I am back after almost a year. I have to thank all of you for allowing me time to rest, recover and reflect. I also want to thank a random group of Substack writers, whom I met in Glasgow in May, because chatting to them about writing, and reading their own newsletters, helped to inspire me.
That meeting reminded me of the early Livejournal community, which I was so fond of. Through it, I met some of the most wonderful people I know. Linking this writing to the one I used to do in the early 2000s and meeting the contemporary community of bloggers around me was the link I was missing for creativity to flow.
The best piece of advice I was given on the meet up was to write as if I were a student. It clicked with me because if there is anything I feel I am and have always been is a student. I know how to do that. So I will share the things I am enquiring in the many classes I take.
Here we go.
Sometimes the biggest realisations come out of the most unexpected places. In 2020, Lucy Crisfield, who I began to work with, announced she was running her ‘Learn to Read Sanskrit’ course for the last time. I don’t like last times, so even though I never showed much of an interest in Sanskrit, I enrolled.
I loved it from the very beginning: Sanskrit awakens my artistic sense with the beautiful Devanagari script, gives me something challenging to engage my brain in and provides enormous satisfaction when I feel I get it. It has also provided tremendous cosmological shifts and one of these is around love.
Bear with me while I explain how a language can teach us about love. Lucy’s classes are anything but mechanical. We learn about ontology through language. In fact, every session she has led has been about understanding the sentence ‘I am’. We go right down to the point at which words are formed.
In Sanskrit, a root is joined with several affixes. This forms what is called a pratipadaka, which could be translated as ‘almost the nature of a word’, a word but not quite. For this to become a word it needs a special affix. And there are only two of these special affixes: they are called sup and tin. Sup has 21 forms and pertains only to nouns and tin has 18 and it creates verbs. These special affixes have a name: vibhakti, an outpouring of love. So it is love that ultimately makes a word, even those I am typing.
What does this mean?
What we say and what we hear matters a lot. It can make us healthy or unhealthy.
In the Indian system of thought, sound has four different stages or realms. These are sometimes referred to as the four levels of speech. They are vaikhari, madhyama, pasyanti and para.
Vaikhari is the grossest level, the usual gross sounds we utter and hear as we move through life, the physical aspect of sound. Madhyama, the middle stage is the subtle state of sound and speech, usually associated with wisdom, with an inner voice that can develop into speech. Deeper, in the causal realm, is pasyanti. Hearing and speaking from pasyanti is characterised by clarity and alignment. Para, (caturthi, or turiya, as this level is also known) is the fourth, and is to be found beyond the causal. It is the expression of pure intention, the will of reality, unadulterated by any individual colouring.
In psychoanalysis – my other love apart from yoga – there is the concept of evenly hovering attention which I wrote about in my book The Hysteric (coming out in paperback in October 2024). Evenly hovering attention is how the analyst has to listen. It is
… a state of reverie or meditation that allows the mind to be aware of more than one dimension at once, refusing to make one thing more important than others. … evenly hovering attention requires both indifference and engagement, and this may seem, at first, to be at cross purposes.
If I think that every word is born out of love, evenly hovering attention changes its meaning, even if a lot of that love is perhaps lost somewhere in the journey.
Psychoanalysis highlights the paradox of love. Perhaps it even attempt at the reconciliation this paradox. Like yoga (in the sense of union), love is not an either/or situation but a both-and. As Slavoj Žižek writes:
Love is a catastrophe. It’s a crazy illness. Love ruins your life. But I am very sad when I am not in love.
And even Jacques Lacan’s catastrophist definition of love in Seminar XII – love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it – does not stop me from feeling that love is a powerful force.
There is some form of love in evenly hovering attention, at least that was my own experience of psychoanalysis. I felt loved by how I was listened and spoken to in my therapy. And by being loved, I loved too.
I would like to work to recover this love in the way I express myself so I can align thoughts, words and speech to that which I hold most dear.
This year I completed an 8-month long ‘Living the Yoga Sutras’ course with my long-term teacher James Boag. The programme, in which we decoded Patanjali’s work word for word, sometimes syllable by syllable, gave me a lot of insights but if I can summarise a practical teaching emphasised by James it is the necessity to formulate a question to live by.
Its aim is to bring clarity to confused situations and to untangle matters. If it is to work, the form of words needs to be open to apply always, whatever the circumstance. Through discussing this, I realised many of my teachers, consciously or not, adopt this practice. They ask: Where am I in this? Is it true that …? Where can I soften? What am I hardening around? Where am I acting from? These words are like an ista devata, a personal deity, and you cannot choose them. They choose you, and they resonate in your being. It was in my grammar class that my question to live by chose me. For now, at least, my question is: where is the love?
In Ayurveda – traditional Indian medicine – my constitution is what is known as predominantly pitta. This means that my excess emotion tends to go towards anger and frustration. Where is the love? is an excellent question to tend to that fire and not let it burn me down, something I have experienced many times.
Love brings words into being. It makes something unmanifest manifest. I have often said that the purpose of my artwork is to make the invisible visible, so searching for this particular power within love as my question to live by made biographical sense. Love is like a ray of sunshine with the capacity to illumine. Once it gets through the cracks, there is no unseeing.
Do you have a question to live by?
Check my Instagram for my current yoga classes. I teach breath, movement and sound practices both live around Glasgow and online. I would love to see you!
Today, it is the New Moon in Gemini and being aligned to the moon, I plan to always send my newsletter when something auspicious happens in the sky above, maybe monthly, maybe not, as energy and inspiration allow. I hope it will make you orient to what is going on cosmically. Today is a good time to plant seeds, to sit still and listen for creative ideas.
Fantastic read! So thrilled to see you here, Laura. I really enjoyed this. And these words:
"Love brings words into being. It makes something unmanifest manifest. I have often said that the purpose of my artwork is to make the invisible visible, so searching for this particular power within love as my question to live by made biographical sense."
To this and more!
ROMANCE🎊🎊🎊