Prayer of Savitri within Body’s Substance
This is a one hour recorded practice that a small group of us did in Savitri Bhavan, Auroville on 22 February 2025.
Link to One Hour Guided Practice: https://youtu.be/Lp5vNi3auuw
In this practice session we work here on the substance of our body to make it more conscious and offer it and link it with the Divine. When we use the word substance, what we are referring to is the matter, the weight and density of the body. Just allow the substance to rest on the substance itself to just make it a little bit more relaxed. We’ll also bring our awareness below our feet and through that we are actually trying to enter into our subconscious and inconscient, which is also the collective and we’ll try and go deep down.
And when we read Savitri or we use the chant AUM, everything we’ll do silently. We can offer it to the body and we can also offer it to the below, and we’ll see. The aspiration all of us can keep is, some day it’ll be beautiful if we discover the Divinity at the very depth below in the inconscient also. Like we do the practice above the head, this is also important.
If you connect to your body, you will feel its weight and its sensations. Normally, we are trained on a single point concentration. Try and develop a multiple point concentration where your awareness can touch 10, 20 or even 100 points across your body and learn to hold your awareness across your body to some extent. Keep attention across the body, hundred points or thousand points across. Show those points to the Mother, to Sri Aurobindo, to the Divine, so that they can directly act.
Notice when it is a flow – a continuous flow. Notice when you get stuck. And then shift your awareness so that you’re living in with your awareness inside a particular point and show it to the Divine.
From the learnings of The Mother, how She used to do the prayer of the cells, in our own simple way, be within these many different points and silently pray to the Divine. For example you can say, may Your beauty be manifest here. So when we say may Your beauty, you’re looking into the Divine. May Your beauty be manifest here. And when we say ‘here’ focus on one or two or three, four points in your body that intuitively emerges.
May Your beauty be manifest here. May Your joy manifest here. May Your wisdom manifest here. Drop deeper within your body, feeling into your body’s mass, matter, substance. Go deeper overall into it. But for that you have to develop an interest, a love for matter – the basis of existence. So go deeper into your body’s substance. And there continue the prayer.
Now when you go deeper into your body’s substance, be free in your mind, so that you discover new domains of the substance, which you’re not aware normally. A substance is not just gross matter. As you go deeper, you move into subtle, supple domains of matter which seems more softer, more lit. And that will come when you just do this in a very relaxed way. You relax your body and just move in to the very substance and if possible you discover a matter which seems more softer, more lit, more nicer, to put it that way.
Develop an attitude of worship because there is a Divine matter inside all of us. We see that in the Mother’s Agenda very clearly. It’s not Divine present as matter, there is a Divine matter itself inside all of us. Even if you are not aware, with faith, bow down and touch the depth of your body’s substance.
Now the beauty about the deeper substance is that it is very malleable. So with your awareness just compress, condense this substance. Which means you are not just doing on the physical matter. Whatever is the inner part of the matter that is appearing to you or you are feeling it, just condense that for a few moments, and then just allow it to expand for a few moments.
On your own, you will do this condensing and expansion across your body, hugging the cells of the matter closer intimately, that is condensing, and then allowing it to connect to vastness which is expanding.
Into this, wherever we read some Savitri, just allow the Savitri lines and consciousness to touch the depth of your body. So you be in your body’s depth. We will chant the mantra AUM once or twice for the sake of the collective. You silently receive it in the depth. of your body. So you’ll have to be inside your body’s substance. Today, be in the depth of your body’s substance and receive the AUM and a few lines that I read from Savitri, giving a lot of break time.
And while you are in this practice, leave your body connected to the Consciousness above. So, you are aware of your body and you are also aware of the above. Which means, there could be a zone of silence, vastness, a zone of light or a zone of joy, whatever is there, you are connecting to it and allowing that to take over your body.
Now if you bring the tradition of breath and prana work, as you are inside your body, there is a prana that is spread across the body. If you become aware of that, that conscious breath and prana opens the body, allows cells more to be receptive to what comes from above.
