The biggest love story

Forget Valentines Day - Saturday 18 February is MahaShivaratri - the great night of Shiva. In fact it is his wedding night. Shiva is the embodiment, personality or force of nature which brings change by removing irrelevance.  His presence is signalled by wind, but also by many stories involving elephants, tigers, snakes and a host of lesser demons that he vanquishes for the god of humanity, and natural balance.

Like many Vedic deities, he has 1008 names, and myriad stories. Best known as blue throat for the time he swallowed poison that was set to destroy - well, everything. His ability also to destroy destruction gives him the name the great preserver. For all his fearsome forms, he is said to be generous with his divine intervention to those who seek him out.

He spent millennia as a sadhu, holy, bearded and dreadlocked and often smeared in ash. In fact the story goes he turned up to his own wedding like this - and caused his future mother in law to faint.

Luckily his brother Vishnu saved the day and cleaned him up til, so the story goes, he was radiant and bejewelled. After the wedding there was a honeymoon of ten thousand years, so safe to say this is good time to catch Shiva in a mode of generous attention.

As meditators we practice letting go each time we shut our eyes. In this way, we embrace the divine Dancer,  Shiva the remover of irrelevance. We tune in to his gentle form, so he doesn’t have to shake things up for us with the big storms of change.

How should you  mark today? Traditionally you would stay up all night, and in India there will be puja ceremonies and chanting and offerings.

It is a good time to:

Meditate

Fast

Have a clear out.

Whatever invites progressive change in to you life.

Clear out the  weeds to plant the seeds. It is spring after all!

And let’s remember - We don’t want to meditate so much that we forget to make an appropriate appearance among the world.