Whether Kali seems terrifying, fascinating, or loving depends on our state of consciousness and our level of both emotional and spiritual development. But she always invites us to a radical form of ego-transcendence.

As we become more able to recognize that men and women contain both masculine and feminine qualities, it changes the way we honor the Goddess. We can start to see her qualities as less gender specific, and more as qualities of consciousness itself.

The divine feminine has a thousand names and a thousand moods, but when she chooses to show up for you, she very often shows up as ecstasy.

The divine feminine knows that a birth sometimes demands a death, and that the personal self sometimes has to die if the world is to be made sacred.

To be a sacred feminist is to be a lover of the feminine face of God as she appears in the world, in culture, and also in our own psyche and soul—while also recognizing that the feminine can never be separated from her masculine other half.

On a personal, psychological level, deity meditation gives us access to a power that works on a deeper level than is available through conventional psychology. The transformative power of the goddess energies can untangle psychic knots, calling forth specific transformative forces within the mind and heart. It can cleanse our mental and emotional

The story of Sati’s disappearance tells a mythic version of a historical process that kept the Goddess underground for several millennia. We know from Marija Gimbutas’s archaeological studies that many Neolithic cultures in Europe and in the Indian subcontinent worshipped a mother goddess, and that the worship of the feminine was displaced in the

Most of us have more than one goddess energy flowing through our personalities. Some we are clearly born with, but others seem to arise through the different conditions of our lives. The goddesses we channel when we are young have different faces than the goddesses of maturity and old age. Often we experience these different expressions of the

KALI ASANA Place your feet wide apart, so that you can comfortably bend your knees. With bent elbows, raise your arms. Begin standing straight, then swiftly bend into a squat, pulling your arms down, elbows first, and sticking out your tongue. As you do, shout “AHHHHH.” Try to do this from the belly rather than the throat. Inhale up to standing,