The Trans-formative Power of Working with Anger and Rage.
This piece has been brewing in my head for the last week or so, catalysed by a great post on Facebook by Shivani Hawkins of Living Sanskrit in the US, challenging people who see Kali as simply a goddess of anger rather than the Great Cosmic Mother inherent in all things, loving, gracious and powerful.
What I want to inject into this discussion, is that Kali also lives in each of us personally as the archetypal Kali, our very own spark of the fierce and transformative face of the great mother, who can be channelled into our engagement with the world.
However, we must be very careful about what we do or don’t do with the archetypal Kali, as like any other human archetype, and especially the so-called “dark goddesses”, we carry a complex mixture of empowering forms, and distorted expressions, of this primal energy.
We can do magnificent things in the world with Her pure forms and, either sabotage our own lives and/or add to an already toxic and profoundly damaged civilisation with our distorted forms.
These distortions can be absorbed psychically from the collective, from 4000 year of patriarchal culture, from the wisdom, power and intelligence of the feminine brutalised and rejected in past generations in our family systems, and, if you are into it, from our past-life histories. This creates incredible ongoing trauma and the most toxic forms of rage which we all carry to some degree.
If this gets activated in its raw, unhealed forms and we launch into the world with it, we can do some real damage, as well as be very good at sabotaging even our best of intentions. Life is littered in in with the corpses and walking wounded from this kind of carnage.
Despite the above though, working with this quality of rage is actually a doorway into states of true personal and psycho-spiritual empowerment, reclaimed passion and creative juice, in ways that transform fear into courage, unlock the pure tantric sacred truth of our sexuality, and turn dis-empowered individuals into agent of change and transformation in the world, all the hallmarks of a truly awake and available inner Kali.
If we run from this necessary confrontation with our own dark, toxic rage, then we miss one of the greatest opportunities of our lives, to become fully authentically ourselves and empowered vehicles for truth, justice and integrity in the world. By doing the work, we become ambassadors for the sacred, when we serve from a cleaner, more vital place within.
And there is joy! The distorted dark feminine can become depression and despair, whereas coming closer to Kali and Durga (or any of her cross cultural sisters, Lilith, Medusa, Black Madonna) brings you to a deepening capacity for joy, to intimacy with self and to the ecstasy of the sacred marriage. When the personal, archetypal Kali is freed of the distortions that overlay her Shakti, she naturally bursts into dance, which in turn allows Lalita and Parvati, the goddesses of sacred sexuality and the Shiva Shakti union to blossom.
The distorted inner Kali will want to rip the throat out of any man who crosses her, the released Kali will seek to transform him into her Shiva and won’t hold back with her love, her passion nor her fierceness around his unconsciousness and anaesthetisations.
How to facilitate this transition? Essentially what is needed, and it is not for the faint hearted, is a mixture of expressive therapeutic work that engages the primal emotions and allows for safe physical and emotional releasing; deep purificatory meditations from the Shiva Shakti traditions that target imploded and cellular toxicity, like the Golden Kali visualisations; any of the conscious dance practices such as five rhythms that allow for her passion and joy to surface freely and, a study program to consciously reclaim the deep sacred feminine from under the yoke of patriarchal versions of her mythology.
From an activism point of view, there is a huge qualitative difference between the efforts and effectiveness of activists who haven’t done this work to those who have. Andrew Harvey, the architect of Sacred Activism and a great lover of the Goddess, describes the difference between impotent and destructive rage with what he calls pure “sacred outrage”, where Kali’s sword of truth has been so honed by the inner fire, that when an individual uses it, it cuts cleanly and surgically through denial and unconsciousness and yet also comes with an equally fierce love and searing compassion.
On a spiritual level, the more we are able to purify the distortions to this archetypal form of the great mother within, it creates more space for her cosmic form to be experienced in individual as an ongoing, moment to moment reality that diminishes our sense of isolation or separateness from the divine in all his or her forms.*
*please be aware that these insights about Kali refer to her “archetypal” form, which in itself is a controversial concept and one based on my own personal and professional experiences. These do not necessarily reflect the perspective of authentic traditional Kali traditions.
Jaya Matiji Ki Jai
For additional support with these processes, here are a couple of offerings…