Lakshmi’s Four Gifts

It’s that time of the month where I turn towards that most misunderstood and misused resource: Money, and its inherent spirit and energy.

(From a decolonial lens, all phenomena are animate and ensouled, with an indwelling spiritual essence that we get to be in evolving relationship with. This includes all beings - human and more than human - Nature, seemingly ‘inanimate’ objects, our bodies + sensations, and yes, even…money.)

So with this awareness of what a decolonial approach entails...

...today, I’m offering a perspective that was explored this spring in Root + Rise when we were working with the story of Goddess Lakshmi & the Churning of the Ocean, and specifically, the four gifts bestowed by the Goddess.

You’re probably familiar with Lakshmi as the beloved Hindu Goddess, most commonly associated with financial wealth and prosperity. While this is definitely an aspect of her, working with Lakshmi in integrity is not simply about amassing large amounts of material wealth - which, when not rooted in the values of the larger Self or soul, becomes the cause of imbalance, exploitation and harm, as we currently see in the world.

Rather, understanding and experiencing Lakshmi’s energy means tuning into balance and sustainability - Nature’s regulating forces, when it comes to our relationship to all resource. This organically calls forth Shri: the essence of auspiciousness which is a sign of Lakshmi’s presence, and another name for the Goddess.

With the gifts and powers of Lakshmi’s boons - both worldly and spiritual - come the responsibility of yoking them with the soul’s values, the larger soul purpose or dharma of one’s life. This is Yoga.

If her blessings are not harnessed to our innate values and our dharma, we run the risk of abusing, misusing and dishonoring our/her power, her Shakti, paving the way for the immaturity of arrogance and avarice.

With that said, let’s explore Lakshmi’s four gifts, as symbolized by her four arms.

Each arm symbolizes a specific blessing or boon.

These are:

Dharma ~ right living through walking one’s soul purpose in Life. (To remind you of its significance, here’s a piece I wrote on Dharma a little while back)

Artha ~ wealth, the cultivation of it in integrity with our dharma or soul’s purpose, and significantly, the enjoyment of it through aligned saving, spending and investing

Kama ~ desire, especially as expressed through the sacred vessels of sex and sexuality, and earthly love (this applies regardless of whether we're partnered with another person; we’re here to experience the divine intimacy of sexual pleasure with ourselves too, and Kama includes that. The practice lies in working creatively with this powerful, cosmic energy and not abusing/projecting it.)

Moksha - liberation (specifically the soul’s liberation) through wholeness - which is arrived at through the shameless harnessing of the first three gifts.

Lakshmi is Goddess of the householder. Her four blessings are symbolic of the four goals or aspirations of humanity, associated with the householder’s path, rather than the ascetic or renunciate’s path. In fact, in India, millennia ago, it was the householders - the people who were living in the world, in relationship and partnership with each other - who were the holders of sacred Vedic wisdom, which was passed down from parent to child. This lineage was handed over to celibate, forest-dwelling ascetics not because of some puritanical distortion of ‘purity’ but because of a specific historical event - which is another story for another day.

The word wealth has its roots in the word whole. Lakshmi’s four blessings, when considered together, bring us to an understanding of what true wealth is, from the perspective of wholeness, a holistic perspective, which is also a decolonial perspective.

(The consciousness of European colonialism and its systems is the antithesis of wholeness and a holistic perspective, encapsulated in the dogma of this vs. that or either/or and the separation of matter + spirit.)

If we understand, practice and embody wealth from the frequency of wholeness, and through the portals of Lakshmi’s four blessings, we’re emanating her energy of sustainability and balance into the world.

The Indian philosopher and poet, Sri Aurobindo, a key figure in the Indian independence movement against the British colonizers, was one of the first modern spiritual leaders to question the assumption that poverty was inherently more spiritual than wealth - an assumption that’s rooted in the puritanical constructs of patriarchal monotheism.

Aurobindo cognized the energy of Lakshmi in his lifelong veneration of the Divine Feminine in Her many manifest forms. In his small and celebrated volume, The Mother, he wrote:

"Money is the visible sign of a universal force, and this force in its manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical planes and is indispensable to the fullness of the outer life. In its origin and true action, it belongs to the divine.”

These words can seem quite radical, perhaps even quite triggering, to the frigid western colonial consciousness steeped in the traumatizing + fragmenting notion that “money is the root of all evil.”

(Here’s an interesting fact: from the 1st century CE to the start of British colonial rule in the 17th century, India’s GDP was between 25% - 35% of the total global GDP - more than all of Europe combined. After the British left in 1947, it had dropped to 2%.)

The invitation here is to consider wealth from the perspective that Aurobindo presents, which is the Divine Feminine, the generative, Nature + dharma-based vibration of Lakshmi - which was the consciousness of India prior to British rule, a consciousness that cultivated a condition of thriving.

With the arrival of the British and the puritanical ways of fire, brimstone, hell and damnation, India’s vast natural resources were pillaged and plundered by a shame, greed + scarcity based consciousness, cut off from the earth, the soul and the Divine Feminine in all Her sensationally sensuous forms, including wealth as an emanation of wholeness.

The words “true action” in Aurobindo’s quote point to the naturalness of a dharma- based relationship with material wealth and its cultivation, leading to artha.

From here, Lakshmi’s other two gifts of kama and moksha organically unfold in their own rhythm and pace.

Dharma, artha and kama create the balance + sustainability required for an embodied, grounded unfolding of wholeness, through which moksha or the soul’s liberation can emerge.

This transpersonal frequency of wholeness, of the Goddess’ four blessings, is what we’ll be tapping into in Money + Me this month, and every month - to restore money to its divine feminine, Nature-aligned source.

It’s worth noting here that both money + sex are two fundamental, life-affirming energies that have been the most distorted + degraded by the patriarchal puritanism of monotheistic consciousness, and its enduring grip on collective consciousness. This has led to both money + sex becoming spaces for abuse, control + trauma. Prior to this, in India and in all lands where Nature + the Divine Feminine were held as supremely sacred, both money + sex were regarded and worked with as vital essences of embodied wholeness/holiness.

On a more personal note, over the last two months, money-as-my- guide has been taking me into some deep crypts of initiation, to meet and alchemize the scarcity + fear-based consciousness of patriarchal puritanism that my nervous system has been colonized by, bequeathed to me by my similarly colonized ancestral lines.

The nervous systems of clients who have been entering my field have their own flavors of this colonial imprint.

Money + Me is a monthly online space dedicated to resolving these personal/generational wounds, held within the loving, transpersonal embrace of money’s divine origin and true action.

​This is how money gets to evolve with us + through us, to become a force for peace in the world - which is what it is intended to be, and has the potential to be.