Shiva: The Complete Story of the Ascetic, Destroyer and Lord of the Cosmic Dance | Hindu Mythology for Sleep

Shiva: The Complete Story of the Ascetic, Destroyer and Lord of the Cosmic Dance | Hindu Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the story of Shiva, told from the beginning and made for falling asleep to.The whole story of the ascetic, the destroyer and the lord of the dance, at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.He is the strangest of the great gods, and the hardest to put in one place. He sits alone on a mountain for thousands of years without moving, covered in ash, doing nothing at all — and he is also the one whose dance keeps the whole universe turning. What follows is where he came from, the marriage that ended in something he carried across the world in grief, and the second marriage that took a mountain's daughter centuries of stillness to earn. There's the night he drank something that would have ended everything and held it in his throat rather than swallow or spit it out. The river that came down from the sky with enough force to break the earth, and how it was caught. The son who was given a new head because his father didn't recognise him at the door. And the dance itself, which is not a celebration of destruction so much as an argument that the ending and the beginning are the same movement. Destroyer is the word people use, but it isn't quite what it sounds like.But the point of this recording isn't really the story. It's the hour or two spent drifting through it. The voice stays low and even the whole way through. No music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Every sentence sits at roughly the same level as the one before it, so nothing ever pulls your attention back up to the surface.That's what makes it work on the nights when your head won't switch off. It's just interesting enough to give your thoughts something to hold, and slow enough that they let go of it on their own. You don't have to follow along. You don't have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift off somewhere on the mountain and wake up much later, in the middle of something you've missed the start of, you've used this exactly the way it's meant to be used. Most people don't make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can't sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episode every day.