Secrets of the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses , livre ebook

Turner Publishing Company - Julie Peters

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126 pages

English

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Wholeness Is Limiting―Possibilities Emerge When We're in Pieces
Everyone experiences brokenness at some point in their lives―a romantic relationship fails, a job ends, a dream dies, an illness emerges. During these times it is easy to focus on our human frailty and to want nothing more than to be whole again. But what are we missing when we overlook the ugliness, fear, anger and vulnerability of being in pieces? The Nityas, or the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses of Tantric philosophy, teach us that we miss the empowerment of the full human experience and the growth that comes from renewing ourselves again and again.
This introduction to Tantric mythology as a contemporary resource for personal and spiritual growth guides you to reach into your pain and ask the larger questions about your relationships, not only with your lover but also with your community and with yourself. Each goddess prompts you to explore some aspect of relationship, such as loneliness, true love, equality, instinct, learning from the other, and learning to be alone. In seeking answers to these questions―supported by yogic wisdom, modern research into psychology and sociology, and nightly meditation and journaling practices―you will find empowerment in discovering who you are and what you truly desire.

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Mindulness

Meditation

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Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	09 mai 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781594736230
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0850€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Secrets of the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses
Meditations on Desire, Relationships the Art of Being Broken
Julie Peters

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Contents
Prologue: Lying Broken
Introduction: Nityas-The Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses
Part One: Desire
First Night Kamesvari Nitya-The Goddess of Loneliness
Discovering Loneliness as a Source of Power
Second Night Bhagamalini Nitya-The Goddess of Disruptive Desire
When Desire Ruins Everything (and That s a Very Good Thing)
Third Night Klinna Nitya-The Goddess of Embodiment
The Healing Power of Sex, Sweat, and Tears
Fourth Night Bherunda Nitya-The Goddess of Vulnerability
The Hidden Power of Vulnerability
Fifth Night Vahnivasini Nitya-The Goddess of Choice
A Call to Action: Learning to Make Our Own Choices
Part Two: Connection
Sixth Night Vajresvari Nitya-The Goddess of Intoxication
The Intoxication (and Danger) of Passionate Love
Seventh Night Shivaduti Nitya-The Goddess of Equality
Loving the Self, Loving the Other: Communication in Relationship
Eighth Night Tvarita Nitya-The Goddess of Instinct
Tapping into the Secrets of Our Own Wild Instincts
Ninth Night Kulasundari Nitya-The Goddess of Learning
Learning the Love Stories (and Learning to Love)
Tenth Night Nitya Nitya-The Goddess of The Death Light
Life Lessons from Death
Part Three: Separation
Eleventh Night Nilapataka Nitya-The Goddess of The Blue
The Nectar of Adversity
Twelfth Night Vijaya Nitya-The Goddess of Ugliness
The Value (and Power) of Ugliness
Thirteenth Night Sarvamangala Nitya-The Goddess of Freedom
Finding Freedom in Boundaries
Fourteenth Night Jvalamalini Nitya-The Goddess of Breakups
Fiercely Protecting the Treasures of Being Alone
Fifteenth Night Citra Nitya-The Goddess of Storytelling
Becoming the Artists of Our Own Lives
Part Four: Play
Sixteenth Night Lalita-The Goddess of Playfulness
The Dance of Connection and Separation
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
About the Author
Copyright
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Prologue
Lying Broken
O nce upon a time, I broke.
That August, my partner and I split up instead of getting engaged. A few months later, a car hit me while I was on my bike, throwing me across the road, and my body didn t seem to know how to put itself back together. In the forced stillness of healing from the accident, waves of grief and anger rose up-not about the car that hit me, but about that time a close friend sexually assaulted me. I d tried hard to erase that moment from my life, but there it was, unraveling in my swollen knees and the knifelike jabs in my gut. I couldn t stop remembering it anymore. None of my strategies-practicing yoga, meditating, (self-) medicating, phoning a friend-were working.
So I broke. I lay belly-down on my floor, crying so hard even my dog didn t know what to do with me. I didn t feel strong or powerful. Whatever I had to call faith-that everything happens for a reason, that I am somehow being guided, that people are trustworthy-turned out to be as flimsy as a plane made out of tissue paper. If everything happens for a reason, the reason sure looked a lot like my cold, hard floor.
Of course, the story didn t end there (in life, stories rarely do). But this book isn t about how I found the secret to putting myself back together again and so can you. This is a story about the art of being broken.
Akhilandesvari: The Never-Not-Broken Goddess
