The Nabagunjra Series · Blog 02 of 09
There is an ancient form in the Odia tradition — a creature assembled from nine animals and one human element.
A rooster’s head. A peacock’s neck. A bull’s hump. A lion’s waist. A serpent’s tail. An elephant’s foreleg. A tiger’s hind leg. A deer’s hind leg. And in the middle of all that wildness — one human hand, holding a lotus.
It sounds like a riddle. It reads, at first, like mythology.
You spend time with it, and you start to recognize the animals. In people. In yourself. In the particular quality of someone you love, or someone you find difficult, or someone you once were.
This form, this creature, somehow describes a human being in full.
All nine are yours.
The question is which ones you know, which ones you celebrate, which ones you’ve silenced, and which ones have been carrying weight without your acknowledgment.
Before I take you through each one, here’s the thought I want you to hold lightly: you are not reading about nine types of people. You are reading about nine lives that already live inside one person. Inside you. None of them is gone.
🐓 The Awakener
Think of someone you know who always senses it before it arrives. Someone who begins things before the world has agreed that those things should begin.
Someone who is ahead of the moment.
That’s how even the Rooster is, isn’t it?
Aware, alert, and willing to be the first to start.
But many of us feel the other way around. Being first to initiate something is inconvenient. Let others do, then I will follow- we might have said this many a time to ourselves. Sometimes, because we need confirmation, or validation, but whose validation a rooster waits for?
But here is the side we must acknowledge if we haven’t already.
Acknowledge the moment you knew something, and you could explain how you knew it. The moment you spoke, before the thought was fully formed and discovered, mid-sentence, that it was true. That’s awakening in you, within you.
The Awakener in you is always there..early, ready, alert.
🦚 The Expresser
How many of us have seen a Peacock spreading its feathers and dancing to an almost inaudible tune!!
We all, right!
We have theories for it as to why a peacock dances. I am not going to talk about those theories, but what I am going to share here came from one of my safari guides in the jungle while we were exploring tiger reserves in India.
He said this exactly- Madam, Peacock is not doing it for you or any audience. Even if nobody sees him, it will still do this, dance in full glory, because that’s his nature, to move, to display what beauty it holds. You can then relate it scientifically, but the core remains the same.
There is a life within every person, expressive in its own way.
Sometimes, before the question of whether it’s good, what it’s for. At times, I was a child who drew on every available surface. Sometimes, as the one who hums while cooking.
Somewhere in adulting, we lose that part, the expression that made so much sense now looks irrelevant. But you know what, while it’s important to move past certain things in life to grow, it’s equally important to keep the expresser in you engaged and alive—the one who finds happiness in creating and does not worry about explaining it to the world.
If you’ve ever created something that surprised you — something that came through you rather than from you — you were living that life within you.
Keep that child alive!
Because the child in you hasn’t stopped. You just got busier than them.
🐂 The Endurer
The most unacknowledged one, in my opinion.
It carries weight like the bull’s hump.
We all have that in us.
Sometimes that weight pushes you through your day.
That holds a commitment together and keeps a practice alive when nothing external rewards it. In a human culture that focuses on the beginning and the end, or let me put it this way, arrival and departure, the endurer in us is the one who sits through the waiting time in the lounge or outside the departure gate.
Sometimes that period occupies most of one person’s lifetime, yet no one talks about it. It is so real that it deserves more recognition than the beginnings and endings.
I know this life well. It is the one who sat with a blank page for the hundredth time and still opened the notebook. To write, to scribble, to note down, not because the inspiration came straight away but because the practice had decided to outlast the doubt.
“If you are in that waiting lounge right now — not beginning, not arriving, just holding — that is not a lesser version of living. That is the whole middle. And the middle is where most of life actually happens.”
🦁 The Sovereign
You know, sometimes you meet people who may not be intimidating if you look at them, but there is something in them that, even if they are not putting in an effort, you trust them for what they say, for what they do. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like an invisible part, similar to the lion’s waist in the Nabagunjra, which isn’t predominantly visible. Yet, it’s the center that balances the other 8 forms.
