Shakti Speaks
Shakti Speaks is a column by Nilima Bhat (www.shaktileadership.com), based on dialogues within The Women’s Circle, a DNA initiative that seeks to restore gender relations and empower women.
Become a part of our online circles @ShaktiSpeaks; www.facebook.com/shaktispeaks
Sadhana came home in tears. It was her 10th wedding anniversary. She had worn her new saree, kissed her husband good morning and left for work in happy anticipation of her promotion. Life was good.
Half way through the day, her mother called. Sadhana proudly announced her new job title, expecting her mother to reflect her own joy. But that was not to be.
“It has been 10 years and you still haven’t conceived! What are you waiting for? The clock is ticking and your eggs are running out. You’ve had your fill of meeting your personal ambitions, now get on with motherhood.”
Sadhana put the phone down with trembling hands. The ghost was back to haunt her. The funny thing was, unlike women who wanted to but couldn’t bear children, she had chosen this path for herself; so she couldn’t understand her own upheaval. Of late, women in the office seemed to be showing off their baby bumps left, right and centre, and something ever so little would stir in her that she would quickly repress before she could feel it.
She shuddered through a tsunami of confused feelings, images and unnamed forces that overcame her. She didn’t really know why she was crying. Her tears were hers and yet, they were coming from beyond her; as if she were channeling the pain of every woman who had not borne a child.
“Why does motherhood still define women?” she wailed. “In this day and age, where we stand shoulder to shoulder with men in all spheres, why is a woman’s life considered incomplete without experiencing motherhood? Why is it the be-all and end-all? Am I not the master of my own destiny, and my body? Do I not have a right to choose how I live my life? So what if it does not include motherhood?”
After the rage, came the calm, and with it a Presence, older than time and wiser than age.
“Life on our planet is typically propagated through the children we birth. The world is transitioning from the old ways to the new. Don’t fret for being caught in beliefs that don’t serve you anymore. They will pass; to be replaced by values that are appropriate for the ‘conscious’ life that is manifesting. In the new age that is upon us now, my presence in your womb, seeks fulfillment as a greater creative being, expressing powers and unveiling mysteries of untold beauty and magnificence that will not just resolve the problems our species has created for itself, but evolve the planet and raise its consciousness to a whole new level. Your womb is an exquisite resource. Whether or not you choose to birth a human child, it contains the seeds of capacities, gifts and wisdom you will birth into the world. Take good care of it. Listen to its wisdom and rest in its regenerative powers.
Become your own Mother; give birth to and nurture your new child-self that will grow up and thrive with ways of the awakened Feminine.
You are tasked to become a mother to the world. Not just one or two children. I ask this of every man too. The ‘discomfort’ you feel in your body every time you see pregnant women, is just my presence that you are pregnant with. I am glad you finally ‘looked-in’. You are indeed pregnant—with Me. As is every man and woman at this time. It is my consciousness awakening in the world. Pay close attention and bring Me forth in every way you can.
Every time you manifest works of high aesthetic form, come up with inclusive solutions to problems, let go with tough love all that doesn’t serve you anymore and embrace the dark-side with compassion and wisdom, you give birth—to Me; to new life. You experience motherhood in a way that honours and fulfills your divine potential.
When you redefine Motherhood in this way, do you see that it is indeed the be-all and end-all of being a woman? Say ‘yes’ to motherhood by becoming a mother to yourself first and then to the world.”
The world is waiting for your motherhood.
And then her HR head had asked, ‘you know you have to move to the Naxalite area, without your family, as part of your promotion. Are you sure as a woman you are up to it?’ She had anticipated that question, rehearsed her carefully chosen blasé, brave words. Yet, suddenly, out of nowhere, her throat tightened, her voice thickened, her face crumpled and tears welled up…
Those god-awful tears!!!!!
‘See Sadhana, we hire people regardless of their gender. You are expected to do a job. All promotions here are based on that competence alone. Do not expect any molly coddling or ‘fair sex’ status. Emotions have no place in a meritocracy.’
She apologized as she hurriedly ended the interview and left the room. Even as she berated herself for her loss of composure, she knew she had somehow failed..not just the interview, but herself.
