Nandi- The Somatic posture of Patience

Picture credit: Lakshmi Ambady

Hills have no sap in them, they say.

Tell me, how else are trees born there?

Charcoal has no liquid in it, they say

Tell me, how else does iron melt in it?

I have no language, they say.

Tell me, how else does

Shambho speak through me?

Do I wait for him forever or should I simply surrender

To his passage through the veins of my being?

Tell me…

We often think of waiting as weakness, as helplessness, as delay. But what if waiting, in its truest form, is a somatic posture of patience and inner power? In Hinduism, Nandi—the sacred bull, Shiva’s mount and gatekeeper is not merely an animal. He is a symbol of somatic devotion and an archetype of stillness that waits without tension. Nandi does not move, not because he cannot. But because he has already arrived. He just kneels. At the feet of his Shambho. He does not wait for his Lord of the Linga out of lack. He is waiting from fullness. From knowing that Shiva will come to him from the centre of silence within.

For Nandi, each moment is an eternity grazed by this love for Shiva. Nandi teaches us that wait can be devotion. Wait can be presence with somatic surrender. Wait can be undying love and patience. Nandi does not wait for Shiva.

He waits as Shiva.

And in his waiting, he becomes the very silence that Shiva embodies himself. Nandi’s posture is depicted with his hooves rooted in the Earth and his spine curved like a crescent moon. This is embodied longing that asks for nothing because it already contains the beloved. And Shiva comes not because Nandi calls, but because Nandi becomes the tranquillity that Shiva hears.

In the science of Somatic Experiencing®, the body does not wait like the mind does. The mind waits with impatience. The body waits with sensation. The body does not rush time—it inhabits it. Nandi is like the body that knows there is no such thing as separation. Only rhythms, cycles, seasons. There is no longing in his waiting—because he is not missing anything. It is a full-bodied reverence for something already here. Devotion is a state of the nervous system. Nandi’s stillness is his devotion. Through this devotion he imbibes the essence of that form of Shiva which is Shambo- the silent one. This is nothing but regulated presence. It is the parasympathetic whisper that says- “You are safe to rest here. You are home.“

So, what are you waiting for? Ask yourself this…are you ready to give yourself up to the stillness of Somatic Experiencing®?

Because what if your waiting is sacred? What if the stillness you’re being asked to hold is not emptiness—but initiation? What if the thing you are being invited to witness is something divine? Within you itself? What if?

Symbolically we are all like Nandi, kneeling at the temple door of our lives. Wanting and waiting, not in defeat, but in devotion. Not because Shiva is absent, but because we can become the stillness through which he arrives. Shambho.