But when it comes to you, how often do you notice this within you, when you feel- I know this, I just know.
Most of us catch glimpses of it in ourselves at unexpected moments. A decision that felt completely clear when everything around it was confused. A conversation where something true came just like that, even before we had planned to say it.
We rarely celebrate the sovereign balancer.
So, while you get intimidated by people, it’s time you sometimes smile a bit longer at the Sovereign in you, who is working behind most of life’s scenes to balance it all.
🐍 The Transformer
Not the Hollywood movie—instead, think of the serpent.
Sprawled and coiled around the Nabagunjra, it is the only element that sheds its skin. Because it has to, it cannot carry the old weight; it never does.
We all see external versions of before-and-after transformations.
But have you felt that shift within yourself?
The version where you actually became someone else? Where something ended so completely that who you were before it and who you were after it feel like two entirely separate lives.
Sometimes it is triggered by an experience, a conversation, a visual, or a reflection that amazes you so much that it coaxes out your transformed self.
I remember long ago, during my school days, traveling by train. A person from the cleaning department asked aloud why people didn’t just carry their own dustbins. At the time, I wondered, how can a person carry a dustbin? He simply meant a small plastic bag. There was little support for his idea on that train, but years later, when I moved to Japan, I saw everyone carrying a small bag to collect their own waste and segregate it at home.
That seed of a habit, planted back in my school days, transformed me. Now it is an inseparable part of who I am.
When we think about transformation, we are reminded of butterflies. Yes, there is a lot that goes on. Sometimes it’s also failure, grief, darkness, noisy chaos, and complete silence. It offers steady revelations until the old skin is shed completely. There is no perfect time for this to happen; it happens when it needs to.
You simply walk through it, shedding what is no longer required.
Just like the serpent and the butterfly, this life within us has either gone through that, is going through it, or needs to go through the transformation phase.
🦣 The Rememberer
We have all heard about the elephant’s memory, haven’t we?
But what truly mirrors that kind of depth?
Stories. It is in how we listen, how they are told, and the way they settle inside us.
Stories are not always passed down in words; they travel in instincts.
Over time, a story ceases to be a personal memory—it becomes an accumulated one, forged by being lived and told time and again.
This is the essence of The Rememberer—the steady, ancient elephant leg upon which our inner Nabagunjra stands. The life that lives within us is built on multi-generational wisdom, raw survival instincts, micro-behaviors, and sharp fragments: specific moments, colors, scents, and voices.
It is the reason why, even if you do not speak to a true friend for a decade, the moment you reconnect, the program instantly restores the relationship script to 100% capacity, skipping the awkward relearning phase entirely.
It is a magnetic force, constantly drawing you back to your canvas, your rhythm—for me, tracing the shifting cosmic forms through the geometry of the mandala and the flow of writing.
“And the beautiful thing about memory is this: it keeps. Even the things you think you’ve forgotten are waiting, patient as an elephant, for the moment you’re ready to return. It is the memory that lives in your hands before your mind catches up. The instinct that arrives before the thought.”
🐅 The Seeker
There is a life in every human being that is still hungry. Not necessarily for a specific object—though sometimes it knows exactly what it wants—but hungry in a more elemental sense. This is what we mean when we talk about the tiger’s hunger.
The tiger moves toward hunger. This is its essential nature—not aggression, not destruction, but a leaning-forward quality that is better described as aliveness than ambition.
The Seeker in us is still curious.
Still willing to begin again. Still able to be surprised. It is the life that reads one more page when it is past midnight. It asks one more question when the conversation is already wrapping up. It signs up for the thing it doesn’t fully understand yet, simply because an internal voice whispers: there is more here.