And so here she was, at her altar, her refuge. Her gaze searched for strength in the eyes of her beloved deities and sacred objects given by her mother and collected from temple and church stalls. She had failed them. She was so so sorry to be just a weak, weepy woman after all.
‘Mother, how do I stop FEELING? It is feelings that make me vulnerable. They are my Achilles heel! No matter how hard I try to crush them, deny them, be strong and stoic, they just won’t go away. If I repress them I become numb and feel like an automaton. As if something in me is dead. When I suppress my fears, guilt, shame, I also can’t feel joy, harmony, beauty, the GOODNESS of life.’
‘I may stuff feelings and learn to live rationally, but why can’t I control tearing up? It is so embarrassing, humiliating and disempowering when I just burst into tears at the most inappropriate times. I don’t just cry when I am sad. I cry when I am angry, or helpless and even when I am supposed to be happy! My vulnerability is my weakness. Its display is inappropriate! I get taken advantage of because of it…
And the all seeing and compassionate eyes of the Great Mother spoke:
My child. All is indeed well. It is just as I have intended. As a human and as a woman, you have a prime place in my Creation. You are here to unfold all the capacities of My own infinite nature. The feelings you are deploring, that make you vulnerable, are your most exquisite resource. Vulnerability is an ability I have built into your system. Your ability to get emotionally wounded is necessary for your complete, indestructible Being to manifest all that it can be and all that it can experience.
Do you remember when you were a child and you fell sick with chicken pox? Your immune system got triggered to fight it and in the process your body developed a resilience and biological immunity to never catch that disease again. Feelings and emotions are equally my way of triggering your psychological immunity. So you learn to bend, not break. Become resilient like Bamboo, not brittle..
But it is so much more than that! I haven’t created you to just survive. I have created you to thrive! Flow with the juices of Life, open to all. To live fully and savour deeply every rasa possible. This is my Lila, my Play. Through you I experience every possibility in Myself.
The age of Mind has overvalued rationality and reason, objectivity and an ascetic detachment, as a sign of strength. When Man denies his feelings and emotions as weaknesses, messy and unmanageable, he also denies my shakti, the vitalizing power, the sap of Life which is contained in them.
Your vulnerability is precious. Your wound keeps you real, in touch with all the creative potential awaiting you. It is not your weakness, it is your glory, your doorway to your true strength.
That’s why I made feelings and emotions beyond the control of your thoughts and beliefs which can limit you. Especially your tears! Those I wired directly to your body, which lives in the Truth at all times. Your body cannot lie. And your tears cannot be controlled. You cannot fake them either. When My Presence in your soul is touched, when you are touched by the truth of something, your raw, unconditioned authentic core rejoices! For it knows it lives. It tells you it does, by making the tears flow, so you stop and take note! For a brief moment, the veil has shifted and my Mystery, the sacredness of Life is present in your slumbering, unconscious world of make-believe importance. Stop and enter through the doorway of your wound. On its other side lies your Divinity. Your indestructible vulnerability. Where you can claim your whole-woman, fully-human self. Celebrate and rest in the release of your wholeness! Even the gods envy you your vulner-ability. For they do not feel the depths you do.
Shakti Speaks is a monthly column by Nilima Bhat, based on dialogues within The Women’s Circle, a DNA initiative that seeks to restore gender relations and empower women to raise their consciousness and connect with the primordial power within. Read original post here: https://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/column-what-is-it-with-women-and-tears-1965921
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Next, Shakti speaks on women v/s women. Why we are often our own worst enemies.
Sadhana switched off the TV in disgust. It was a much known scene from the Mahabharath, where Kunti tells her five sons to equally share Draupadi as a wife! And dutiful sons that they were, they did! And no one really asked what Draupadi had to say about that!
Or that part of the great story was not paid much attention to. Certainly not the way she had heard her own mother tell it. It was a footnote in a story about great warriors of Dharma, Maharathis who fought the good fight..
A new consciousness was awakening in Sadhana these days. Where she found herself questioning things that she had just accepted as ‘normal.’ Suddenly there were many rather unacceptable things everywhere she looked!
