Epilogue
SHAKTI SPEAKS
Shakti Speaks started in February 2014 as a monthly column by co-author Nilima Bhat, based on dialogues within the Women’s Circle, an initiative by DNA, a national newspaper in India. The goal of the column is to restore gender relations and empower women to raise their consciousness and connect with the primordial power within.
A diverse group of women of different age groups and educational and working backgrounds came together in Shakti Circles to explore their deepest hopes, fears, and needs. They addressed questions such as: As a woman, what brings you joy? What causes you pain, fear, and anger? What do you need to love, accept, forgive, and let go?
What emerged—the range and depth of material uncovered and processed—surprised us all. The issues broadly fell into five themes: Motherhood, Vulnerability, Women vs. Women, Invisibility, and Longing. Each is an existential issue of deep significance.
Based on the psycho-spiritual nature of the themes, and Nilima’s addressing of them from a yogini’s perspective, these columns have developed as a modern-day “Gita for Women” where Shakti gives divine instruction to Sadhana on what her dharma should be. (Sadhana represents Everywoman. Her name means “self-mastery practice.”)
Unlike the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna (which is the basis for the revered Indian text the Bhagavad Gita), there is no such dharmic dialogue available from the Mother Goddess to Everywoman, who is her emanation, her child. So the column evolved into Shakti Dialogues—Everywoman in Conversation with Her Eternal Self. It is a healing, psycho-spiritual follow-up to Eve Ensler’s acclaimed “Vagina Monologues” in the women’s issues space.
REDEFINING MOTHERHOOD
Why does motherhood still define women? Why is a woman’s
life considered incomplete without experiencing motherhood?
Why is it the be-all and end-all of a woman’s existence?
Sadhana came home in tears. It was her tenth wedding anniversary, and she had worn her new sari, kissed her husband good morning, and left for work in happy anticipation of her promotion that was to be announced that day. She had worked hard for it and she certainly deserved it. Life was good.
Halfway through the day, her mother called. Sadhana proudly announced her new job title, expecting her mother to feel joy at her achievement. (Somewhere in the back of her mind, her mother’s voice always egged her on, to shine and do better. She felt like an eight-year-old again who had come home with her report card saying “1st rank,” her mother glowing with pride.)
“This is not a time to be proud, dear girl. I just had a call from your mother-in-law. What are you up to? It has been ten years and you still haven’t conceived! What are you waiting for? The clock is ticking and you are running out of eggs. You were not a spring chicken when K married you. Enough of this career business. You’ve had your fill of meeting your personal ambitions, now get on with motherhood.”
Sadhana put the phone down with trembling hands. The ghost had returned to haunt her again. K and she had not told the rest of the family about their several trips to the fertility clinic in the last four years. The series of “almost” pregnant moments and failed attempts had taken its toll on both of them, and they had finally decided that if it were to happen naturally, it would.
K had thrown himself back into his work and so had she. Yet, lately, women in the office seemed to be getting pregnant left, right, and center, flaunting their baby bumps. Something ever so small would stir in her that she would quickly repress before she could even feel it.
Her mother’s call broke the camel’s back on whatever it was she had kept such a tight lid on. As soon as she got home, she rushed to her altar and shuddered her way open to a tsunami of confused feelings, images, and unnamed forces that overcame her. She didn’t really know why she was crying. Her tears were hers and yet, they felt as if they were coming from beyond her . . . as if she were suddenly bringing forth the pain of every woman who had not borne a child.
It was funny. She thought she had made peace with being childless and now she couldn’t understand her own upheaval.
“Why does motherhood still define women?” she wailed. In this day and age where we stand shoulder to shoulder with men in education and the workplace, why is a woman’s life still considered incomplete without experiencing motherhood? Why is it the be-all and end-all? “Am I not in charge of my own destiny, and my body? Do I not have a right to choose how I live my life? Can it not include motherhood?” Even as she said it, she felt that strange, vague unease somewhere in her womb. This time she decided not to ignore it.
Her breath slowed down and she became very still. Like some kind of Alice in Wonderland, she seemed to be drawn in through the vortex of her navel . . . back into a dark space, deep inside her womb . . . or was it her mother’s womb? It just was A Great Dark Womb.
Suddenly, her angst, her pain, and her fear all seemed to dissolve. It was if she had entered a secret, sacred, eternal space. It felt like home, but unlike any actual home she had ever lived in. Her whole being relaxed deeply into an indescribable feeling of comfort.
