The Cleansing of Saidin

Learning to lead from inner wholeness

Devin.Shaw, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Author’s note: this idea for an essay only arrived yesterday, and today I am feverish and low energy and underslept, having had words bouncing around and taking shape much of the night. I had thought to save it for the 21st, but then writing is something that flows today whereas other planned activities do not. So here it is, with perhaps a bit less clarity than usual. It is a first-quarter moon today - the day of balance, equal light and dark, union.

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This story begins, for me, at the Ashland Goddess Temple where I unexpectedly found myself last weekend, it being on the same grounds as the music festival I was attending.

I wandered in one morning to a sound bath of a new-to-me and particularly resonant rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, by an artist named Jai-Jagdeesh.

In trying to find more of her music, I discovered her heartbreaking most recent album, born of revelations of years of abuse, manipulation, and bullying by Yogi Bhajan, the father of modern Kundalini Yoga and someone close to her family, much revered in her community.

Another one.

Why am I not surprised?

Every time this happens, we express shock. How could someone so beloved, so sincere, so spiritual, have within them such darkness? How have we allowed them to con us? Is there any real truth, real value, to their teachings?

Meanwhile, the number of gurus, celebrities, churches, religious boarding schools, and charismatic leaders of all stripes that are free of such allegations continues to dwindle. One of my last experiences with intense devotion to and adoration of a single individual was my one and only time at Bikram’s Yoga, back in 2008. Out of curiosity, I asked my friend Google about him, and yes, him too. And I see the same patterns repeating in my own extended family, extended community.

Perhaps it is time to stop laying the blame at the feet of bad people and start learning from our own mythology. I am thinking here of Isildur in The Lord of the Rings, and Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, and and probably at least one character in every fantasy or sci-fi story ever written.

Whether power is acquired through title or fame or skill or magic or simple charisma, there is always a point of choice, whether or not to follow a small voice that lives inside all of us, born of the illusion of separation, until we have done our deepest healing. I am not enough.

We may have the highest of ideals. We may have created methodologies, teachings based in love that bring real and lasting healing to millions. But if we feel inside that we are not enough, that we need validation, we will accept the power, the life force that others begin to give us, or that we choose to extract. We will rationalize increasingly strange and damaging behaviors.

We are not meant to hold others’ life force.

Where I think the exposés get it wrong is in their tendency to recast an entire life and work in a negative light, as if it were all a fraud, an act, a façade. We then grieve our losses, do our best to heal, and move on to the next guru or leader who has not (yet) been accused of impropriety.

Holding, extracting, accumulating others’ power and life force changes us, corrupts us. This is the message from our mythology that we seem never to learn, whether we look up to billionaires or celebrities or gurus or just the popular bully at school. In our desire to belong, to be held, to feel safe, we too often overlook the transgressions of the power brokers in our group. We continue to give them our power, our reverence, even as they change, shift out of integrity, sever their public persona from their private life.

We are not meant to give our life force away. As children we have to live within the container created for us, for better or worse. In Hannah’s beautiful words, “may they abide in the temple of my love’s essence until they recognize, within themselves, they are home.” (We Are Wanderers, p. 96, from For My Children) As adults, it is our task to create a home within ourselves, to come to know our inner truth, to grow into our own sovereignty.

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In the far-too-long-to-read Wheel of Time series, the power that animates the world, from which all creation derives, has two aspects: saidin (masculine) and saidar (feminine). Saidin, the masculine aspect, carries a taint, and all who work with it eventually descend into madness and violence. One of the major turning points of the story is the cleansing of saidin, and I have always found this peculiarly resonant to our present moment.

In what I feel to be true, what I would call saidin is our ability to consciously weave the pattern, to hold and touch and guide others and to shape the path of our own lives. What I would call saidar - the feminine aspect of our deepest reality - is the life force that bubbles up spontaneously within each of us, the wonder and joy and vivacity that we experience simply by being alive. Perhaps I am confusing you by choosing new words from a lesser-known story - I am doing it, I think, in an attempt to break preconceived definitions, to open new ways of seeing.

The taint that it is high time to heal - that affects both aspects - is a separation between the two, a sense that we are not enough. On the masculine side, a disconnection from our own saidar that lives within all of us, male or female. A need to source our life force externally. And - I say this from my own experience - no amount of success or achievement or adoration or control will produce a lasting feeling of wholeness - there is always a need for more validation. On the feminine side, a disconnection from our own saidin, an inability to hold ourselves in love, to weave our own stories. A need to source that container externally, to belong to a group, to submit to authority. A fear, perhaps, that in opening our own ability to hold ourselves, to hold others, we will ourselves fall into old patterns, subtly claiming others’ power or allowing them to give it to us.

We can choose to heal, to become whole within ourselves, but how then do we create community if we choose away from the typical structures of belonging, deference, binding ourselves to each other through a codependent transfer of vital energy? Our myths and histories are peppered with rare Gandalf or Aragorn characters who have great capacity to weave the pattern - great charisma or wisdom or respect - and who lead from a place of inner wholeness. Those who invite rather than coerce participation. Those who create structures and containers and then step aside, allowing everyone to weave their own pattern within. Those who are not controllers but conductors, who refuse to accept followers, who stand with rather than apart from, who weave diversity into resonant harmony.

Last weekend I had a number of opportunities to sing with Max Ribner, whose new Resilient Beings project is created and conducted in community, with no rigid expectations and no separation between “performer” and “audience”. Everyone is encouraged to add their own harmonies and improvisations, and Max holds the space with a calm and inviting power born of his own deep internal healing and wholeness. Very rarely in this life have I felt any level of attraction to a charismatic man - I usually maintain some distance to protect my own life force from extraction - but a part of me feels deeply held and seen within Max’s musical container, and I would like to see many more similar creations.

I feel also that there is a lesson for me, an unfolding, in this time. I seem to have an innate somatic resistance - a fear response of sorts - to opening to saidin, to taking up space in community, holding space for others, guiding a group in harmony, even as I find I am creating resonant connections. I sense that I might have a large untapped capacity for this, waiting to be opened in wholeness. Perhaps this is ready to shift. Perhaps I will explore creating group vocal resonance in my own community.

I feel it is high time for all of us to become whole, to heal the wound of separation within ourselves and within community, to stop taking others’ power or surrendering our own, to listen to the wind and the rain and our own inner voice, to curiously explore new ways of being on Earth. May it be so.