Thoughts on Siva and Shakti

Shakti
She dances
No matter what
She knows nothing of suffering

Siva he watches while tears fall
He cannot bear the dance
Yet he knows he must wait
For her return

But she is already there
Resting in his arms
Restless as a flame on a candle
He cannot keep her
He knows she is this wild dancing creatrix
Free as fire, light as the wind

She is a part of him like he is of her
Two sides of the same coin
One still...one alive with the play of the universe

Shakti dances
No matter what
She knows nothing of suffering

Our energy builds through our connection with stillness. In tantra stillness is symbolised by the energy of Shiva. Shiva meditating up on Mt Kailash, his eyes closed pondering the infinite nature of consciousness. Shiva however cannot exist on his own, he needs Shakti; Shakti is the energy of all creation and this is what Shiva contemplates, the beauty of Shakti, the multitudinous forms that all feed into the one.
These two qualities of Shakti and Shiva are represented in our own body as blood, Agni, the fiery rush of life through our body, it heats our digestion and creates psychic heat to burn away our avidya (ignorance) and reproductive fluid, Soma, the divine nectar that inspires life and feeds and nourishes our cells.


In life we are the natural expression of these two energies digestion, assimilation, reproduction, thinking, processing, creating etc. when does the mind and body stop? In deep sleep! We actually only get about 2.5 hrs of deep sleep a night that’s not much time… but it seems to be enough. In some yogic systems we can think of Shiva as representing a still point while Shakti is like a coil unwinding. In life the desire to move away from the centre is stronger then the desire to move back. We move back in sleep and move out in life. To build our energy we must move back to the stillness more often and this is achieved not only through a commitment to practice and observation of the breath and mental focus but through observing our habits and tendencies. If you have a habit of overdoing it, working hard, stressing out, it takes a great deal of work to break that habit. Maybe you spend years in therapy and self help workshops and still the tendency is there. Tantra likes to take the direct approach, using mantra and yantra to uproot the habit, using Shakti, physical energy, creative energy and mental energy to change the direction from moving out to moving in.