“Great Mother, Kunti had been a wife too. And an unwed mother. Surely she understood a woman’s feelings and the sanctity of her body. She (Kunti) may have willingly borne great sons from different gods for the sake of their dynasty. But why did she assume Draupadi would or worse, SHOULD make that same choice? Or did women never have the power to choose anyway?
Why berate our myths which perhaps need to be reinterpreted for modern times? Look closer to home. Saroja, my bai who comes to clean our home and works in four other homes, is the main bread-winner of her family. Her husband is a drunkard and she has to drop and pick up her young children from school, cook and clean and manage all chores, waking at 5am before everyone else and going to bed last. She has a mother-in-law and sister-in-law who live with them, who do not care to help her as it is expected to be her duty as the ‘good wife and daughter-in-law’. Worse, they disapprove of her wearing jewellery or looking beautiful, as it may attract the attention of other men. All the sarees I have given her are promptly taken by her MIL to be given in dowry to the unmarried daughter. Saroja is not expected to have any desires of her own!
Everywhere I look, I see this again and again, like a theatre of the distorted. Are women not the empathic sex? Don’t we feel love and kindness more than men? Why is it that we can shower it upon our fathers, husbands and sons, but somehow we end up denying and discounting other women’s voices and needs? Even if they are our own mothers, sisters, daughters and colleagues?”
Shakti speaks: “No one is your enemy, no one is your friend. All alike are your teachers.
Women are coming out of several thousand years of Patriarchy. Where the power has been in the hands of Men. That power, arising out of my shakti, which is the fuel for all life.
In their ‘dis-empowerment’ from Me, women have had to fight and feed on the scraps left over after the power-play between men and the world they normed. Do not judge women too harshly. For they were caught in the same drama: The false belief that my shakti is limited and to be traded as a weapon for survival.
As both Men and Women have cycled through the use and abuse of power, the time has now come for you to indeed reinterpret your mythologies, from a whole new level of consciousness.
I AM Shakti, the inexhaustible Source-Power of Creation, Preservation and Transformation, inside everyone. Awaken to Me and rise out of scarcity and fear into sufficiency and love.
In your journey to reclaiming your power and becoming masters of your own destiny, no one is your enemy, no one is your friend. All alike are your teacher
Truths about the inequity, inequality, negative stereotypes and unconscious biases that women, like her, even like her!, still faced in the 21st century!
Women, who walked in a ‘free society’, still walk in fear of violation. They see themselves as human beings, who can be over-powered by others stronger than them. In a day and age where we are questing for success rather than survival, you would think our deepest fear would be to fail somehow. But Sadhana had heard again and again that every woman’s deepest fear is to to be violated somehow. Not just emotionally but physically.
She mulled, “… 300 years of the slave trade completely ravaged Africa. It completely created large tracts of desert. There were inter tribal wars, hate and paranoia. The slave traders’ perspective was that the blacks were sub human. It absolved them from any sense of empathy with their conditions…
….What then has 5000 years of subjugation and suppression done to women? How has it impacted our collective psyche? What is the equivalent with paranoia? If 44% men surveyed in India think women are inferior (sub human??) what are the implications…”
She had been called to the circle in answer to a sudden urgency that she felt in finding answers. There was something sub-human in the way a group of men, like a pack of opportunistic dogs, had sexually and physically overpowered and abused women in two of the most horrific cases of rape in the metros.
She trawled through the internet in search for understanding and came across the research on Social Dominance Theory. That studies how power tends to get polarised between ‘dominant’ and ‘subordinate’ social groups. There was an age of owners vs slaves, then colonisers vs colonised and, right through it all it seemed, men vs women. While one social group dominated over its other half, a strange psychological and behavioral phenomenon was observed: The dominant group stopped ‘seeing’ the subordinate group. It was as if they were invisible to them. ‘Sub-human’ or objects meant to serve the Dominators’ needs; the Subordinates were no different from the land or insentient materials to be mined or harvested or exploited.
“Mother,” she asked horrified as she started seeing the invisibility of women being perpetrated in subtle and not-so-subtle ways in all domains of life, “why…? how…?”
