“When my spirit goes through its door, and my bones return to the root from which they grew, what will become of me?”~ Chuang Tzu

What is on my mind right now is Chaos. Recently my somewhat habitual and ordered way of being has been threatened.

I have been experiencing some sort of profound consciousness shift. My three lowest chakras (energy vortices lying along the etheric spine, the lowest three associated with survival in terms of meeting basic needs, sexuality and ego-sense respectively) are in a state of complete and irreverent disarray. I am careening out of control and the intensity of this churning and unbounded energy, that has for whatever reason been cathartically awakened, is absolutely flooding into every aspect of my existence.

Is this what the mountains do to people (I live in Asheville in the Appalachians.) It‘s like ingesting powerful hallucinogens and then hanging on for dear life as the chemically induced high wreaks havoc with your neuronal circuits. Your cells, soaking in a bubble bath of over stimulation don’t quite know whether to sink a little deeper into the tub or get out and dry off before they shrivel up like moisture deprived grapes.

Meanwhile, sanity hangs in the balance as whatever semblance of being grounded that had previously been cultivated took an unapproved sabbatical. There is the frantic attempt to ride out the storm, waiting for whatever is going to happen to happen and crinkling up your forehead in a bewildered sort of ignorance wondering when the ride is going to come to an end. And, you don‘t really know how or when the ride started because you don‘t remember buying a ticket (don‘t you need a ticket to ride on the rides?).

And, as a last ditch effort, you decide to swallow your intellectual pride and pray to that granter-of-personal-wishes God (even if you don’t really believe because, at this point, you are more than desperate. And, just in case there is something out there listening, you want to be covered), that you don‘t puke or at least if you do, not in public because if you puke someone might see that you are really sick.

I find myself thinking and behaving in ways that heretofore would have not been descriptive of whom I thought myself to be. This is radical, chaotic. The strangeness of this is that, at times, I really, really, really like it a lot. And, at other times, it scares the Hell out of me.

So, I am not sure if I need to be somehow ‘fixed’ or if this tumultuousness, this ‘energetic awakening’ of sorts, is, in some cruel-joke-way, the fixing.

I mean, I have studied and read at length about Shakti -Kundalini awakening. I know that in yogic philosophy, the goal of practicing the techniques is to wake up the sleeping creative serpent (Shakti-Kundalini) that lies coiled at the base of your spine. She sleeps until she is awakened, and then she rises up to meet her lover Shiva (an aspect of Absolute Supreme Consciousness) in the spiritual third eye center (Ajna Chakra) thereby dispelling the illusory nature of duality and bringing one into unity consciousness. This union of Shiva/Shakti at Ajna Chakra is the veil of illusion (Maya) buster. And, many of the yoga techniques are powerful ‘waker- uppers’ of this cunning ‘consciousness-evolver’.

So, perhaps this wild ride that I have been thrust on is just the Universe grabbing me by my yoga straps and shouting , “Wake up, Jeri!”. And, haven’t I been pleading with the Universe to speak to me by patiently and faithfully doing my yoga practice for years? I guess, in a way then, I have asked for this. My yoga practice/ticket is bearing fruit. I am eating the proverbial apple from the forbidden tree and it is bittersweet. The serpent is alive and well and beckons for me to taste, to eat, to

experience, to know (or not know, depending upon how you look at what happens when you eat from that God forsaken tree!). And, damn it, I have consented.

Where this will end up, I do not know. So that’s it. Can I just be with the experience? And, even more pressing can I be with the experience without knowing what the outcome will be? Can I do what I often tell others to do? Just let it go. Be with the moment to moment creative expression of manifestation and watch without judging or attaching to some idea of how it is supposed to turn out. Can I live the questions?

I share this with you because it dramatically underscores one of the core yogic tenets- that letting go of our attachments to how things are supposed to be, and of our notion that we must have the answers (and, for that matter, that there are answers) to the questions, is tantamount to evolving consciousness. And, since initially yoga postures were performed as body mudras (ways of placing the body in various positions in order to energetically set oneself up for experiencing higher, more unitive levels of being), it seems appropriate as practitioners of yoga asana, that we should be in the business of evolving consciousness. Coming into yoga (union with Supreme Consciousness), is what the practice is ultimately about. How to do that may mean moving through order and back into primordial chaos – or is it the other way around?

This reminds me of something I recently read. A friend of mine lent me a book about quantum physics. In it, is the query, “What is the fundamental structure of reality?” It postulates, rather fervently, that science has learned, from chaos comes order, and from order comes chaos. And, it appears that cosmic creativity depends on a reciprocity between order (Shakti?) and chaos (Shiva?) How intriguing. And, just when you think you can know something for sure, the book throws in a profound commentary from the creation hymn of the Rig Veda (a spiritual text from the Hindu philosophical system) which asserts that in the beginning there was no air, no heavens, no water, no death, no immortality. Night and day did not exist and there was only the breathing of the One. Then somehow Creation occurred. No-one knows how this happened, and the Rig Veda speculates that possibly even the One does not know.

What is personally interesting about this, is that ever since my tidy and ordered way of thinking and being has been placed in the balance, rent in two, sucked into one of those mysterious black holes in the cosmos where all things eventually go, I have been re-considering this whole sitting with the questions idea in terms of not just talking about it, but actually living it. And, although I feel more like scrambled eggs these days than eggs benedict (a far superior, and my preferred, way of eating eggs), I am coming to believe that being with the questions as opposed to having the answers is a superior way of being even in lieu of the messy chaos it can

potentially bring. Superior in the sense that practicing it may lead to more evolved levels of consciousness which is, after all, what we are ultimately after. And, even if that is not the case, it affords us the opportunity to experience things in a more expansive and spacious way. In a way that can embrace and even celebrate the notion, “I don’t know and it’s okay”.

Well, if that is true, then my paradigm shift, at least in part, seems to be moving me in the right direction that of evolving consciousness.

So here I am, questioning my way through chaos. Inviting you into my topsy-turvy world and begging the question, “Is my world upside down or right side up?”

I leave you to chew on these thoughts as it relates to your perception of being in the world. And, lest you think me less than compassionate, trust me when I say, my heart goes out to all of you who are being forced, whether by ordered design or chaotic randomness, to sit with the questions and endure/celebrate this ride.

Oh, and by the way, I don’t think the ticket ever expires…
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Jeri Senor is a lover of yoga, elephants, good food, champagne and other wonders that she has yet to become aware of. Her motto these days is, “Get on that wave and ride the heck out of it.”