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 offers us the freedom that lies beyond death. You can enter her freedom through many doorways—looking into her force in nature, examining the hidden forces behind your shadow rage, or invoking her fire to help you dissolve emotional patterns and negative tendencies. Ultimately—and this is the secret that Kali reveals only to those who seek

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

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 most immediate and powerful way to unlock the energies of the sacred feminine is through the technologies of deity practice. In deity practice, we contemplate the forms and qualities of subtle beings. Advanced practitioners in the Hindu and Buddhist Tantric traditions have developed deity meditation into a living science for transforming

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.

Deities come alive when they are invoked and worshipped. For example, if you want to know Kali, you need to treat her not only as a figure out of myth but as a living being, an energy that is palpable, powerful, and real. Kali, whether we see her as an internal archetype or as a personality or as an aspect of a universal power, is truly present in

From the Tantric perspective, all our biological activity is inherently feminine. The power behind breath is the expression of the feminine, not to mention our heartbeat, the energy that fires our muscles, and the impulse behind thoughts. Even more important, the Hindu view of the Goddess identifies her with the kundalini energy, the hidden power

The hands on her apron represent the karmic tendencies she removes from her devotees, as well as her own manifold capabilities. The skull in her hands, which her sword has just lopped off, is the ego that separates us from her. Kali’s nakedness shows that she has cast away illusion; in her, the entire truth about life and death is revealed. Even