The Void was powerful and alive. She sensed a presence—one more real than herself. It seemed to be flowing through her every cell, even as she was bathed in it from all around. “Who are you?” Sadhana asked in awe.
The presence replied:
I am Shakti. I am the Great Mother, the Creative Power, from whom this multiverse has come forth. From every planet, star, and galaxy to plants, animals, and humans. Even the angels, gods, and those you call demons.
Like you, each is a unique aspect of all that I hold in my being. In an eternal, endless lila (play), I create and recreate myself in all the ways in which I can experience the ananda (bliss) that I AM.
You came out of my womb so I can now come out through yours, in every way that you give life to what brings you joy, when you create beauty and expressions that vitalize and power the cycles of life.
Up until now, life on your planet is propagated through the children you give birth to. Every time you give birth, you become divine, and in that you fulfill your greatest potential, your manifest divinity. You experience the power of giving life and its ineffable ecstasies.
In the new age that is upon you now, my presence in your womb seeks to fulfill us all, expressing powers and mysteries of untold beauty and magnificence that will not just resolve the problems your species has created for itself, but evolve the planet and its consciousness to a whole new level. Your womb and your woman’s body contain the seeds of capacities, gifts, and wisdom you will birth and bring forth into the world, whether or not you choose to birth a human child.
The world today is a transition from the old ways to the new. Don’t fret for being caught in beliefs that don’t serve you anymore. They will pass, to be replaced by values that are appropriate for the Conscious Life that is manifesting. As a woman, your womb is an exquisite resource that you will have to use to bring forth creative ideas and expressions for the new age. Take good care of it. Listen to its wisdom and rest in its regenerative powers. Become your own mother; give birth to and nurture your new child-self who will grow up and thrive with the ways of the awakened feminine.
You are tasked to now become a mother to the world, not to just one or two children. The “discomfort” you feel in your body every time you see pregnant women is just my presence that you are now pregnant with. I am glad you finally looked in. You are indeed pregnant—as is every man and woman at this time—with me. It is my consciousness that is breaking upon and awakening in the world at this time. Pay close attention and bring me forth in every way you can.
Every time you lay down your swords against each other as men and women and see each other equally as my children, you give birth to me. Every time you manifest works of high aesthetic form, come up with inclusive solutions to problems, let go with tough love all that doesn’t serve you anymore, and embrace the dark side with compassion and wisdom, you give birth to me. You experience motherhood in a way that honors and fulfills your body’s divine potential.
When you can define motherhood in this way, can you see that it is indeed the be-all and end-all of being a woman? Embrace this new reality for yourself, dear child, self of my own Self. Turn your problem on its head. Say yes to motherhood by becoming a mother to the world.
VULNERABILITY: STRENGTH OR WEAKNESS?
Is there an appropriate level of displaying/being vulnerable?
As a woman, my concern is “My gentleness should not be
taken as a sign of my weakness.” Our lachrymal (tear)
glands are often hyperactive. We cry when we are sad, angry,
happy, or while chopping onions! Barring the last one,
what is it with women and tears? Psychosomatic? Social
conditioning? Physiological evolution/regression? I get the
need to vent, the cathartic relief from crying. I don’t get why
the tears are sometimes helpless.
“What is it with women and tears?!” Sadhana was sitting in front of her altar. Her face showed all her confused emotions—from sadness to anger to exasperation to just a plain unknowable feeling. For no reason at all she had burst into tears in her appraisal interview.
She had gone in super-confident. She had worked hard and had so much to show for it. She knew she was competing against two very logical, competent male colleagues, who seemed to know exactly where they stood in the scheme of things. They knew how to play the game, how to compete in the dog-eat-dog world. She too had learned the same skills very well. Long ago she had promised herself, “My gentleness will not be taken as my weakness.” When she overheard her juniors snicker that she was a “man in woman’s clothing,” far from being affronted, she had been secretly pleased.
Then her HR head had asked, “You know you have to move to the Naxalite area as part of your promotion. Are you sure as a woman you are up to it?” (The Naxalite movement is a violent uprising in parts of eastern India.)
She had anticipated that question, rehearsed her carefully chosen blasé, brave words. Yet, suddenly, out of nowhere, her throat tightened, her voice thickened, her face crumpled and tears welled up . . .
“See, Sadhana, we hire people regardless of their gender. You are expected to do a job. All promotions here are based on that competence alone. Do not expect any mollycoddling or ‘fair sex’ treatment. Emotions have no place in a meritocracy.”
