Embodiment and the Flow of Now
Embodiment and the Flow of Now
This article was originally written by Jutta Hecht and first published on www.agaguru.com.
Every summer I visit Germany to spend time with my family. This June was an especially hot summer, and many evenings, when the air finally cooled, I walked through the suburb where my mother lives. Lots of children were out playing at this time. One evening I stopped, watching some of them playing the game “Himmel und Hölle” (Heaven and Hell, also known in a similar version in many places as Hopscotch). Watching them brought up happy childhood memories and a big smile to my face…chalk lines on sidewalks, stones tossed, afternoons spent hopping on one leg or two, bending down to retrieve the marker, journeying toward “Heaven,” aware of the danger of “Hell” just before it, and always returning, by skipping and bending back to “Earth,” in spontaneous ways, since we never knew how long it would take, what mistakes we might make, or where the marker would land.
And as I watched smiling, I realized this simple game also carries a deeper truth. I remembered the words of my Siddha teacher, Pal Pandian: “All children are naturally embodied, which means embodiment belongs to everyone. It is only society that begins to separate mind from body.” When body and mind are split apart, duality arises, and with it some of the challenges we see today, like anxiety, exhaustion, and adrenal fatigue.
The Siddha tradition holds embodiment as a foundation. Embodiment as a sense of wholeness that arises through wholehearted participation, as a sense of integration, as a flow, much like the children immersed in their simple yet profound game of Earth, Heaven, and Hell. You never see a child stop to analyze why they stepped into a certain square or why they avoided another. They simply embrace the flow of the game, the journey of returning home, by being fully present in their bodies—hopping and skipping up and down, balancing, bending, moving forward and returning.
In a way, this is also what somatic practices, which are are very popular, are pointing us to. I feel they have an important place in helping us tune more deeply into body sensations, which are often linked to emotions. It is important to recognize these sensations through bodily awareness and to integrate them.
My understanding and experience is that the Siddha practices incorporate this somatic sense, but go further—using the body as the grounding for all our experiences, as embodiment that embeds the Universal Patterns. Embodiment, then, is not only about emotions, but about aligning with and embedding these greater patterns. And of course, this is a process, a journey.
Like the game Himmel und Hölle, where we return home to Earth with all our embodied skills, or as Joseph Campbell so beautifully describes in the Hero’s Journey: we venture out, face trials, and discover new awareness—but the journey is not complete until we return home—to the body, to Earth, to ourselves. Embodiment is that homecoming, where what was learned is no longer just an idea but becomes lived through the body.
My teacher Pal Pandian reminds us that from duality we must come back into a state of non-duality, a state of pre-reflective experience, a state of presence, a state of being in the moment.This is what we naturally lived as children, though in an unconscious way. Later we lose this connection and often begin searching for it again on spiritual paths. I was one of them… and in the name of “spirituality,” I often created even more duality—separating body from mind, or becoming mechanical, numb, and insensitive to certain facets of life. Of course at that time I was initially not fully aware of it.
And yet, when we search for it, we need to consciously bring the pre-reflective state back, and then, as my teacher says, “it will arrive spontaneously.” As Jesus said: “Become like children again.”
Children are full of spontaneity, the very opposite of mechanical and rigidity. So too are the practices in our Minimalistic Movement classes, where we attune to the inherent flow—through a journey, through direct experience in simple body practices. This cannot be found by asking “Guru Google,” which only satisfies the mind.
Children also have no responsibility, so they live in a sense of non-doership, in innocence. We have a beautiful practice that nourishes this through what we call Conscious Sleep—a practice of dropping into a state of non-doership. It cannot be compared to Shavasana or Yoga Nidra, since we are not using imagination or slipping into unconsciousness. Rather, it is a journey of relearning how to sense again.
One of the basic principles I was reminded of while watching Himmel und Hölle is that we need to make the journey, but always return—to the mundane, to Earth, to our bodies, to that which gives us grounding. To participate in life, including the things we consume as part of it. That means we need to eat…so can you cook your own meals instead of eating out all the time? We want to live in clean houses and wear clean clothes…but can you start cleaning your own home and clothes again, or at least some of it, instead of handing it all over to others—or more and more, to AI and robots, as we now notice in big cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco, where self-driving cars quietly roll through the streets? Can we begin to participate more fully in life again?
When I ask these questions, I often hear: “Well, if I have AI or other people do these things, then I’ll have more time for everything else I want to do, the things that are more important.” I understand this. Yet the question arises in me: what is really more important than being fully with life, and also with the mundane that is part of it? Not wanting to escape, but rather being fully present with what arises.
To return, over and over, is the path itself—back to innocence, to the beginner’s mind, to curiosity, and to the simple joy of being in the flow of life.
“... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.” ~ Hermann Hesse, Siddartha
