Goddess, Where Art Thou?

The Indian deity Parvati is surprisingly relevant to anyone looking to balance strength with gentleness.

By Sally Kempton

Laura, who has a demanding job in the finance industry, a meaningful yoga practice she cares about but is neglecting, and a new romantic relationship, told me recently that she can't seem to integrate it all. Her working self, her yogini self, and the person she is when she's with her boyfriend seem like different people. "I don't know how to be with Andy without turning into my mother," Laura told me—her mother having been a Mormon wife who took for granted that she should put her husband's needs and agendas before her own. "Half the time, I'm going to whatever movie he wants to see, spending time with his friends, and keeping quiet when I disagree with him. And pretty much letting go of my practice. Then I realize what I'm doing and freak out and start a fight. It's like I don't know how to be strong and soft. It's always either one or the other."

Laura's dilemma isn't an uncommon one in this era of evolving gender roles. And it isn't just women who struggle with this problem. In fact, it happens to be one of life's great questions: How do we find the balance between decisiveness and cooperation, between autonomy and partnership, between strength and softness?

As I listened to Laura, it occurred to me that it would help her to meditate on the story of Parvati. Of all the Indian goddesses, Parvati is the one who most embodies the complex possibilities inherent in contemporary feminine roles. Deity meditation is a great practice for bringing out the buried strengths of the psyche, and meditating on Parvati can bring a powerfully helpful energy to the challenge of balancing strength and softness. For men, Parvati can be a powerful link to the inner feminine.

I first came across the story of Parvati early in my practice. It leapt out at me from the Shiva Purana, a fat mythological text of the Indian tradition, and when I read it, I felt in some odd way that I was reading my own story. I identified with Parvati, the maiden yogini who takes off for the wilds to practice hard-core yoga and wins the love of Shiva, the lord of yoga, whose outlaw cool and air of unavailability played into one of my primary romantic tropes. Independent yet devoted, a teacher as well as a wife, Parvati's name is synonymous with yogic willpower as well as with love. She is a maiden, a lover, and a mother—powerful in her own right, yet an equal partner in a marriage that combines the erotic and the sacred like no other in the tradition.

Invoking the Goddess

To see how Parvati can be such a powerfully helpful energy in the life of a woman trying to balance strength and softness, it helps to understand why an Indian goddess figure might be relevant to your life at all. In psychological terms, the deities of the Indian tradition are archetypes, subtle energies lying deep within the unconscious. In the language of yoga, however, the major deities of the Indian tradition are literally aspects, or faces, of the one divine reality. Indian tradition worships reality as a single seamless whole, in which the Divine is not only transcendent and formless but also layered into the cellular structure of the world and capable of taking personal forms. Deities like Krishna, Shiva, Durga, Rama, and Lakshmi, according to this tradition, are more than symbols. Their figures contain the full power of the Absolute in a particular aspect, and when you contemplate them, they shed a particular quality of light into your consciousness.

But there's an even more practical side to deity meditation. When you contemplate deity energy, it lets you bypass your own ego, with its tendency to identify with your limitations and culturally determined assumptions, and internalize qualities of the higher Self. Have you ever gone to a movie or concert and come out moving and talking like the star? Deity meditation works on a similar principle, except that focusing on Parvati or Hanuman is quite a different proposition from meditating on Angelina Jolie or Jay-Z. Meditation on a divine archetype calls forth transformative powers of our consciousness, which is one reason that deity practice has been such a crucial part of Indian and Tibetan Tantric yoga since the early Middle Ages.

The Sanskrit word for deity is deva, or devi, which means "shining one." This is exactly what deities are—beings of light who exist at subtle levels of awareness, in realms prior to physical manifestation. That means that, when you focus on these energies, they empower transformation at the subtle level, where it is actually possible to make changes that will then show up in your physical life.

Though deity worship is embedded deep in the fabric of traditional Hindu culture, Tantric deity practice aims at something that is more radical and subtle than external ritual. It's a strategy for internalizing the subtle powers personified in a deity. The idea here is that by tuning in to a deity figure, you liberate certain qualities in yourself—Durga's protective energy, Lakshmi's power of abundance, Shiva's yogic mastery, Hanuman's strength.

You might connect to a deity through a mantra or through meditating on a painting of the deity (traditionally made by an artist who has meditated deeply and received an inner image that is then represented on canvas). You might read one of the deity stories and imagine yourself into it. Or you might simply contemplate the deity's qualities. Deity energies can be inspiring and protective. But most important, they enlarge your sense of Self.

This is especially true when it comes to the archetypal energies of feminine power. The energy of the divine feminine has historically been hidden in both Eastern and Western society, just as the strengths of women were kept subordinate to the masculine. It is no coincidence that in the past 50 years, as women have come into stronger positions in society and politics, images of the divine feminine have begun to surface as role models and exemplars of specifically feminine forms of strength. Nor is it an accident that Tantric practices, which more than any other honor the shakti, the feminine aspect of God, have begun to draw attention in the world. Unlike the Western traditions, which see the feminine as essentially passive and receptive, the divine feminine in Tantric tradition is the very creativity and potency of the Absolute—the shakti is as inseparable from the Divine as heat is from fire. Goddess practice has been a major part of Tantric traditions in both India and Tibet, and most of the practitioners in these traditions have been men, who meditated on the goddess as a way of gaining creative power, literary gifts, or strength in combat. For many women—and men—the Indian power goddesses like Durga and Kali are particularly po--tent, perhaps because of their radical and warriorlike energy. Yet, though Kali is undeniably fascinating, with her bloody sword and necklace of skulls, there is a lot to be learned from a figure like Parvati—a gentle form of Durga—who is as human as the yogini next door.

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June 2011

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