Dabbling

I’m dabbling a little in Vedic chanting right now. I’m not fully committed, just dabbling. Like a duck or a duckling, just very unlike a baby crow 🙂

I am drawn to the simplicity of this form, just as my mother was in a previous life drawn to plainchant. These limited tones carry an infinity of meaning, the foreign syllables beckon me with a promise of hidden meaning. If only there were someone to unlock the meaning, unlock the timeless wisdom, unlock my limitations..

My teacher is beautiful (as one’s teacher always is, of course). She breaks down the lines, the words, sometimes even the syllables. And then builds it back up again into a full and beautiful whole. In the process she’s breaking me down into my elemental parts. She helping me see the beautiful wholeness that’s in me too. I hunger after every syllable. I listen to her and weep.

My Sanskrit pronunciation has always been OK, received as a happy surprise by any teacher I’ve yet read or recited to. But hers is something else. It transports me. I listen eagerly, I try to emulate. Where exactly is the difference? I am in love with her voice. My ears adore it. There’s joy beyond my frustration, hope leading me on. The discipline of this focus, the endless repetition and endless correction is familiar to me. The pattern between teacher and student is at once comforting and triggering. The tough love of endless minute corrections now administered so gently, with such care. It unravels me every time, it is a balm to past pains.

After a time of fierce concentration (“listen, repeat… listen, now you…”) my ears and my brain are exhausted. And then when I think I can’t bear any more, right at the end of her teaching there’s a prompt for me to sit, to continue in my meditation, allowing the after-glow (after-flow?) of the words to wash over and through me. Is it a purification? No, it’s simply an exhortation to stay, to feel, to acknowledge all that there is in me. There’s no absolution, there’s no need. I am that. I am all that.

This is when I weep. When I sit in that exquisitely uncomfortable place, soft parts revealed, my yearning laid bare, loving the acute painfulness of vulnerability exposed to another being, holding it between us in our cupped hands, my face slightly upturned… holding my breath almost at that hanging moment in the depth of my exhale where I have given everything and let go of more than I thought I could.

The suspension of time right before the inhale rushes in, bringing the outer world with it.

The moment has passed, the bubble is burst. It’s just me again, sitting hundreds of miles away from my teacher on the other side of the world. Yet still, it feels, we are tantalisingly connected by this thread, this ripple in the airwaves, this pulse of a human heartbeat and all the raw emotions of being alive.

I am loving and hating this practice.

I’m not fully committed, just dabbling.