Thankfully, it was during this time that I discovered the patron saint of being broken: a goddess named Akhilandesvari, or She Who Is Never Not Broken. Akhilandesvari is a goddess from the Shakta Tantra tradition, a branch of Indian philosophy that worships the divine feminine as god. Akhilandesvari stands on the back of a crocodile with a sweet smile on her face. She is surrounded by images of herself, as if she were standing between two mirrors in an elevator, multiplying into infinity. One of her hands is held up, palm forward, in abhaya mudra , a gesture for dispelling fear, and another holds the trident, a weapon representing her consort, Shiva, the masculine form of god. 1
Isvari means goddess while akhila means undivided. When you see a letter a at the beginning of a word in Sanskrit, however, it plays a little trick: the a can either fold into the word or act as a prefix that means its opposite. Akhila thus means both undivided but also not-undivided. The word won t quite let you land on one or the other meaning; its opposite is always contained within itself. In this way, Akhilandesvari is broken right to her very name.
Akhilandesvari was once a fierce, or kali , goddess, full of fury. She was too fearsome to understand or to relate to, and Shankara, a famous sage of Tantric philosophy, is said to have tamed her by adorning her with the sricakra as earrings. 2 The sricakra is an image that represents the goddess Lalita, the manifestation of supreme beauty and power. In the form of earrings, Lalita could whisper into Akhilandesvari s ears, calming her fierceness enough that we can sit with her brokenness. In this sense, Lalita provides the secret to being present with the intensity of our own grief, pain, and confusion. She helps us to look deeply and fearlessly into the heart of our pain and to be willing to see that there s always a seed of beauty, or shri , right at its center.
Wholeness may be comfortable, but it s also limiting. Akhilandesvari s brokenness acts like a prism that breaks white light up into many different colors: the colors were there all the time, but you couldn t see them through the unbroken white light. Difficult times in our lives can break up our story of ourselves and reveal colors we didn t know were there, like our resilience, our compassion, or some great desire that has thus far never been fulfilled. Suddenly we realize how oppressive it is to have to be whole all the time. When we learn to snuggle up with the experience of brokenness, we are able to face our fears. We can ride them down the river like Akhilandesvari on her crocodile. This goddess wants us to see the possibilities that emerge when our lives are in pieces. She wants us to play within the fragments.
This book is about those possibilities. The goddesses we will meet here are not the sort of unattainable ideals of divine femininity that can appear in other spiritual or mythological traditions. These goddesses want us to explore who we are right now, not who we could or should be. They dare us to look deeply into our own dark hearts and find the treasures that have always been hidden there. They want us to share those treasures with our lovers and our friends. They want us to be broken, to get whole, and to be willing to break again. They want us to experience love and pleasure and pain and the full range of what it means to be human.
Let me introduce you to them.
Introduction
Nityas T HE E TERNAL M OON P HASE G ODDESSES
I n this book, you will meet Vajresvari, who sits on a throne on top of a lotus floating in an ocean of blood, intoxicated with desire. Here, also, is Klinna, whose name means She Who Is Always Wet, oozing sweat and tears that she catches in a jeweled cup so she can drink it with you. Two-faced Vijaya rests on the back of a lion, daring you to see her in all her beauty and all her horror at once. Nilapataka, adorned with sapphires and pearls, drinks the blue poison of adversity that for her is the sweetest nectar. In my brokenness, each of these goddesses reflected back to me a different version of my own face, showing me the many selves that could emerge when I stopped trying so hard to be whole. These goddesses weren t offering me their strange weapons and beautiful gemstones to teach me how to put myself back together again. They were doing it to help me see the beauty in all my fragments. These are the Nityas, the Eternal Moon Phase Goddesses.
Nitya means eternal or forever, and indicates the way the moon is always present but also always changing, returning through the same cycle again and again, a little different every time you look up. The moon, like Akhilandesvari, is always divided and also always undivided. Each of the Nityas presides over her own night of the moon cycle, and also represents some aspect of Lalita s desire. As such, they trace a sexual narrative, a story of desire, connection, and separation.
Lalita herself appears as the sixteenth night of the moon cycle, though a true lunar month has only fifteen days between the new moon and the full moon. All of the Nityas represent some aspect of Lalita; they are her and yet she is also a goddess in her own right with her own story to tell. She subsumes the cycle of fifteen, adds something new to it, and manages to bring us right back to the beginning of our cycle. Her power is in this playfulness, this unwillingness to fit into the confines of anything so mundane as lunar math.
These goddesses come from a tradition called Shakta (or Sakta) Tantra. In this tradition, erotic desire is the source of everything in the universe. The world is created by the sexual union between Shiva (or Siva) and Shakti (or Sakti), the masculine and feminine Source. Desire is not (or not only) dangerous, but the energy that moves us toward each other, creating the possibility for learning and evolving (and, well, orgasms).
These goddesses are about relationship. Their story begins with desire, the energy that draws us together. The first five nights are ab