Feeling the feelings

This one is about the rasas, the purest states of emotion; the philosopher Abhinavagupta describes rasa as “the self tasting the self.” You can read the full piece here, and below.

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Today is my friend Nick’s birthday. He died in December, but I can't imagine that today ever won't be his birthday. It’s been an absolutely beautiful day in New York; birds tweeting, the sun shining, and the new leaves on the trees casting all kinds of beautiful seaweed shadows on the sidewalk.

I am so very sad he has gone. And so very glad to be alive. I have been thinking lately about a teaching I received on the rasas, in a yoga class by the founder of Abhaya Yoga, Tara Glazier. She talked about the rasas as the very purest states of emotion that we feel, and are our birth right. It is a profound part of our human experience to feel these things fully: love, joy, wonder, courage, peace, sadness, anger, fear and disgust.

Rasa can be translated as juice, essence, or transformational state. In Shiva Rea’s excellent article, Coming to Your Senses, she writes that the idea of rasa originated in Indian performance art, and that the philosopher Abhinavagupta describes it as “the self tasting the self.” Isn’t that amazing? I had to sit with that idea a little to begin to comprehend it.

There's a sense In which to allow ourselves to fully explore any one of these states opens up our capacity for all of them. And similarly, to damp down or deny any one of these pure states is to risk muting them all: when we fully feel pain, we give ourselves complete access to joy, and vice versa.

The deeper I move into my practice and noticing what's going on in my body and my mind, the more I understand that it’s possible to know two seemingly opposite experiences at once. To have tears in your eyes from the heart-pain of having lost a loved one, at the same moment as you see the sun and shadows moving on the wall, and feel something in that same heart dancing.

I realized today that in one pocket of my wallet I still have the train ticket from the day I went to Nick’s memorial service back in England; in another, there’s a folded up scrap of paper that has the address of my friends’ wedding party in Mumbai written on it, from such a happy time last May. Both are precious.

On the yoga mat, we practice holding these dualities. Reaching up as we root down. Focussing the mind on the breath and letting the thoughts go. Finding a balance of effort and ease in the same pose. I find it hard to do these things, but I try anyway, and I learn.

My own experience of grief has been that it feels like it’s opened up another dimension of feeling and understanding, as painful as that has felt. And it has felt very painful; I don’t wish to fluff around the edges of something that’s been so sharp. Yet in this expansion, I’ve felt more love; curiously, more capacity to love. A sense of the human heart opening so, so wide. The question, it seems to me, is whether we allow the heart to hold us in its open embrace, as we feel those pure feelings?

Happy birthday, Nick. Happy loving and living, all of us.