A collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad & Bhanu Kapil
DAY ONE:
Rest your hands on a vibrating machine: car, fan, washing machine or dryer, anything with a motor that vibrates. Take notes after a few minutes, spontaneous notes, write with one hand still on the machine. Rest your cheek and other body parts against the machine, close your eyes and allow a low hum to build deep inside your body. Deepen the hum and allow it to rise. Open your mouth to release it. Take notes with your forehead against the vibrating machine. What is a favorite song from your childhood? Hum that song (don’t sing the words) with eyes closed with as much of your body pressed against the machine that you can manage. HUM HUM HUM THIS SONG LOUDER AND LOUDER AND LOUDER. Take notes about the song about the time in your life when you first heard it and take notes about now take notes about your life that is now.
DAY TWO:
River Inversion. An experiment in cadence. Walk to the nearest river. This may take you days. This may take you minutes. Invert yourself above this river. Let your hair go into the river. You are face up. If you do not have long enough hair, or hair, then let your hands go into the river, above your head. You are lying on the ground as close to the edge as you can get. You walked here. It's snowing. It is winter-time. It is spring-time. You live in the country you were born in. You are in India. You are far from home. Perhaps there is no river. Perhaps you are at the sea. A river is more stable, yet runs shakti. Shaki is the primordial vibration. It is the divine feminine vibration, and I have found it in the rivers of North America as much as the Ganges or Thames. Some rivers are very powerful. I went to Chicago and the river below my window was a toxic river, but I felt
the shakti like KALI. An oblivion. It doesn't matter if it is pure river or a toxic river or an ordinary stream with mixed qualities. As an extension of your body you could use, instead of hair or hands, wool, or branches -- something that you will feel in your own body when it moves in the current. This is the current. Wait until you feel your breathing and spinal flow mixing with the riverbank or shore. Your throat is open. Your head tilted back. At the same time, you should feel almost slumped. Very relaxed and free. It is hard to experience a physical feeling of freedom with someone telling you to feel that way. But nevertheless, this is the path of descent. It is not about posture, it is about the surrender of posture. I am sharing with you what I learned at the ashram in Kankhal. Stay there as long as you can, until the vibration of the river has mixed in with your body. Inside, with your lips zipped shut, repeat: "Ram." A long central syllable: "Raaaaaaam." Like an "a" version of OM. This will run the shakti through you even more. You could say it 8 times aloud, then zip your mouth shut and repeat/chant the syllable inside you. This will increase the power of your mantra. You will now when you have softened. If you have recently suffered a heartbreak, or find yourself unable to shake the sense of loss following a broken love, visualize, too, a stream of light as gold-white as the sun coming into your heart center. Sometimes, if I have a lot of anxiety, I bring the parallel shakti of the sun into my forehead. In-breath: the light comes in. Out-breath: the light softens out, filling the chest or the brain. The brain is very real. I know you are not meant to think of the brain as a reservoir of thought, but lately, I have been thinking that the brain is, in fundamental ways, that cave. Of red things. But in the river inversion, the brain is surrendered to the larger flow of images.Now it is time to go home, or to a sheltered place. Sit up gently, and take in your hand some of the earth of the riverbank. Just
keep in it in your fist until you reach your home, or the the sheltered place. Try not to speak to anyone. When you have reached the next place, put the dirt on the table where you have sat to write. Take out your notebook, or its equivalent. Now write the beginning of the book you have wanted to write for much of the last five years, or more. A poet's novel. A page or two. A map. Day Two is for cleansing. Day Two is for beginning something new.
