Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga

Indra knows enough to let that pass. He knows that she can do no less than save her world. A moment later, she agrees. “Yes,” she says, “I will intervene to restore the balance of the world.”

It’s a truism that scientific materialism has tended to reduce all natural phenomena to mechanical processes, as postmodernism has tended to reduce metaphysics to an outworn cultural artifact.

What we can imagine, we will ultimately be asked to bring forth—whether it is positive or negative. As poet William Blake wrote, “Imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

We’ll recognize our thoughts and feelings as goddess-energies.

They personify energies that we feel but may never have thought to name or invoke, both in ourselves and in the world.

Our human consciousness contains both polarities: each one of us is both witness and player. But our lived experience is almost entirely an experience of Shakti. Shiva is the subtle field within which Shakti plays, but she is the power that lives you. As the sage Shankara discovered, your very life-force is Shakti. Quite literally, whatever you see

Our conditioning, our relentless dependence on the egoic perception of our separateness, even our neural wiring predispose us to view ourselves only as the physical and personality self.

When kundalini is asleep, you experience a split between subject and object, between yourself and the world. According to the tantras, the awakening of kundalini is the awakening of the Goddess’s power to reveal

They knew how contemplating an enlightened quality (like compassion) or a divine archetype (like the Sacred Heart, the Tree of Life, or Krishna with his flute) will eventually bring what you’re contemplating alive in you.