Kali medicine: the end & the beginning

The end of the solar year is a time for the goddess Kali to rise.

She rises from within – she pervades everything, a potent kernel of divine energy within the whole of the cosmos. Already within you, awakened by the call of springtime.

It is the call of death and birth. The end and the beginning.

In order for the solar new year to arrive, this current year must die. Springtime can be erroneously portrayed as purely about birth when the calendar new year is pinned to January 1st, but humans have known for eons – long before the Gregorian calendar – that the truer rebirth periods lie outside that window.

For some cultures, autumn signals a period of rebirth; the lunar new year in January is another; and perhaps most commonly honored in our blood and bones is the solar new year in the spring. If you pay attention to the Christian tradition beneath the veneer of bunnies and candy, it’s a more nuanced holiday. Jesus dies a brutal death on the cross to be reborn three days later.

The rebirth of Christ the spirit from Jesus the man is a powerful message for the spring season, and closely aligned with goddess Kali. It’s worth noting that many of the lost teachings of Jesus Christ (found in the Gnostic Gospels, amongst others) point to lessons on reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. His own life is a testament to it, and the rumors he traveled to India and Egypt are possibly validated by these lost teachings. He did not fear death, for he understood it was simply a transition for his soul from one form to another. Arguably, life on the “other side” might be better than on earth.

But my work here is all about making life here just as beautiful. Can we?

Can we welcome death with new seeds to water, late winter buds, pine cones and tinkling bells, ready for the eclipse to wash us clean?

Can we look with wide, open, forgiving eyes at our shadows, and invite the blade of goddess Kali to our necks as she cuts away our dying egos?

Can we stop grasping on to what we knew and what we thought we wanted, and truly let go?

It’s much easier said than done.

But Kali can help.

Kali is the goddess of constructive deconstruction. Often depicted standing on dead bodies with her tongue out dripping with blood, the skulls of her victims around her neck, Kali appears fearsome at first glance. She’s known as the destroyer.

She is also known as the goddess of rebirth.

I often imagine Kali as the seed opener. For a plant to grow, the hard exterior of its seed must be broken so it can become something new. It requires a particular force of nature to break open that shell so the seed can germinate, and this process typically occurs underground, entirely in the dark. Kali is that force – the dark power who erupts the seed.

She reminds us that dying is entering a gateway to something new. Like an angel of death, light in the dark – Kali helps birth the entire world. A midwife, supreme lover and life-bringer at heart. She’s intense, yes, but who said birthing was ever going to be mild? 😉

Kali is revered in different forms if you look harder – some emphasize her fierceness and bloodlust, while others focus on her love and compassion. In truth, she is both. For it takes truly massive courage, ruthlessness, as well as love and compassion to break open those seed husks, to cut off the unnecessary arms, limbs and parts of our identity which no longer serve us.

She doesn’t wield her sword for the inherent pleasure of killing or for revenge. Her blows are strategically loving, and she’ll cut you with piercing admiration for your soul, seeing right through you and into your core. She sees the stuff in that seed that wants to break out of your outdated shell.

I invoked Kali unknowingly for the first time in 2015. I had already gone through an intense breakup and relocation. After the dust settled from those changes, I experienced a creative renaissance and was painting, training as a yoga instructor and filled with longing and desire for a new life. Yet I was also dragging myself to a job that made no sense to earn small amounts of money, unable to thrive. My ride was a hand-me-down from my sister, needing constant maintenance and repairs. Whenever I ran the heat, it smelled like gas in the car, so I stopped using it and drove with a chill.

One spring night during this time, I attended a strange party hosted by a friend’s acquaintance. The apartment was filled with antiques, vintage cocktail glasses and oddities. I was on my moon cycle in a red dress, doing my best not to absorb all the energy, but what’s a woman on her moon to do? The toilet in the bathroom was broken and ran constantly. I tried to fix it and couldn’t. Towards the end of the night, I discovered a small sculpture who was unhappy. He was sacred yet the dwellers of this apartment had placed a silly hat on him, but that wasn’t the worst of it. His phallus was missing! The host was impressed I figured that out. How could one not notice this erotic deity’s missing part? I explained the important of remedying this situation, though I’ll never know what happened.

Once home, I felt weird, so I grabbed some herbs and burned clouds of smoke to cleanse my aura of the energies from that party. It took a long time, and I found myself crying outside in the grass. The tears wouldn’t stop. That incomplete masculine deity was me. I was sick and tired of myself in my current life. I wanted my phallus back, too! The tears flowed and flowed and I announced my desperation and willingness to do anything if it meant I would be on my path and serving a higher good. If I could feel whole again. Anything, I whispered in the ground. This kind of plea is music to Kali’s ears.

Within two weeks, I found a new job, then a new car the following month, and a new apartment later that year. I know that it was my utter surrender on that strange night which precipitated the shift. At one point in my breakdown, I had agreed to try another kind of job, randomly throwing out the suggestion of being a “plumber” in an effort to emphasize: I would do whatever the divine wanted, if only I could get out of my rut.

Of course, the new job was dedicated to yoga & ayurveda, with creative skills required. Often we just have to be willing to let go of our attachments before the wish is granted.

The next time Kali came to visit me, I dreaded it. I felt her coming for years – I knew a big shift was necessary. But I resisted the change. I couldn’t let go of the stability of my apartment (a relatively new one, at the time), my relationship, my regular paycheck. These things weren’t serving me at the time – I couldn’t serve myself within their influence. So Kali cleared them away, one by one, within a very short span of time – again, about 2 weeks. And when she did, as painful as it was to lose so many large aspects of my identity, I trusted her, and I welcomed her, as well as all my blood and tears, for I knew there would be rainbows on the other side. The ending is also the beginning.

It was in the clearing that followed – the blank slate of my new life, in which I finally made headway on writing my first novel, finally got into the garden and started learning how to grow things (a goal for over 10 years!), and finally released some of my oldest patterns of wounding that were holding me back from living and loving in my authentic, sovereign heart and soul.

   

It is only natural to experience fear and trepidation in the face of change. There’s no need to suppress it. These are the shadows of the self who long to be reborn, whose cries are the necessary voices to usher in change. For to hear them is to allow their medicine to do its final work: to be a catalyst. They are here to teach us, and cannot complete their purpose unless we heed them, honor them, in our minds, bodies and souls. While resisting emotions makes them stuck in our subconscious minds and bodies, causing imbalance and struggle, feeling and witnessing emotions fully gives them permission to finally go.

There’s no shame in crying in the grass at 3am. It might just be the catalyst for those prayers to be answered.

Kali loves your tears and mucus and blood and everything messy and gross about being in a body. Remember – she’s the one underground busting open seeds and slicing off the heads of our egos. She’s with us for the dirty work, and we’re so blessed to have her with us. It’s a lot easier to do with a goddess on my side.

And so, I am learning more each day, it’s also ok to get excited about my fears, to look forward to all my little deaths.

To don my favorite black and star-studded gown.

To pick up Kali’s sword and smile as I walk to the place of surrender.

To lay my weary body on the earth, to gift her my salty grief, and find the eye of my emotional storm. When I quiet my mind after a good emotional release and sink into the embrace of the earth’s stillness, only then can I hear the humming below, in the soil. Kali is working her magic there in the dark, even while I am resting.

In this day and age, rest is radical.

Expressed grief is medicine.

And silence – the holy, sacred kind – can be progress.

You are all of this: radical, medicinal, holy, sacred and ever-evolving, dear one.

 .˳·˖✶𓂁𓂄✶˖·˳.