In the Blink of an Eye
Oct 23, 2024
It’s been a magnificent autumn week at the Kripalu Center in Western Massachusetts. I’m attending the Wisdom of Trauma Conference, focused on somatic approaches to healing trauma.
I'm inspired by how mental health professionals are increasingly recognizing the power of integrating the body and breath into traditional therapy. This awakening reminds me of a profound Tantric metaphor: unmesha and nimesha – the opening and closing of Shiva's eyelids.
According to tradition, the world manifests when Shiva – the principle of pure, unbounded consciousness – opens his eyes (unmesha means "the opening of eyelids"). When Shiva closes his eyes (nimesha), the world dissolves. This perpetual blinking creates and recreates the world, illustrating the nature of consciousness as an ever-emergent pulse of expansion and contraction.
This metaphor works on two levels. From an external perspective, it mirrors our usual experience of the world. As I sit here writing, watching the sunrise, the world comes into being in my awareness – an unmesha of sorts. Tonight, darkness will make the outer world seem to vanish.
But the metaphor also has an internal dimension. When we close our eyes in meditation or other inward practices, the outer world fades, and we awaken to our inner landscape. This too is a form of unmesha – an opening to our interiority, where memories are stored, and wisdom resides.
When we emerge from meditation by opening our eyes, some of those internal experiences may fade, but their essence lingers, infusing our outer life and shifting how we relate, communicate, and act.
This is the essence of a transformative yoga practice: a rhythmic dance between inner discovery and outer expression. True wholeness embraces both movements, allowing our inward journey of self-awareness to shape how we engage with the world.
Like Shiva's cosmic blink, we can embrace this sacred rhythm of turning inward and extending outward to find our own perfect pulse of being and becoming.