Sadhana apologized as she hurriedly ended the interview and left the room. Even as she berated herself for her loss of composure, she knew she had somehow failed . . . not just the interview but herself.
And so here she was, at her altar, her refuge. Her gaze searched for strength in the eyes of her beloved deities and sacred objects given by her mother and collected from temple and church stalls. She had failed them all. She was so sorry to be just a weak, weepy woman after all.
“Mother, how do I stop feeling? It is feelings that make me vulnerable. They are my Achilles heel! No matter how hard I try to crush them, deny them, be strong and stoic, they just won’t go away. If I repress them, I become numb and feel like an automaton, as if something in me is dead. When I suppress my fears, guilt, shame, I also can’t feel joy, harmony, beauty, the goodness of life.
“I may stuff my feelings and learn to live rationally, but why can’t I control tearing up? It is so embarrassing, humiliating, and disempowering when I just burst into tears at the most inappropriate times. I don’t just cry when I am sad. I cry when I am angry or helpless and even when I am supposed to be happy! My vulnerability is my weakness. Its display is inappropriate! I get taken advantage of because of it.”
And the all-seeing and compassionate Great Mother spoke:
My child, all is indeed well. It is just as I have intended. As a human and as a woman, you have a prime place in my Creation. You are here to unfold all the capacities of my own infinite nature. The feelings you are deploring, that make you vulnerable, are your most exquisite resource. Vulnerability is not a liability. It is an ability I have built into your system.
Your ability to be emotionally wounded is necessary for your complete, indestructible being to manifest all that it can be and all that it can experience.
Do you remember when you were a child and you fell sick with chickenpox? Your immune system got triggered to fight it and in the process your body developed a resilience and biological immunity to never catch that disease again. Feelings and emotions are my way of triggering your psychological immunity so you learn to bend, not break and become resilient like the bamboo.
But it is so much more than that! I haven’t created you to simply survive. I have created you to thrive! To live fully and savor deeply every rasa, all the juice of life possible. This is my lila, my play. Through you I experience every possibility in myself.
The Age of Mind has overvalued rationality and reason, objectivity and an ascetic detachment as a sign of strength. When man denies his feelings and emotions as weaknesses, messy and unmanageable, he also denies my Shakti, the vitalizing power, the essence of vibrant life.
Your vulnerability is precious. Your wound keeps you real, in touch with all the creative potential awaiting you. It is not your weakness, it is your glory, your doorway to your true strength.
That’s why I made feelings and emotions beyond the control of your thoughts and beliefs, which can limit you. Especially your tears! Those I wired directly to your body, which lives in the truth at all times. Your body cannot lie, and your tears cannot be controlled. You cannot fake them either. When my presence in your soul is touched, when you are touched by the truth of something, your raw, unconditioned, authentic core rejoices! For it knows it lives. It tells you it does by making the tears flow so you stop and take note! For a brief moment, the veil has lifted and my Mystery, the sacredness of life, is present in your slumbering, unconscious world of make-believe importance. Stop and enter through the doorway of your wound. On its other side lies your divinity, your indestructible vulnerability. Where you can claim your whole-woman, fully human self.
Rejoice and rest in the release of your wholeness! Even the gods envy your vulner-ability, for they do not feel the depths that you do.
WOMEN VS. WOMEN
Aren’t women equally culpable in matters of patriarchy?
Don’t they practice favoritism at home against their
daughters or daughters-in-law? I am always amazed why
one woman (it could be the mother-in-law, boss, or sometimes
even a colleague) can’t understand another (sister, daughter-
in-law, subordinate). The one who can give birth to male or
female children, the one who is known for her forgiveness and
her love—why does she lack understanding toward another
woman? There are frequent power plays between women; why
are we often our own worst enemies?
Sadhana switched off the TV in disgust. The program was a well-known scene from the Mahabharata, where Kunti tells her five sons to equally share Draupadi as a wife. Dutiful sons that they were, they did. No one asked what Draupadi had to say about that!
That part of the great story was not paid much attention to. Certainly not the way Sadhana had heard her own mother tell it. It was a footnote in a story about great warriors of dharma, Maharathis who fought the good fight.
A new consciousness was awakening in Sadhana these days; she found herself questioning things that in the past she had just accepted as normal. Suddenly there were unacceptable things everywhere she looked!
