(Aim Hrim Klim Chamundayai Viche)
Goddesses
Have you ever...
Have you ever felt an ecstatic or joyful presence within or surrounding you? Have you ever felt tears or love or passion or rage well up from what feels like an unknown place in your soul or psyche? Have you ever felt guidance from within with surprising results? These are examples of the goddess reaching out to you in your own life.
What Sally Teaches
In her Goddess courses, Sally introduces us to MahaShakti, the Supreme Goddess, as the ultimate creatrix of all that is. Sally leads us through the many manifestations of Goddess and provides a framework for how the Goddess moves within nature, our bodies, and as our inspiration to know her as ourselves. Spiritual and life experiences that may have felt murky, confusing, or even scary are illuminated in Sally’s courses and her book, Awakening Shakti.
(See: Dancing with the Divine Feminine – origin story of the Goddess 55:44)
Goddess Within Tantra / Kashmir Shaivism
The basis of reality, according to Hindu Tantra and Kashmir Shaivism, is the inseparable, blissful pair of Shiva and Shakti. Prakasha, or light, is associated with Shiva, or the ground of being. Vimarsha, or the capacity to experience light, is associated with Shakti, or Goddess. The self-recognizing ability within the light is what experiences the aliveness, power, and bliss of life. As the great light recognizes itself, an inspiration happens within it; a leaping forth in bliss that conceives of creating a universe.
The bliss-filled union of ShivaShakti is also fully present as our personal minds, bodies, and hearts. All creatures and creations are fundamentally made of the inextricable pair of Shiva (light) and Shakti (ability to perceive light). Our minds, bodies, and hearts are microcosms of the macrocosmic bliss-soaked ShivaShakti reality.
Who are the Goddesses ?
Goddess is power. She creates. She is the power within the senses ; not just what is perceived but the ability itself to sense. She is the ungendered love that creates all that is. She is the smallest atom and the exponentially expanding cosmos. She is in you. She is you.
The Supreme Goddess is also called MahaShakti, or simply Ma. But even before she is Ma, the Supreme Goddess is indivisibly entwined with her consort, Shiva, or P ure Awareness. Together they make up the ver y essence of ever ything known and unknown in the cosmos. As Shiva and Shakti differentiate, Shiva is the ground of awareness upon which Shakti, as dynamic power, creates. She conceals herself within her creations, sustains these phenomena, provides the desire within each creation to know her as her creations, and destroys only to create again.
Shiva without Shakti is a corpse.
Shakti without Shiva is chaos.
The Forms of Goddess
The Supreme Goddess also contains within herself each of the thousands of names and forms of the goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. The four most fundamental, powerful expressions of the Goddess (in Indian culture) are:
Durga
The Great Goddess; transcendent spaciousness in which everything manifests
Kali
Fierce, brave,
and transformative face
Lakshmi
Sweet, abundant, boon –
bestowing face of worthiness
Saraswati
Creative clarity in speech,
learning, and wisdom
Others Taught by Sally
Sita
Lalita
Courses on the Goddesses
The Goddess Empowerment
Awakening Your Own Power, Love, and Creativity Through the Sacred Feminine Archetypes
Lalita Tripurasundari and the Cultivation of Enlightened Desire
Kissed by the Goddess of Bliss
The Goddess Lalita
Tripura Sundari
Lalita means playful. Tripura means Three Cities (e.g., past, present, future; waking, sleeping, dreaming). Sundari means beautiful one.
Lalita Tripura Sundari is the beautiful, playful energy at the core of all aspects of life. She is known for restoring light after periods of darkness. She reminds us that the reason we are attracted more to the light than the dark is because light, and love, are our true natures; that the energy within life is inherently blissful and ecstatic.
The origin stoy of Lalita demonstrates how the Goddess is called upon to bring forth the light at the heart of all life.
(Story of L TS in Class 1 of Lalita Telecourse at 5 6:50)
Invocation to Shakti
Oh, power beyond all powers,
Lover and mother of the universe
You are the life within my life,
The breath within my breath,
My body, senses, mind are rays of light
From your body of light
Ripples in the ocean of your splendour.
when your eyes open,
You manifest as the world,
Spilling forth as planets and stars,
As mountains and rivers,
As the tiger’s open mouth,
As the petals of a rose
As the spiny stems of sea anemones.
You have become my joy and my pain,
The vastness of my enlightened awareness
And thorny knots of my confusion.
May your love bring joy to all beings.
May your power destroy suffering.
May we know your light within all that lives.
Personal Reflection
Hearing the Goddess origin stories within Sally’s courses brought a highly focused clarity to my own life experiences and highlighted what I have always known to be my life’s purpose. The Goddess is called upon during the darkest of times, to bring order, love, and joy back to any realms that have fallen into darkness. The Goddess is found in nature, within our bodies, and as the impetus that leads us toward spiritual deepening.
Before I understood Goddess and the practices around her, I knew I found my highest, calmest, truest self while immersed in nature. I prioritize time in nature in my daily life and have frequently been told that my time in nature is unproductive and selfish.
What I learned from Sally is that being in nature is sacred time spent with all three aspects of the goddess: the truth and beauty of the natural world create a calm and deeply inward connection within my physical body which inspires a craving within myself for more of this connection. I had realizations, received creative solutions to problems and conundrums, and was able to simply “let go” and “lie down” layers of my shadow self, issues, and darknesses small and large.
This new relationship with Goddess via nature, my body, and the inspiration I palpably feel gives me clarity of mind and action. Whether I understand how my actions will eventually unfold in a larger context is unimportant. I have spent enough time honoring Goddess within myself and the world around me to know how to act in a way that honors her and myself as her.
