The Lila of Awareness
Divine play, ecological belonging, and the practice of returning
This week, as I deepened my practice of self-awareness, the concepts of Lila—divine or cosmic play—and existential creativity stirred something ancient yet alive within me.
Lila is a word from my Hindu ancestry. It has been present in my life since childhood, carried through stories, rituals, and the language of elders. When life became difficult or inexplicable, elders sometimes described it as the Lila of Krishna, Shiva, or Shakti, according to their devotional relationship. The phrase offered surrender: life was not merely punishment or chaos, but part of a mystery larger than the individual mind could comprehend.
Returning to Lila now, I receive both its spiritual beauty and its ethical complexity.
Lila can help us loosen our demand that every moment obey our plans. It can restore wonder, humility, and openness to life’s unfolding. But it should not be used to sanctify suffering, silence grief, excuse injustice, or suggest that another person’s harm was simply “meant to be.” Surrender is not the abandonment of discernment. Mystery does not remove responsibility.
For me, Lila has become a question rather than an answer:
*How might I participate consciously in a living reality I cannot fully control?*
Divine Mother, Mother Nature
In the devotional imagination, Divine Mother is not only tenderness. She is generative and protective, fierce and compassionate, creative and transformative. In forms such as Durga and Shakti, she holds the power through which life emerges, moves, dissolves, and becomes again.
Mother Nature, too, is often spoken of as a life-giving mother. Yet she is more than a gentle background created for human comfort. Earth brings forth forests, rivers, bodies, food, storms, decay, and regeneration. She exceeds our categories of benevolence and control.
I do not need to claim that Divine Mother and Mother Nature are identical in every philosophical or religious sense. Yet I experience a profound relationship between them. Both interrupt the fantasy that life is inert, separate, or ours to dominate. Both draw attention to a creative power moving through forms and relationships. Both ask us to understand ourselves as participants within life—not masters standing above it.
The goddess, then, is not only an image beyond the world. She can also be encountered through the living world: in breath and soil, grief and germination, human bodies and more-than-human lives. Mother Nature is not merely scenery for the spiritual journey. She is among its teachers, relations, and conditions.
In the Anthropocene—a time when human activity is altering Earth’s climate and living systems—this recognition carries responsibility. If sacred presence moves through the web of life, awareness cannot remain only private. Reverence must shape how we consume, build, lead, care, and respond to ecological harm.
To honor the Mother is also to attend to the Earth.
Awareness as Remembering
I began to sense that I am not here to escape my humanity in order to become divine. I am here to become more fully present within the form and relationships through which life is experiencing itself as me.
This does not make the individual self the center of creation. It places the self within a larger ecology of existence.
My body is formed by Earth. My breath is exchanged with trees and oceans. My inner life is shaped by ancestors, cultures, relationships, technologies, and places. I am distinct, but never self-created and never truly separate.
The Hindu philosophical expression Sat-Chit-Ananda—existence, consciousness, and bliss—offers one way of contemplating this mystery. Bliss here is not constant happiness, emotional escape, or denial of pain. It points toward a deeper delight or fullness of being: something that may be remembered even while sorrow, uncertainty, and change remain real.
Awareness of being is not another achievement to chase. It is a relationship to which we return.
Practicing Presence Within the Swirl
Throughout the week, I carried this awareness into ordinary life. I noticed my emotions, inner chatter, and small choices. Moments that usually felt tight and hurried began to hold a little more space.
Do I need to repeat myself?
Do I need to react immediately?
Can I let this moment unfold before trying to control its meaning?
The aim was not to become detached from motherhood, relationships, family, aspirations, study, or work. These are not interruptions to spiritual life. They are among the places where awareness takes form.
Even my frustration with distraction could be held differently. Perhaps distraction was not evidence that I had failed at presence. Perhaps noticing it was already the return.
Still, presence does not require passivity. Sometimes awareness asks us to soften. Sometimes it asks us to act, protect, refuse, repair, or speak. The question is not whether I can remain serene through every disturbance. The question is whether I can remain in relationship with myself, others, and the living world while deciding what this moment asks of me.
Questions Within the Play
Questions began to dance through me:
If life is Lila, what do we mean by play?
Who created the rules we live by—and which rules can be changed?
Where am I participating freely, and where am I following inherited scripts?
If I belong to others and they belong within the same web of life, how does that change my responsibility?
What am I creating through the quality of my attention?
