Entering the Other Room
Read slowly, aloud, leaving a breath between lines; about twenty-five minutes. It can be read by a clinician to a client, or recorded and played back in your own voice. The text has a guide go in with the seeker; this practice keeps that guide.
Before you begin. This is a guided practice of stillness, imagery and return, built on the sequence of Līlā and the goddess. It is for healthy adults. Do not use it unsupervised if you have, or have had, a psychotic illness, a dissociative disorder, depersonalisation or derealisation, uncontrolled epilepsy, or trauma that still produces flashbacks. If you are grieving and have had any thoughts of ending your life, or of joining the person who has died, do not use this practice alone: speak first to a doctor, a therapist or a crisis line, and use it later, with them. In the first weeks after a death, use only the stillness and the return. Nothing in this practice is contact with the dead; it is a way of visiting what you carry. Sit, do not lie down. Never practise while driving, operating anything, or in or near water.
How to return at any moment. If anything becomes too much, say aloud, "I am in this room," press your feet into the floor, count up from one to five, and open your eyes on five. Nothing requires you to stay.
Sit down.
Before anything else, name the loss or the longing you are bringing. One word is enough. And name the room it lives in. Every grief has a room: a bedroom, a kitchen, a hospital corridor, a chair no one sits in now. You do not have to go there. Only know which room it is.
Now let this room, the real one, be closed and quiet. Doors shut. Nothing will come in. It is late, and everyone else is asleep.
Somewhere in the back of your understanding there is a guide. You do not have to know her name. Call her quietly, the way Līlā called at midnight, and notice that some part of you is already listening.
Breathe out.
Let the body become still, as a carved figure is still. The statue does not hold itself still; it simply is. Let the shoulders be stone. Let the hands be stone, resting. Let the face be smooth.
Breathe out.
Now let the thoughts close, the way a lotus closes at the end of the day. You do not shut it. The light goes, and the petals fold of themselves. Thought after thought, folding.
The limbs are quiet, like a cloud resting on a mountaintop on a calm autumn day. Nothing moves it.
Let attention rest on one point: the breath at the nostrils, or the weight of the hands. Fixed there, without effort. The sounds of the room are further away.
Breathe out.
You are in the middle place now, the doorway between one room and another, neither here nor there. Rest in the doorway.
(Pause.)
Now, if you wish, and only if you wish, let a lighter body of you rise. Not far. One span, the width of a hand. The heavy body stays on the chair, safe, exactly where you left it, waiting for you.
Feel the guide beside you. Her hand takes yours. You are not alone in this.
If rising feels wrong, stay seated, and simply let the inner eye open instead. Either way is right.
Let the space open as far as it wishes, wide and quiet perhaps, like an ocean of air under a full moon. Look around with open, easy eyes. Nothing here needs to be done.
Breathe out.
Now, with the guide's hand in yours, come down towards a house. It is the house where your grief lives, or a house where you once lived, or a house you have never seen but somehow know. Go in. No one sees you yet.
Notice who is there. Notice who is grieving. It may be someone you know. It may be someone who looks a great deal like you, younger perhaps.
You can stay unseen. Or, if you choose, you can let them see you. Choose quietly.
If you choose to be seen, go to the one who is grieving most, and lay your hand gently on their head, the way a plant leans down to its own new shoot. Not to carry them off. Not to hold on. Only to lean.
Let something cool pass from your hand, like the first rain after a hot season.
Let them feel it.
(Pause.)
Now let the house be. Let them go back to their day, to the small tasks of the house. They will be all right.
Rise again with your guide, and look down at everything you have seen from a height. See how a long reign fits into eight days, how a life of hurry, haste and hasten, fits into one breath. See how each person down there is the shape of what they believe themselves to be, and how gently that shape can change.
You might say, silently, I see the worlds within me, as oil is held in a mustard seed.
Rest here.
(Silence: one to three minutes.)
Now it is time to come back.
Feel the guide's hand still in yours, and let her lead you down, gently, towards the room where you began. You can see the chair. You can see your body sitting there, quiet and safe.
Come down into it, the way one finds oneself in one's own bed after a dream.
Let the breath come in through the nostrils, a little fuller.
Let warmth and colour come back into the face and hands.
Let the limbs soften. Let the fingers move. Let the feet press into the floor.
I will count from one to five, and on five the eyes open, clear and rested.
One. The breath is full and ordinary.
Two. The hands and feet are your own, warm and heavy.
Three. The sounds of the room return, near and clear.
Four. Take a deep breath in, and let the shoulders roll once.
Five. Eyes open. Here. Now. Fully alert.
Now test the room, as Līlā tested the court. Look around and name, aloud, five things you can see. Touch something solid: the chair, the table, the wall. Say your name, the day and the place. Stand up slowly and take a few steps. If you feel at all distant or slow, sit and count from one to five again, drink some water, and wait ten minutes before driving or doing anything that needs full attention.
If you laid your hand on someone in that house, you may want to write down what you felt. It belongs to you.
