Spiritual work is usually pictured as something stern. Early alarms, a straight spine, serious faces, the sense of doing something important and difficult. A woman starts a practice like that and a month later finds she has acquired one more obligation to push herself through. On the law that actually governs a woman's path, Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, a musician, composer, author and facilitator of personal development trainings for women.
The strictness that gives a woman very little
Peruquois has been through many of the strict formats. “I was in many satsangs in my life, in men's practices and in yoga practices, everywhere. All of them very strict, serious, formal,” she says.
That form works beautifully for someone built in a straight line. There is a goal, there is a regimen, there is a result, and the more effort you put in the more progress you see. For a woman it usually adds one more weight on top of everything she already carries. The house, the job, the kids, responsibility for everyone's mood, and now a practice she has to measure up to as well.
What follows is predictable. The practice becomes an item on a to-do list. She does it, she skips it, she feels guilty about it. Energy rarely comes out of it.
The path of pleasure
“For me the path of a woman is the path of pleasure. It is the path of a feeling of fullness, of grace, of joy,” Peruquois says.
Her reasoning is short. We live in a heavy world, and a woman vitally needs that sense of joy and grace. Without it she looks around, searches for it, finds it nowhere, and loses her connection to two things at once: to herself and to the world.
Pleasure here is the very method by which a woman returns into herself. The body responds to what feels good instantly, without persuasion, and opens exactly where effort would only make it tighter.
What a woman looks like when she has lost her bearings
Peruquois describes this state in detail, because she sees it constantly in her work.
The woman has lost trust. Somewhere she was hurt, and ever since she has been looking for ways to survive. The heart is closed, sensitivity and sensuality are blocked. The mind runs her life completely, so she worries all the time and lives in constant stress. She trusts neither life, nor her own inner voice, nor her love. Love exists somewhere out there, for other people, and “not for me right now.”
The stream of intelligent, conscious, loving energy has not gone anywhere. She has simply dimmed it, muted it, and that is why she feels lost. “She lost the anchor in herself,” says Peruquois.
A state like that cannot be corrected with discipline. Discipline speaks to the mind, and here the mind is already working itself to the bone.
The dance warm-up as the first practice
This is why the first practice in her work is physical and light.
Peruquois recommends doing it first thing in the morning. The best hour is early, around six or six thirty, when the energy is fresh and bright. You get out of bed, you stand up, and you do a simple dance practice that is freeing and filling at the same time. It has one task: to touch your own body with love.
There is no required number of repetitions in this practice, no correct technique, no report to yourself at the end of the week. There is movement that feels good, and ten minutes in which nobody wants anything from you.
In her experience, states women had forgotten existed begin to open. “So much pleasure, so much life, so much joy,” she says of what she sees in her groups.
Why trust grows out of pleasure
A woman who has lost trust does not get it back by reasoning. You can explain to her endlessly that life is safe and that she is loved. While the body is clenched, the readiness for the worst stays in place.
Pleasure works directly. Easy movement, a warm palm, a deep exhale, music she likes, all tell the body the same thing: right now you do not have to defend yourself. The body lets go, and the mind follows, because it reads the state of the body faster than any argument.
This is why lightness comes first in her work and depth comes second. The order is the reverse of the usual one, and it explains why women in her practices reach what years of effort never gave them.
What opens after that
From that sense of the body opening through pleasure, the work goes deeper.
First a meeting with yourself and with your body. Then the opening of the heart, which a woman feels physically, and after that the mistrust stops holding. By Peruquois's observation, on the fourth or fifth day a woman goes through an enormous opening in the body: the heart opens, the womb opens, the whole body opens, and the sense arrives that it is filling with sensual, loving energy.
Women say the same thing at that moment, and it sounds almost like a discovery. So this is what she is like. How beautiful she is.
A few days later the connection to the field of the soul comes back, and meditation becomes something else. The field fills with a stream of insights and revelations that do not arrive by thinking.
Lightness as a working instrument
A woman's practice does not have to be hard, because heaviness does not open a woman's body. It closes it, exactly the way fear, hurry and the need to measure up close it. What opens it is what feels good: movement, sound, breath, the warmth of her own palm, music, pleasure with no purpose at all.
There is discipline on this path, it is simply built differently. You come back to the practice for one reason: you want to be there. That is the only regimen a woman keeps for years.
If you want a practice you are drawn to rather than one you force yourself into, take Peruquois's course Meditation for Women, Level I.
Do you have any questions? Contact me now
Should you have any questions, please contact me via messengers below. I'll reply you shortly.