Sadhana: a discipline undertaken in the pursuit of a goal. The goal of sadhana is to attain some level of spiritual realization, which can be understood as enlightenment. For me it is the practice of practicing and the practice of reflexivity.
The Path of Practice focuses a lot on sadhanas involving ancestral memories and accessing the divine feminine. Both of these have been practices I have been working with in a variety of other ways over the summer (and less so over the past few years) that didn't initially have any connection that I could see with what Tiwari articulates in her book. It took me some time to realize that my summer of research in Colorado was very much a practice of delving into the past of my family. In addition, as I read my fun books, they had a consistent theme: the divine feminine and how vital it can be for a woman to access that internal power. The link between that work and what I embarked upon with Tiwari's book very slowly started to come together.
As I worked with sadhanas that emphasized Kali and moon cycles with clarity and intentionality, I was facing challenges in my external world. Mother challenges. Work challenges. And in the face of these challenges, I could no longer react the way I have in the past. Something in the sadhanas left my old ways of coping and handling stress unsustainable.
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| Kali |
Kali: the Hindu goddess associated with empowerment, shakti. She is the fierce aspect of the goddess Durga. Kali is the goddess of time and change.
There are times when everything seems to fall together. Align. In the past few months experiences have aligned to bring me face-to-face with a woman I know well: me. It has brought me to a place in which I have to confront what I haven't been able to see within myself. It has also brought me to a place in which I understand that if I want the life I dream about, I have to start seeing myself with the fierceness that Kali embodies. No, I don't need a bent sword or a necklace of skulls, but I do need to comprehend that I have the right to assert my own voice and that I do have important things to say, things that matter. The time for people pleasing is drawing to an end and I have to stand by my own voice--not hide from it. It is time to assert my right to be me out in the world, and not try to hide behind veils of fear and insecurity.
I know in the past I have worked with Kali mantras and practices, but there is something different in the practices I have undertaken in the past month or so. There is a visceral, qualitative difference. It is not just words I repeat, but something that truly has an energetic quality. There have been times my body has not known what to do and I've been frozen with fear. There have been other times in which I have been braver than I thought I ever could be--to the point in which it has actually startled me afterward. But I realize I am at a point in which I can't turn around and run for the hills of my previous self. I have to settle into this new self that is intensely, subtly, me.
Doing the Kali sadhanas while doing sadhanas that draw me into memories of my past and my family has created a strange synergy of shifts. I know it might be hard to comprehend if you haven't experienced it for yourself, but I am not exaggerating when I say that I can feel the unsettling changes not within my perspectival thoughts, but within my tissue and bone. It's like my body is trying to settle into what it going on and my brain is an observer, waiting for the tissue to find its own grounding and new set of normalcy. I say this because I have had moving muscle pain throughout this month of Kali and family sadhanas. Muscle tension in places I never have muscle tension. I had a muscle spasm the first week I started doing the family work. I'm sure these things could easily be identified as coincidence or I could find numerous logical explanations. But what is going on right now is not about logic. It is about trusting what is going on and continuing with the sadhanas. It is about listening to my body with multifaceted ears that can hear the rational and the visceral and the primeval with equal measure.
Great post! Great post! And once more--great post! Oh the co-incidences, they elate me at n-1 levels of profundity! Kali! What a traumatic beauty and how utterly misunderstood. Remember when we first started talking about her last year, when walking over to atomic coffee downtown? Sometime in April? Lemert's Black time? It's fascinating how symbolically she's been making her presence known in our lives. Over and over again. I mean my first semester at UT I actually wrote two papers on her last year. The one on trying to understand her as an archetypal 'kali'descope (an embodiment of both light and dark, shadow and sunshine, hot and holy) that not just reveals the various patterns of the collective unconscious, but also completely disrupts it through an explosion in consciousness--is relevant to what you have described. Will you believe it that i am actually presenting this exact same paper at NCA in November. On my birthday? These illogical, acausal yet perfect co-incidences are just fascinating. Not to forget our finding a deep connection with Kali/Durga/divine feminine this summer in our own ways. You with your grandmother and me because of my grandfather--even though these ancestral forces have always been around. I am simply amazed at the universe. I don't know why I am writing this (logically speaking). I suppose I am just trying to tell you that the I too have been going through similar motions of tendon-ripping ribonucleic change, invisible to the undiscerning eye (You know how it happens to Peter Parker :)). Diet. Sensitivity. Emotions. Mind. Body. Everything out of control, yet serenely coherent to the external world. So, you are not alone. I understand how you feel. I hope you keep up with your sadhanas. I am too in my own ways. They just get more intense and more beautiful as time ages.
ReplyDeleteOh and symbolically speaking, her scepter and the chain of skulls she adorns (and the one skull in her hand) is our encounter with her divine shadow and the consequential severing of one's ego maniacal shadow. But, great post! Keep writing.
It occurred to me just a while ago that today marks your blog's one year anniversary. Congratulations! And, Having known me for a bit, my oddly specific memory shouldn't creep you out! (I hope). Minuscule successes invisible to the eye matter more than our world-validated accomplishments--because what's essential is invisible to the eye :) But really, the kind of growth that this space, your space has witnessed in a year's time is simply splendid and indubitably inspiring to me (like you'd expect anything less)--the kind of growth that is not blindly progressivist, but takes into account all the gaps, disjunctures, footfalls both forward, backward and wayward that make our personal and collective histories worth piecing together. Dialectical in every way and always incompletely gesturing toward what will be through what has been. In all its highs and lows, ups and downs, joys and sorrows--but always or mostly in tune with seasonal rhythms. It's life in seasons after all :)!! Your space embodies exactly the kind of storytelling about which Benjamin gets nostalgic. The kind of storyteller, I too want to be but I am not sure if I have your skills. I am always learning from you though and I promise it won't go waste! So, on this day to this space which is one of my favorite spaces in all its intensities, energies, densities and (extra)ordinary affects. To the angelus novus of dialectical spaces!
ReplyDeleteI was hoping you'd write today to see how far you've really come. Generally in the scheme of human growth, but also compared to your 2009 blog--you stayed true to your promise from last year. Over the year, You have held yourself accountable and beautifully so. Over and over again. I know that you don't need my nauseating epideictic rhetoric over and over again because it's just a blog--but that's just how I am and little things matter more. Besides, your words are important to me like I told you before. I just hope you keep writing because when you write you fly in language, becoming through flying--more importantly because after reading Cixous's essay, my blood is on the boil. On fire. It's flying. It's becoming my gesture :). Congratulations once again!