The people I find most genuinely alive—regardless of age, regardless of what they have already built or achieved—are living from this space. They have not confused accomplishment with arrival. They are still on their way somewhere. And the destination is far less important than the primary fact of the movement.
To live from this life is to understand that the true danger is never the unknown path ahead—it is the comfort of standing still.
“This life holds the irreplaceable value of your own curiosity. It is the part of you that looks at a full lifetime of achievements and still has the beautiful, brave humility to ask: ‘What else is possible?‘”
🦌 The Responsive
The deer’s hind leg introduces the medicine of agility to the Nabagunjra. It is the capacity to alter your trajectory in mid-air while preserving your essential grace. Notice this fluid rhythm the next time you see a spotted deer running in full swing.
There is a life within you that understands that stubbornness is often just fear in disguise.
When this life is active, you can sit in a conversation, encounter a reality that flatly shatters your previous worldview, and, instead of locking your joints in defense, flex and absorb the impact. This is rarer than it should be. We live in an era that treats an unwavering stance as a virtue, a culture that misinterprets changing your mind as a lack of conviction or a sign of weakness.
The Responsive knows this is exactly backward.
You can only change direction when you are actually moving. Standing completely frozen while loudly declaring your position is not strength—it is stagnation. True psychological power belongs to the one who is fully engaged with life, yet agile enough to pivot the moment the ground beneath them shifts.
This life frees you from the burden of performative certainty.
The person who carries it does not need to win the argument; they need to understand what is actually true. It allows you to say, “I thought I knew, but now I see differently,” with absolute dignity. It bridges the gap between your past ignorance and your present wisdom, treating the transition not as a failure, but as a victory of consciousness.
“The person who carries this life doesn’t need to win. They need to understand what’s true. And they trust themselves enough to update their map, bridging who they were with who they are now, without a single drop of shame.”
🪷 The Soft Human Hand
While multiple animal lives run wild within us, there is one final version—the solitary human element—situated right at the heart of all that wildness. It is a soft human hand, holding a lotus flower.
The lotus is a creature of contradictions. It grows in the mud, yet it has no structural business being as breathtakingly beautiful as it is, given exactly where it came from. When it blooms, it commands absolute stillness; you cannot take your eyes off it, even if you are only catching a fleeting glimpse from a speeding car on a frantic road.
This ninth life is the hardest one to carry. It does not demand the heavy endurance of the Bull, the territorial hunger of the Tiger, or the sharp vigilance of the Rooster. It requires something that raw strength and courage alone can never manufacture: the conscious choice, after everything you have been through, to remain soft.
We all know people who embody this life. They have had every valid, reasonable reason to close their hearts. They have been disappointed, diminished, misunderstood, and broken.
Yet, somehow, they haven’t closed. They came back from the fire softer rather than harder. More generous, not less. Against all logical expectations, they continue to hold the lotus with the very same hand that was once empty and bleeding.
If you are carrying this life right now, you might feel fragile.
You might mistake your tenderness for weakness. But the fact that you are still open, after everything, is a profound victory. It is something far rarer than power: it is experience that chose not to become armor.
“Most of us have held something beautiful in the middle of something hard. This life is about choosing to keep your hand open so you don’t crush the very thing you fought to save.”
What Nabagunjra Is Really Asking?
Nine animals. One human hand. One form.
This is not a hierarchy. It is not the idea that The Sovereign is more evolved than The Endurer, or that The Transformer is more important than The Responsive. Every single one of these lives has its season. Every one of them carries a weight the others cannot lift.
The question Nabagunjra is asking
The question the form is asking is not ” Which one are you?
It is: which ones have you abandoned? Which ones have you silenced because the world made no space for them? Which ones have been carrying weight on your behalf, unacknowledged, for years?
And perhaps most importantly:
Which life in you has been waiting the longest to be brought home?
Take a deep breath and feel the support of the earth beneath your feet.
You are not a single, uncomplicated story. You are an entire, magnificent ecosystem.
Let the lotus bloom. Let yourself be whole.