When the Goddess Leaves
This spring in Root + Rise, we’re journeying with the Indian Goddess Lakshmi, and the story of churning the great cosmic ocean of primordial consciousness, known as Samudra Manthana.
The tale is multilayered and multidimensional - an invitation to explore, among many things, the nuances of balance, which is what Lakshmi’s auspicious energy is ultimately a symbol of.
The narrative of the story is set in motion when an act of careless arrogance releases a cascade of events that causes the Goddess, in the form of Lakshmi’s beneficent radiance, to leave the manifest world. In truth of course, Goddess is never absent. But in the myopia of arrogance, we can forget the beauty + truth of her presence in all that is, creating an experience of a world devoid of meaning, devoid of her radiance.
Our season with Goddess Lakshmi & the Churning of the Ocean in Root + Rise is going to dive into the depths of re-membering Goddess back into the world. Especially through the frequency of Lakshmi, who above and beyond material wealth, asks us to unify our worldly achievements, accolades and accomplishments with something deeper.
This is Yoga: the (re)unification of individual consciousness with cosmic consciousness. All the Goddesses of India embody a specific flavor of Yoga, and this spring, we’ll be guided by Lakshmi’s.
In Yoga and Ayurveda, Nature has three essential and interdependent qualities or gunas: Tamas (black), Rajas (red) and Sattva (white).
(In western alchemy, Nigredo (black), Albedo (white) and Rubedo (red) are also the three fundamental processes, within which the complexities of the seven stages unfold.)
Lakshmi, along with other goddesses, personifies Rajas. She is a goddess for the householder, for those of us who live rajasic lives, whose souls have chosen to be in the world, to participate in and evolve through its sensory, sensual, sexual and sensational dimensions - in contrast to those who have chosen the life of asceticism or monasticism.
She brings with her the alchemy of balance: of participating in the world without losing ourselves in it, without forgetting that it is not our power, our shakti that drives our lives and achievements, that brings us our material comforts but hers. This keeps the imbalance of arrogance, avarice and exploitation at bay. Tuning into her resonance field helps us to palpably experience her divine nature, and consequently all the gifts and blessings of our lives - big and small, inner and outer - as manifest expressions of divinity. In this way and under her auspices, we become responsible, co-creative stewards of our lives.
Alarmingly, in a world dominated by greed and scarcity, this aspect of her is mostly overlooked. She’s invoked simply for material gain without any roots in her larger and more fundamental essence - which has seemingly been forgotten, has seemingly left the world.
We can call forth the blessings of her power and medicine when we’re able to root all our doing in the world, all our achieving and accomplishing in the felt-sense acknowledgement that it’s all actually her. Interestingly, when we do this, we organically tap into a vaster, dynamic ocean of energy, of shakti. We feel less untethered, less alone and ‘at sea’ and more viscerally a part of something far bigger and more mysterious than us.
And we stop taking ourselves - our so-called ‘failures’ and ‘successes’ - so personally. Instead, we create the capacity to become more open, more curious and more playful.
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