got there.
The day we drove the thin asphalt snake toward our sanctuary in the sacred valley I felt awestruck seeing what I had already seen. Somehow already knowing, without knowing. Knowing this was a certain kind of homecoming.
We turned a corner. I cried out. The water in me erupting sending out a shower of iridescent light. Recognition and familiarity filling my sight. I knew the sand glistening below us, I knew the swift sure caress of Ganga’s jade green hand as if it just swept across my heart with prescient remembrance.
It was ten days of chanting and prayers before the first light. Ten days of singing and deepening. Ten days where weather rolled through us and surged and subsided all around us.
On the tenth day we were asked to wear white. A flurry of yogini skirts and bells and glistening eyes piled into the cars called to carry us from the deep inward crevice to the outward flow. Labor was beginning. I knew without knowing where we were going. We were returning. Everything in me was quiet on the way.
Like water I adapt to the shapes around me and this was the shape of soul. Flowing. I could feel the waters rising. We arrived and I poured myself downhill slowly, water falling freely toward synchronicity and rightness aligned in the light of morning glow.
I was the last to arrive in the already formed circle, the magic and mystery of the moment consuming me. The sand glittered like the goddess herself had spilled her treasure chest of jewels along the shore. Lady Ganga dancing swift along the sparkling curve of Earth’s body, glowing green with the heart of Her. The shape and texture of the far banks alive, vibrating with presence, holding the container of now.
There is a way to water. The way is letting go and slipping in. For in this moment, there were no hard lines, everything was halos, soft light, and the quiet flow of water singing. Steady streams rained from the deepest creases of my eyes. I became the river.
Immersing, dissolving. It was freezing but I was no longer frozen. Everything was melting glowing golden. Inward and outward, warm honey moving. But water, the sweet water, the soul water, this immersion in remembering. The place where past and future folded together and floated downstream on a little boat filled with prayers and flowers.
Initiation comes by water. First by the rivers, floods and storms that pour forth from the inside. Then by the waters that cleanse and renew, pouring upon us from beyond our vulnerable stretch of skin.
Wet. Waking. Water.
Woman.
Flooding.
Finally free.