In this posture, receive the sounds and Savitri lines…
We can prepare for a labour of love to go into our subconscious, unconscious, to offer that too to the Divine, so that the Divine’s glory can manifest. So we’ll begin with our body itself. Intuitively connect to your body, where you have deeply ingrained patterns, habits that are pretty much hardened and no matter what we try, there is a repetitive stubbornness. This could be in a particular way of being or health. Just get into the process. These hard habits are ingrained in our body. Intuitively connect across your body into layers of rigidness, falsehood and patterns that are there. Look into these patterns. Half the time we won’t even know what these are but we would have an intuitive feel. Look deeply into these hard grained habits, illnesses present within us and silently tell into these regions, praying to the divine, ‘May Your force manifest here. May your force manifest here.’
Continue to look very deep. And sometimes when we are looking into these hard grained habits, certain images may come, certain memories could pop up sometimes not even from our lives. Just take them as embedded stuff in the cells of your body and look at them neutrally, but directly and pray to the divine. So from the cells, you’re looking up to the Divine and you’re praying ‘May your love manifest here. May your will manifest in this body, across all the cells.’
Now, take your awareness below your feet. For some, it could appear as if you’re entering and going down into the earth. That’s if you’re doing it very materially. That’s also fine. For some, it’ll appear as if the moment you go down, you will notice a dark zone. And if you’re very sensitive, you will notice some untransformed stuff. So I’ll be reading lines of Savitri once or twice. You don’t pay attention to Savitri, but you go down below your feet. If you get that zone of darkness, travel through that and every part of that, offer it, like you may offer your home. Allow the AUM to touch below your feet into the darkness. Offer the words of Savitri into the darkness. And by doing like that, keep going down and down.
Receive the sound AUM in the darkness below. Keep on going down. And the terrain is vast. On all sides you will find all kinds of things if you are sensitive. Grasping the hand of the Divine keep going down and keep offering the sounds into that regions wherever you are. Connecting to the Divine Mother or Sri Aurobindo or both take a final dive of your awareness into whatever depth you are able to touch with an aspiration that today or another day you discover the golden Divinity below. In whatever manner it comes to you, take the deepest dive possible, aspiring to touch the Divine source below. Wherever you have reached, receive these lines of Savitri there as seeds, so that the work can continue by the grace of the Divine.
Both deep within our body’s substance and also in the consciousness below our feet, we read the following lines of Savitri, and allowed its vibrations to touch our body and subconscious / inconscient:
“A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.
A mediating ray had touched the earth
Bridging the gulf between man’s mind and God’s;
Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.
A spirit of its celestial source aware
Translating heaven into a human shape
Descended into earth’s imperfect mould
And wept not fallen to mortality,
But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.
One had returned from the transcendent planes
And bore anew the load of mortal breath,
Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;
She took again her divine unfinished task:
Survivor of death and the aeonic years,
Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.
Again there was renewed, again revealed
The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,
The secret contact broken off in Time,
A consanguinity of earth and heaven,
Between the human portion toiling here
And an as yet unborn and limitless Force.
Again the mystic deep attempt began,
The daring wager of the cosmic game.
For since upon this blind and whirling globe
Earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining mind
And life invaded the material sheath
Afflicting Inconscience with the need to feel,
Since in Infinity’s silence woke a word,
A Mother-wisdom works in Nature’s breast
To pour delight on the heart of toil and want
And press perfection on life’s stumbling powers,
Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss
And make dumb Matter conscious of its God. ”
Page 353-354, Savitri, Sri Aurobindo
I’ll be quiet for five minutes now. Either you can be silent or you can open your own Savitri and intuitively pick just two lines. Just read two lines and offer it to your body and to your breath.
We simply close our eyes for the final prayer, connecting to your entire body and its substance, bringing that attitude of worshipping your own substance. What comes to us in the first glance is our illnesses, our discomforts, our good and bad. But beneath that, everywhere there is Divine matter. So with faith, we go down into our body’s substance.
Connecting to our entire substance of our body, we look up to the Divine above with the concluding prayer:
May your will manifest within this body.
May your joy manifest within this body.
May your love manifest here.
May your purity manifest itself here.
May your flow manifest here.
We offer ourselves unto you, O Lord.
By ‘here’ we pointed to specific points / cells of our body and also in general across our body.