“Great Mother, Kunti had been a wife too. And an unwed mother. Surely she understood a woman’s feelings and the sanctity of her body. She may have willingly borne great sons from different gods for the sake of their dynasty. But why did she assume Draupadi would—or worse, should—make that same choice? Or did women never have the power to choose anyway?
“But why berate our myths, which perhaps need to be reinterpreted for modern times? Look closer to home. Saroja, my bai who comes to clean our home and works in four other homes, is the main breadwinner of her family. Her husband is an alcoholic, and she has to drop off and pick up her young children from school, cook and clean and manage all chores, waking at 5:00 A.M. before everyone else and going to bed last. She has a mother-in-law and sister-in-law who live with them, who do not care to help her as it is considered her duty as the “good wife and daughter-in-law.” Worse, they disapprove of her wearing jewelry or looking beautiful, as it may attract the attention of other men. All the saris I have given her are promptly taken by her mother-in-law to be given in dowry to the unmarried daughter. Saroja is not expected to have any desires of her own!
“Everywhere I look, I see this again and again, like a theater of the distorted. Are women not the empathic sex? Don’t we feel love and kindness more than men? Why is it that we can shower it upon our fathers, husbands, and sons, but somehow we end up denying and discounting other women’s voices and needs? Even when they are our own mothers, sisters, daughters, and colleagues?”
Shakti speaks:
Always remember, my child, women are coming out of several thousand years of patriarchy, where the power has been in the hands of men. That power, arising out of my Shakti, is the fuel for all life.
In their “dis-empowerment” from me, women have had to fight and feed on the scraps left over after the power play between men and the world they normed. Do not judge women too harshly, for they were caught in the same drama: the false belief that my Shakti is limited and to be traded as a weapon for survival.
As both men and women have cycled through the use and abuse of power, the time has now indeed come for you to reinterpret your mythologies from a whole new level of consciousness.
I AM Shakti, the inexhaustible source-power of creation, preservation, and transformation, inside everyone. Awaken to me and rise out of scarcity and fear into sufficiency and love.
In your journey to reclaiming your power and becoming master of your own destiny, no one is your enemy, no one is your friend. All alike are your teachers.
Whether challenging you or supporting you, see the women in your life as together creating the perfect kshetra (field) for the distillation of your spirit, for the real you to shine through, resilient and inviolable! Together, they help you find and forge your dharma, your unique heroine’s journey to becoming all that you can be!
See the truth of their being and give thanks, for they serve you in your evolution.
THE INVISIBILITY OF WOMEN
Three hundred years of the slave trade completely ravaged
Africa. It created large tracts of desert. There were intertribal
wars, hate, and paranoia. The slave traders’ perspective
was that black people were subhuman. Thinking that way
absolved them from any sense of empathy with the victims.
What has 5,000 years of subjugation and suppression done to
women? How has it impacted our collective psyche? Women
are still considered subhuman in many parts of the world.
What is the implication?
Sadhana was deeply disturbed. She had just come home from attending her first women’s circle. It was a gathering of women like she had never experienced before. Perfectly sane, “normal,” educated, and emancipated women like herself had sat in a circle and shared their deepest hopes, fears, and needs. There was something about the circle and the process that had brought out truths that she had known but not been able to speak about. More disturbingly, truths she did not even know she didn’t know—perhaps buried deep in her unconscious—had surfaced as woman after woman shared. They surfaced truths about the inequity, inequality, negative stereotypes, and unconscious biases that even women like her, educated and professional, still faced in the twenty-first century!
Women in a “free society” still walk in fear of violation—human beings who can be overpowered by others stronger than them. In a day and age where we are questing for success rather than survival, you would think our deepest fear would be to fail. But Sadhana had heard again and again that every woman’s deepest fear is to be somehow violated—not just emotionally, but physically.
She mulled, “What has thousands of years of the patriarchy done to our psyche?”
She had been called to the circle in a sudden urgency she felt to find answers. There was something subhuman in the way a group of men had physically overpowered and sexually abused women in two horrific cases of rape in the major cities.
Sadhana trawled through the Internet in search of understanding and came across research on social dominance theory, which studies how power tends to get polarized between dominant and subordinate social groups. There was an age of owners versus slaves, then colonizers versus colonized, and, right through it all, men versus women. When one social group dominated over another, a strange psychological and behavioral phenomenon was observed: the dominant group stopped “seeing” the subordinate group. It was as if they became invisible to them. They were subhuman, objects meant to serve the dominators’ needs. The subordinates were no different from the land or insentient materials to be mined or harvested or exploited.