Francesca Ferrando’s *The Art of Being Posthuman* helped me deepen these questions beyond the human-centered self. Existential creativity is not only about designing an individual life. It is about recognizing that we are relational participants and co-creators in an unfolding that includes society, Earth, other species, technologies, and futures we may never personally see.
The creative process may have no single purpose beyond manifestation itself. Yet how we participate still matters. Play is not consequence-free. Our words, systems, technologies, and ways of living alter the conditions in which other beings must live.
Perhaps awareness is the anchor that allows creativity and accountability to remain together.
No Final Judge, Yet Real Consequences
I asked myself: How am I coloring this creation? What values, art, and energy am I offering?
Then judgment entered:
Am I doing enough? Am I enough?
I reminded myself that growth does not require an inner courtroom. Harsh self-judgment rarely produces the clarity or courage it promises. It often contracts the very awareness from which wiser action could emerge.
But freedom from judgment does not mean freedom from accountability. There may be no cosmic scorekeeper measuring my perfection, yet my choices still have consequences within the ecology I share. I can release shame while remaining willing to listen, repair, learn, and change.
This is a more compassionate form of responsibility: not punishment, but responsiveness.
Moments of clarity gave way to confusion, then silence. In that stillness, my gaze softened. My thoughts quieted. I felt no need to explain.
Just presence. Just gratitude.
The Sacredness of Awareness
This practice feels sacred. At times, turning inward can feel selfish—especially for women taught to orient constantly toward the needs of others. Yet returning to awareness is not withdrawal from relationship. It can make more honest relationship possible.
When I notice my judgment, I gain some freedom in how I meet it. When I notice exhaustion, I can listen before overriding my body. When I notice fear, I can ask what it is protecting. When I notice the effects of my choices, I can respond with greater care.
True responsibility does not arise only from duty. It can arise through awareness of relationship. When we experience ourselves as part of a living ecology, care becomes less like an imposed moral task and more like participation in the conditions that sustain us all.
Grief has been one of my teachers in this journey. It did not arrive as a lesson I needed to earn, nor would I reduce it to a divine plan. But within grief, awareness has slowly revealed love, impermanence, and the depth of our interdependence. My movement toward women’s spiritual and ecological awareness now feels connected to this larger unfolding—not because loss was required, but because I am learning how to create meaning without denying what was lost.
Returning Again and Again
Each moment, I can return to a living question:
*What is the Lila of this moment?*
Not: *Why was this done to me?*
But:
What is moving here?
What is mine to feel, question, protect, or create?
What do I choose not to energize?
What would honor both my inner ecology and the wider ecology to which I belong?
Presence is not a permanent state. It is a practice of returning—to body, breath, truth, relationship, and Earth. Again and again, we remember that being alive is not a solitary achievement. It is participation in a mystery continually taking form.
A Practice of Ecological Awareness
If it feels supportive, sit near a window, a tree, a plant, or another living presence. Place one hand on your heart or body and let your breathing remain natural.
Notice three relationships sustaining this moment: perhaps air entering your lungs, ground holding your body, water within you, sunlight, food, a caregiver, an ancestor, or a more-than-human life.
Then ask gently:
What is moving through me in this moment?
What am I trying to control that may need more space?
What requires my action rather than my surrender?
Where is life asking me to receive support?
What small act would honor Mother Nature as a relationship, not a resource?
What am I being invited to create with awareness?
Do not force an answer. Let attention itself become the practice.
In dedication to Divine Mother Durga—and to the living Earth that holds every form through which we become.
*With love and light,* *Salana Aura*
Scholar’s Note
Sri Aurobindo’s *The Life Divine* explores Ananda, the delight of existence, and the manifestation of consciousness in nature. His thought offers a rich philosophical companion to Lila, although the relationship among Lila, suffering, evolution, and divine delight remains complex and should not be reduced to a simple explanation for personal pain.
Francesca Ferrando’s *The Art of Being Posthuman: Who Are We in the 21st Century?* (Polity, 2023/2024) brings the inquiry into a contemporary ecological frame. Ferrando describes human beings not as masters of manifestation but as relational participants within planetary, multispecies, technological, and existential becoming.
Suggested Further Reading
Sri Aurobindo, *The Life Divine*, especially “The Delight of Existence” chapters.
Francesca Ferrando, *The Art of Being Posthuman: Who Are We in the 21st Century?*