The Transformational Power of Words

Wonder of wonders, words have started arriving for my 13-month old son! Their arrival is a deep reminder that words are more than detached concepts — they are somatic, they invoke, they carry with them the power and potential of transformational magic. Speech, or voice, in the Vedic vision is the goddess herself, and poetic discourse is a river whose ultimate promise is to allow us to 'step in tune with being', or to 'find the angel' that lives between us and another.  Yet these days we are inundated with millions upon millions of words, words that live removed from the somatic and communal context words once bore. And perhaps the further the word gets separated from its rapturous, somatic core — isolated and treated as a symbolic end unto itself rather than part of a continuum —  then the more public discourse, and even social movements themselves, become self-referential abstractions that are solely based on the shifting around of written words. Today on the podcast, we take a journey from the primordial deities of the word through Jay-Z and Rudolfo Anaya to understand the true transformative potential of words. 

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