A guest piece · six moments · one story about the body
The Ramayana is usually told as a story about a king, a queen and a war. Read another way, it is a very precise story about what happens to a body when attention is taken from it — and how it comes back.
Why this story
I should say how I came to Swati, because it was not as an observer. A year ago we were looking for someone who could work with our daughter, whose development was not arriving the way it does for other children. Somebody said Swati’s name. That is how we met.
What has happened since is very hard to put into words, and I have mostly stopped trying to explain it to people. What I can tell you is one thing I saw. In the second session there was a profound change in how she walks. She walked straight, without support. I was in the room. Nobody pushed on anything.
I want to be careful with that sentence, because it is exactly the kind of story that gets told badly. It is one child, one afternoon, and it proves nothing about anyone else. It is also true, and I was there.
I am an engineer, not a scholar of the Ramayana, and I do not understand most of what Swati does. But a year of sitting in the room has given me a language for it, and the language that arrived was Hanuman’s. Everyone in India grows up with the scene: a monkey sitting on a shore, the ocean in front of him, unable to cross it — until an old bear reminds him that he could always fly. He had simply forgotten.
That is, as nearly as I can put it, what Swati does with her hands. She does not add anything to a body. She reminds it. I am writing this down while it is still happening to us, which is the only honest way I know to write it.
A caution before the rest. The six moments below are a reading, not a teaching. The Ramayana has carried many meanings for many people over a very long time, and this is one more, offered lightly. Swati has read a draft and sharpened one part of it, which I say where it happens; the rest, and any mistakes, are mine. Take what is useful.
01 · Prāṇa
Rama and Sita in the forest. Nothing has happened yet.
Watch a baby who has had an easy start. A movement begun at the foot travels without interruption — ankle, knee, hip, spine, head — and the whole body answers it. Nothing is being managed. Attention is not directed at the body; it simply lives there.
This is the state Swati is always listening for underneath everything else, and the reason her question is never what is wrong here. Her question is where does the conversation stop — which assumes there was a conversation to begin with.
In the story, Rama and Sita are not two people who happen to be together. When I sent Swati a draft of this, she put it more exactly than I had. Sita is the movement. Rama is the sensing of it. And presence, in her work, is not something passive that only grounds you: it has movement in it. It does not give the movement a direction. It lets the movement emerge, with the recognition that the ability to move was there all along.
The forest is quiet because nothing has yet pulled the two apart.
02 · The rupture
Ravana takes Sita. Rama is left with the forest.
A fracture at five. A birth that got stuck. A fright nobody remembers. The body contracts around it and finds a way through — and the way through works, which is exactly the problem. Attention is pulled away from the part that was hurt, a workaround takes its place, and nobody comes back later to tell the nervous system that the moment has passed.
Swati’s way of saying it is that a body keeps compensating long after the reason has gone. The held shoulder, the leg that has gone quiet, the head that does not turn: each is a place from which attention was carried off, and each is still guarding the spot where it happened.
It is worth noticing what Ravana does not do. He does not destroy Sita. He removes her. The capacity is intact; it has been taken somewhere attention no longer travels.
03 · Chetanā
Hanuman on the shore. Jambavan reminds him.
This is the moment the whole reading turns on. Hanuman was cursed as a child to forget his own powers until someone reminded him of them. So he sits on the shore, an ocean between him and Lanka, and it does not occur to him that he can cross it. Jambavan, the old bear, does not give him anything. He tells him what is already true.
This is the closest description I have found of what Swati’s hands do. They are not treating. They are not correcting. They are Jambavan’s voice, addressed to one part of the body at a time: you can do this; you always could. A hand rests on a foot, and the foot is given the chance to find out that it is still connected to the knee.
It also explains one of her stranger working rules. If a body is not changing, she assumes her input is insufficient, not that the body is resisting. Jambavan does not blame Hanuman for forgetting. He finds a better way to remind him.
There is a third figure in the panel, easy to miss. Rama sits on the shore behind them. He cannot cross the water himself. He is watching someone else remind his people of what they can do. That is where a parent sits, and I have sat there for a year. You learn to stay out of the way. Swati says parents unlearn the habit of starting from the outcome faster than therapists do. I think it is because we have already tried the outcome, and watched it not arrive.
04 · Śakti
The leap across the sea.
Once Hanuman remembers, the leap is not effortful. He does not train for it, and nobody pushes him off the rock. Remembering and moving are nearly the same event.
This is the part that looks like magic in a session and is not. The man with the dead leg did not strengthen anything. Once the part of him that insisted rest is not permitted was genuinely allowed to rest, the leg came alive and light in the same hour, and movement went through from hip to knee to ankle. Nothing was added. Something was permitted, and power that had been sitting on the shore for years stood up.
The order matters. Śakti follows Chetanā; it does not replace it. Try to force the leap and you get strain, or nothing. This is why Swati is so unbending about it: nothing moves under force. The body knows the difference between an invitation and a demand, and only one of them gets a monkey across the water.
05 · Recognition
Hanuman finds Sita in the Ashoka grove and offers her Rama’s ring.
Hanuman crosses the sea, finds Sita, and offers her Rama’s ring. She recognises it. In that moment the part that was taken learns two things at once: that it has not been forgotten, and that it is safe to be found.
Every account on this site has that moment in it somewhere. The two-month-old who had been stuck in the birth canal, whose face changed under Swati’s hands when what she was given was not correction but the message that is over, you are here now. The woman whose guarded arm, weeks later, turned into a boundary set with her parents for the first time. The ring is not information. It is presence arriving where attention had stopped travelling.
And notice what Sita does. She does not leave with Hanuman. She could; he offers. She waits for Rama to come himself. A held part of the body will not release for the messenger alone. It releases when it is sure the whole person is going to arrive — which is what Swati means when she says safety is what makes acceptance possible.
06 · Bhakti
Hanuman opens his chest. Rama and Sita were inside all along.
At the end, asked what he has to show for his devotion, Hanuman tears open his chest, and there are Rama and Sita, seated in his heart. The two who were separated are not somewhere else to be reached. They are inside the body that did the reaching: the movement, and the sensing of it, back in one place.
This is the state the whole practice points towards, and the reason Swati will not call it a method. When attention lives in the body again, and the body trusts that it will not be forced, movement stops being something you do to yourself and becomes something you are. The distinction she draws is exact: allowing cannot be conditional on an outcome. If you permit the pain in order to be rid of it, the body knows. In her words, it does not want to operate in the realm of lies.
Bhakti is the word for action that has stopped bargaining. Hanuman does not fly across the sea to get something. He flies because that is what a body does when Rama and Sita are already in it.
The four words
These are old words with long histories, and I am using them in a narrow, bodily sense. Roughly:
If you would like to feel the first of these in your own body rather than read about it, Swati recorded an invitation one night. It is an invitation to be exactly where you already are. That is where Hanuman was sitting, too.