Horrified as she started seeing the invisibility of women being perpetrated in subtle and not-so-subtle ways in all domains of life, Sadhana asked, “Mother? Why . . . ? How . . . ?”
A debilitating rage and shame rose up as she confronted her own oft-experienced impotence and her invisibility.
In the great quiet of her being, Shakti speaks:
Come into your stillness, come to me. Let me breathe with you.
Being visible, being invisible.
Feeling comfort, feeling discomfort.
Breathe with me and master these polarities. Flow with each.
And find your freedom in that flow.
Be with one, then just as easily be with the other. Like inhale . . . and exhale.
Om Ma . . . Om Sri Ma.
Emergence now . . . Dissolution now.
Ease now . . . Churn now.
Allow each experience and move through each experience. With presence. And release me, your Shakti locked in them. Become. More. Power-full.
Look deeper. Is there perhaps a secret purpose to your humiliation? Humiliation leads to humility. In humiliation could lie the cradle of glory.
When you lose your sense of self-worth, your ego self experiences wounding. This pain and powerlessness cause you to journey within, awaken, and bring forth your true power, your Shakti. You then achieve your real worth, your worthiness to be and to become the all that is.
Exhale and disappear fully. Inhale and emerge truly.
Emerge to claim and fulfill your unique place in this grand evolution.
This is my built-in design, to evolve Creation.
It is okay to be visible. It is okay to be invisible. Both are choices for you to make and experience. Show up and shine through. Emerge out of the testing fire of your dominator. Equally, master invisibility and learn how to surrender your ego to my higher plan. How else are you to come into your own, your true, enlightened power?
LONGING
The unfair expectations that set us up and let us down.
“The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
Sadhana was stunned into a shocked silence as she read Rumi. The words of the thirteenth-century Persian poet and mystic seemed to speak to her with the freshness of a rose just bloomed.
She didn’t completely grasp the full quote. Her breath was caught on just the first words: “the minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you…”
It seemed as if her breath had never moved away from that raw quest since.
Rumi knew her deepest secret?
She had been married ten years, and slowly it was dawning on her that she was still looking—despite having had a wonderful whirlwind romance with a kind, handsome man, a “prince charming” who married her and provided for her in every way.
Once the heady haze of the honeymoon period was over, she had suddenly felt a flat emptiness. No matter how hard she struggled to bring that “in love” feeling back, the cooking and housekeeping after the commute to work and back were pointing to a different kind of reality. The joke “after the ecstasy, the laundry” suddenly made sense and wasn’t funny.
As K became a focused provider, holding down a steady job, managing the finances, and rising up the corporate ladder, Sadhana felt less and less seen and met as a desirable, charming woman. She had to find the romance she craved in mushy tele-serials or novels that absorbed her late into the night. Not to mention that it was also safer than having an affair!
These days it seemed as if she lived two lives: the one the world saw, where she was a dutiful, domesticated wife, and the secret life of her dreams where she went searching for an unnamed beloved, whose face she longed to see.
Not knowing what to do with this yearning that wouldn’t go away, Sadhana came to her altar, her one refuge. “Mother, why can’t I be happy? Despite having a faithful husband who provides so well for me. What is this longing? Why do I feel as if something precious is tantalizingly close but missing? Why do I feel like a desert waiting to be quenched by torrential rains?”
Shakti speaks:
Do not despair, my child. Your longing is my longing, for the ecstatic, life-giving union of body and spirit. I am your life-force seeking to dance with my lord inside you. He is Shiva, your awakened consciousness. When you merge with him, like a river finds the ocean, your thirst will be finally quenched. Do not expect your husband or any man to fulfill you. That is the most unfair expectation and will only lead to certain disappointment. Pay attention instead to the rest of Rumi’s quote: “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along.”
Wake up to Shiva. The Beloved we both seek is within. And he has loved you all along. He is the morning sun caressing your upturned face. The cool showers on your parched lips. The fragrant, warm earth after the first rains. The flowers blooming along your path in spring. The hot embrace of your husband on cold winter nights. Shiva makes love to you all year round. He has penetrated you so deeply, possessed you so completely. Don’t you see?
Sleeping beauty, open your eyes and see the face of your beloved. He has been waiting for you to wake up and take you to pleasures beyond anything your innocence could conceive.