The Moon Meditation
The Moon Meditation
I learned this Moon meditation in India, in Chennai, at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram where I studied vedic chanting. After the course, I hit the road and went to Tiruvannamalai where I stayed at the ashram of Ramana Maharshi, who is said to have attained enlightenment and who had many devotees. When I was there, he was no longer living in form, so in a room in the ashram they had a full-sized painting of him perched on a couch, the couch where he had always sat when teaching. His devotees would all sit, listening to his teachings, and then meditate with him. Now we sat with his painting, meditating with his image.
In another building made of dark mahogany posts and beams, smooth cool marble floors, tall open doors and windows, his ashes were held in an urn that sat on a grand throne of a stone and wood chair-like structure adorned with garlands of flowers, incense, and food offerings. Consistently, at any time of the day or night, there were people walking around the rim of the structure in one direction, then the other, mumbling chants, sounding bells, or silently walking. It was beautifully haunting.
The Moon was days away from being full, and when the Moon is full devotees worship and celebrate Siva by circling the mountain against which the Ashram is nestled. The Mountain is the embodiment of Ramana who is the embodiment of Siva. The Mountain is Siva himself.
However, I left before the full Moon. I went down to Pondicherry, which is an amalgam of India mixed with French colonization. It has a European feel to it, yet is swimming in India. I met up with my friend, Rosa Ugarte from Chile, in a small fishing village just north of Pondicherry. We stayed under a thatched roof made of thin branches and palm leaves above a small room of a kitchen, with no power but an electrical cord pushed up through the slats in the floor from the kitchen below. We sat on a rickety platform overlooking the small bay and the goings-on of this community. We saw a knife fight, a snake encounter, the comings and goings of long wooden boats heading out in the darkness of early morning to bring fish back to the shore and sell on tattered blue tarps on the ground in the heat with flies hovering and street dogs scratching.
The medicine of the moon teaches us the nature of rhythm and change. This meditation teaches us how the power of chant and repetition threads that which ebbs and flows in our lives.
This one evening it happened to be my birthday and my friend was my friend because I had met her in Chennai and we had studied vedic chanting together, so that experience was resonating in our hearts and between us. This night the Moon was full, and we watched her rise over the Bay of Bengal. There was nothing but a small path that separated our domicile from the beach and boats and in the evenings people would come back from the day. One man returned each evening around 11 at night and put his mat out and that is where he lived, that is where he slept. In the morning, he would wake up, brush himself off, go poop in the ocean, and be on his way, and every night he would return.
On this night of the day I was born 41 years earlier, we chanted the Somaya mantra, the mantra of the Moon, in many ways on that deck under the light above the beach in the center of the Universe on the edge of India.
There was one pattern of practicing the mantra where you begin chanting loudly and then get quieter. There is a paradoxical power to this experience where, when chanting loudly, the focus is obvious and outward, yet the transformative power of the chant is weaker than when chanting quietly. When chanting quietly, we touch more intimate layers of the self. And chanting silently is said to penetrate directly into the main channel of the spine which is the portal of our becoming and the seed of our birth. The first thing formed in the womb is the spine. What once was not now is; the paradox is that all form arises out of silence, emptiness, that which is subtler than subtle. And arriving at yet another paradox, we then use that form to return to that infinite space within.
Soma is the medicine of the Moon. This mantra links us to the Moon. The Moon is the reflective side, the dark side. We can liken the way we chant to the waxing and the waning of the Moon by working with volume
