SUNDI The Place Between

 

 The Sanskrit word sundi refers to the space between two actions. Or between "this thing and the next" - like a doorway.  A familiar sundi is the space between preparing food and eating it. Maybe we pause and honor that sundi, perhaps by saying grace. Other examples are dawn and dusk, significant sundis in the daily cycle. And there’s Sunday, the sundi between the weeks. A profound sundi, recognized by women who have given birth consciously, is “transition”, a potent quiet place between labor and birth, that is so powerful and filled with Shakti, that it feels like the eye of a storm of Grace.

In the sundi there exists possibility, a potential for an opening to Grace, to something new.

 In Yoga practice - asana, pranayama, and meditation - there are many sundis. In fact, these practices are well-designed to help us recognize and expand the magic of the sundi - of then "place in the middle”. For example:

·         The centering at the beginning of a Yoga class is a sundi between the busy world of 10,000 things, and the focused time of practice.

·         In asana, we learn in very physical ways to recognize the quality of a sundi. For example, we pause and connect to foundation and breath to make a skillful transition between poses. And we practice Tadasana as a pose which honors the place between poses.

·         Pranayama offers a wonderful awareness of sundi as it cultivates the pause between breaths, whether a gentle pause or a retention of the breath.

·         Meditation pivots awareness deeply within to a vibrating silence; at the end of a meditation, it is good practice to pause and honor the sundi, a liminal or transitional place, before your awareness moves fully outward to life.  In that way the energy of the meditation can follow you back out into your life.

·         Savasana can be a way to practice the Sundi between life and death (well OK - maybe just between yoga class and the rest of your day).

·         There is sundi just after a Yoga or meditation practice when you can consciously offer the fruits of the practice outward.

Whether on the mat or off the mat, sundis ask us to pause in recognition, and in that pause to expand the middle space between inward introversive awareness and outward manifesting awareness. We naturally and gradually learn to honor this pause between things rather than rushing forward to the next task or the next thought or the next …. [fill in the gap] …(Pun intended.) One benefit of all this is that we do not lose or drain off the energy that was cultivated in the practices but instead it builds and gives a good reserve of energy to use for our day.

Sundis offer us opportunities to enter a relationship with the Divine which lives in the “space between”.  To begin our day by dwelling in the sundi a bit is to begin our day with “the Beloved” – or with the Sacred Mystery” if you prefer, gathering Itself more firmly to us so It can follow us back out into our lives.

Once the day begins, we are almost always moving in an entrainment with a multitude of schedules and logistics and demands on our time and energy, doing the dance of outward moving awareness and manifestation. Often, we roll out of bed and into the world without even an awareness of the blessing of the sundi between sleep and waking, and then we march lockstep through our day all the way to sleep and miss that important sundi as well. While our busy day truly is the blessing of embodied life, it is more possible to awaken to that blessing if we learn to pause in the sundis – the between spaces. David Whyte expresses it beautifully in his poem “What to Remember When Waking.”  

 

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What to Remember When Waking  

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,

coming back to this life from the other

more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world

where everything began,

there is a small opening into the new day

which closes the moment you begin your plans.

 

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough

for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

 

To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.

 

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.

 

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window

toward the mountain presence of everything that can be

what urgency calls you to your one love?

What shape waits in the seed of you

to grow and spread its branches

against a future sky?

 

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?

In the trees beyond the house?

In the life you can imagine for yourself?

In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

 

from The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press