Left Hand Path...

I'm rereading the book Aghora, written by Robert Svoboda a well respected Ayurveda teacher about his guru Vimalananda who was an Aghori.

Culturally in India they use the right hand for all auspicious activities and the left hand for only killing animals and wiping their excrement. But in the idea of the left hand path it honors those things which may not be popularly part of the Hindu rituals in the mainstream, but none the less they are not invalid to many. Aghora is such a path, that invites many things that most humans would think of as disgusting and despicable and shows that they also are valid steps to God realisation because everything really can be.

This is also an idea in the Tantrik path which is also mostly considered a left hand path even though there are Tantrik rituals in Buddhism, Hinduism, in many other isms. Even the Hatha Yoga path is truly considered a Tantrik path so anyone who does asanas most days could be thought of as Tantrikas.

Now in mainstream society these things, Aghora and Tantrik, are thought of as the darker side of things. Even black magic in India. Mostly it seems that Shiva worshippers, but even more so, Shaktas, or goddess worshippers fall into these two categories more than any other. But to me they are just words and the real rasam, or juice, is in the ritual and how it feels. If it feels like you're so full to bursting after a meditation or visualisation or even just sitting, then maybe you're on the right track. Now I don't mean full to bursting from food, although food could be part of the path.

Many Aghora practitioners eat the flesh off dead bodies just to be reminded of impermanence and that nothing isn't sacred. In fact many Goddess cults eat meat, almost all Goddess temples sacrifice animals, especially the Kamakhya temple in Assam that I'm about to embark on a pilgrimage to. Do these things bother me? No, not really. I can chose to make the discipline of it me not eating meat and get a lot of juice from that. Even though I still sometimes eat fish, although its very few and far between and I really have to be craving it, my friend said to me that in his mind that is my version of eating flesh for my Aghori rituals lol. So I guess it can be part of it, but I also feel the tapas from abstaining is just as powerful.

This is one of the things I love is that on this path you can find the rituals, do your version of them and get the connection from it. When I realised that I'm a Kali worshipper a couple years back and wanted to deepen my experience of that a friend in California informed me of this pooja you can do nightly involving chanting of her names and offering her meat and whisky each night as part of that, I found out you can do it also by offering fruit, flowers and yourself, or symbolically your heart as the meat and it is just as powerful, maybe even more so to me. I still to this day am doing this evening mantra and offering of my heart to her and the purposes she puts in front of me daily.

I think I was born to be on this left hand path, even though technically I'm right handed (my sister is left handed though) I have always leaned to the thoughts that most would consider outside the box. Outside the box in fact is the only thing I know and consider "normal" in my life. Always have. Even though I didn't know that until someone told me that I think this way. All I know is that what feels right in my gut is what I do, and when I can feel my heart open up and burst from the inside out it really, really tells me that what I'm doing is worth it.

In fact I would say that the path of yoga was often considered a left hand path, when you read about how people used to be scared of yogis stealing their children and so many other things that we would deem "wrong" then you might realise this also. But yoga, a term I do use very loosely, has become so saccharine these days. So involved only with the lovey dovey, light glowing from within type stuff that people have left the dark by the wayside. Often to their own detriment because we all have some dark and to embrace it and move through it is just as important as any other psychological work we can do.

Even Mysore these days feels this way to me, too much focused on the asana and the clean aspects of things. Not that those are bad things by any means, but its not complete. There is so much more. Let us embrace it all as something that can transform us. Transformation is really what yoga, including the asana practice, is to me. Transforming ourselves into what? Who knows. I can barely answer that question for myself, but you have to be the one to answer it for you.

Even now as I plan this short trip in a week or so I get nervous about leaving because Mysore is so comfortable, but while comfortable is okay for me it is not where the growth happens and I'm feeling growth and I don't want that feeling to stagnate. So I go to Dakshineswar, an area outside Kolkata (a city I have no real desire to go to partially because it holds 26 million people amongst other things in its reputation) that houses a Kali temple. Not an ancient one that is a Shakti peeth, google that if you don't know, but one that is very powerful. Powerful enough that I read a whole book about it. It's where Ramakrishna spent much of his life worshipping the goddess. I look forward to being there soon. Also going to the Kamakhya temple in Assam, an even further away place but a powerful one. The story of Sati, the first wife of Shiva, is a long one but the gist of it is that after she had immolated herself on a fire to diss her father Shiva was so upset that he carried her dead body around for years and years, even centuries. Vishnu and the other gods needed him for his destructive duties so Vishnu himself slowly started chopping off pieces of the body and as they fell to ground there lies a Shakti peeth, a place of power where the goddess is worshipped strongly so therefore creates its own energetic field. There are 52 and interesting to read about, so do Google it. Each one even lists which part of her body fell there. Yes I know, its kind of gross to the western mind that one god chopped up the dead lover of another but in the slow process Shiva came back to his senses and took on his duties again, and besides Sati was reborn as Parvati and they were reunited after she convinced him through 10,000 years of tapas that it was her, but that's another story.

So the Kamakhya temple is where Sati's yoni fell. If you're one of those saccharine yogis you may even still know the word yoni. If not, google it hahahahah. Yes, I'm being a dick, but to explain these things is not the point of my entry this day. So the feminine energy is strong there. And they also have temples to all ten of the Mahavidyas which I'm excited to see as well.

Then I think I'll come back to Mysore for a bit to integrate, then leave again to go to Uttarkashi and visit the Kali temple there where I had such profound experiences last summer, for a week or two anyway, before I leave to go teach in the US, Germany and then back to Mysore to practice with my teacher again in July hopefully.

So here I go, to get uncomfortable again. I'm even having trouble going to the guy to book my tickets to fly to these places, so the discomfort has already started! lol

Do you look always for your comfort zone, and just sit in it? Or do you welcome being uncomfortable and embrace the openings and expansion it can bring to your heart and soul? Just something to contemplate and maybe test yourself with...