A debilitating rage and shame rose up as she confronted her own oft experienced impotence and her invisibility.
In the great Quiet of her being, Shakti speaks:
“Come into your stillness, come to Me. Let Me breathe with you.
Being Visible, Being Invisible.
Feeling Comfort, Feeling Discomfort.
Breathe with Me and master these polarities. Flow with each.
And find your Freedom in that Flow..
Be with one, then just as easily be with the other. Like inhale.. and exhale.
Om Ma ….Om Sri Ma.
Emergence now…Dissolution now
Ease now…Churn now
Allow each experience and move through each experience. With Presence. And release Me, your Shakti locked in them. Become. More. Power-ful.
Look deeper. Is there perhaps a secret purpose to your humiliation? Humiliation leads to humility… In humiliation could lie the cradle of glory?
When you lose your sense of self-worth, your ego-self experiences wounding. This pain and powerlessness causes you to journey within, awaken and bring forth your true power, your Shakti. And you then achieve your real worth, your worthiness to be and to become the all that is.
Exhale and disappear fully, inhale and emerge truly.
Emerge to claim and fulfill your unique place in this grand Evolution.
This is My built-in design, to evolve Creation.
It is OK to be visible. It is OK to be invisible. Both are choices for you to make and experience. Show up and shine through. Emerge out of the testing fire of your dominator. Equally, master invisibility, and learn how to surrender your ego to My higher plan. How else are you to come into your own, your true, enlightened power?“
Sadhana was struck into a shocked silence as she read Rumi. The words of the 13th century Persian poet and mystic seemed to speak to her with the freshness of a rose just bloomed.
She didn’t fully grasp the full quote. Her breath was caught on just the first words..”the minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you…”
It seemed as if her breath had never moved away from that raw quest since.
Rumi knew…her deepest secret?
She had been married 10 years and slowly it was dawning on her that she was still looking. Despite having had a wonderful whirlwind romance with a most eligible bachelor, a ‘prince charming’ who married her and provided for her in every way.
Once the heady haze of the honeymoon period was over, she had suddenly felt a flat emptiness. No matter how hard she struggled to bring that ‘in love’ feeling back, the cooking and housekeeping after the commute to work and back was pointing to a different kind of reality. The joke ‘after the ecstasy, the laundry’ suddenly made sense and wasn’t funny.
As he became a focused provider, holding down a steady job, managing the finances, and rising up the corporate ladder, she felt less and less seen and met as a desirable, charming woman. She had to find the romance she craved in mushy tele-serials or novels she got absorbed in late into the night. Not to mention that it was also safer than having an affair!
These days it seemed as if she lived two lives; the one the world saw, where she was a dutiful, domesticated wife, and another, the secret life of her dreams where she went searching for an unnamed Beloved, whose face she longed to see.
Not knowing what to do with this yearning that wouldn’t go away, she came to her Altar. Her one refuge. “Mother, why can’t I be happy? Despite having a faithful husband who provides so well for me…What is this longing? Why do I feel as if something precious is tantalizingly close but missing in my being? Why do I feel dry, like a desert waiting. Waiting to be quenched. By torrential rains?
Shakti speaks: Do not despair my child. Your longing is my longing, for the ecstatic, life-giving union of body and spirit. I am your life-force seeking to dance with my Lord inside you. He is Shiva, your awakened consciousness. When you merge with Him, like a river finds the Ocean, your thirst will be finally quenched. Do not expect your husband or any man to fulfill you. That is the most unfair expectation and will only lead to certain disappointment. Pay attention instead to the rest of Rumi’s quote:
“…lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along”
Wake up to Shiva. The Beloved we both seek is within. And He has loved you all along. He is the morning Sun caressing your upturned face. The cool showers on your parched lips. The fragrant warm earth after the first rains. The flowers blooming along your path in Spring. The hot embrace of your husband in cold Winter nights. He makes love to you all year round. He has penetrated you so deeply, possessed you so completely. Don’t you see?
Sleeping beauty, open your eyes and see the face of your Beloved. He has been waiting for you to wake up and take you to pleasures beyond anything your innocence could conceive.
