» Letting go. Is it a force of will to let go? Or does letting go simply happen? «
Durga: Releasing What No Longer Serves You
Theme » Letting go / Crumbling
Enquiry » What am I holding on to that no longer serves me?
Invocation » I offer into the fire, that which no longer serves me! SWAHA
Mantra » OM SRI DURGAYAI NAMAHAA
The Transformative Power of Durga
When planning our Winter Solstice ceremony, we pulled the The Crumbling Card; letting go of what no longer serves us. It fitted alongside the divine signature of Durga, the fierce Hindu goddess who entails destruction to empower creation. The mythic stories show her fierce-mother-love. She rides a Tiger.
To get a sense of the destructive/creative power of Durga, a useful metaphor is that of the jaws of the tiger. To her cub, the jaws offer protection, love and care. To a wild boar, those same jaws are lethal. It all depends on your perspective to how the Durga energy is expressed or experienced.
Holding ceremonies, I am discovering, is about clearing out my own energy field as part of the process to turning up and holding space on the night. Leading in to our ceremony, a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings of intentions lead to a sizeable rupture in our holding container and it was looking pretty sketchy how well we would be able to pull this off. I was curious enough to stay with the process... was this the energetic clearing process of Durga?
The power of these ceremonies is known and real for us and we both trusted in the purification of the fire havan, and the heart opening of the kirtan practice, so we willingly put our grievances on hold, to attend to after our ceremony.
I share this 'behind the scenes' experience simply to say that afterwards a new world opened up. Durga came and conquered all that I felt important to the rupture. She wiped the slate clean. I could only wonder what I had got so upity about. Nothing in the drama that proceeded the rupture seemed significant anymore. The lightness I felt in my bodymind was liberating and I didn't want to contract back into where I had been. It was nonsense to do otherwise. Such is the power of Durga.
The Power of Ritual: Amplifying Intentions with Cacao, Fire, Mantra, and Meditation
Using the heart opening technologies of Cacao, Mantra, Fire Havan & Kirtan to clarify our intention and bring it forth into the world
In these power-filled ceremonies, we create space to get clear on our personal and collective intention; and then we amplify this by opening our heart with the aid of the cacao elixir, purifying our mind with the fire havan and sacred mantra, and shifting into heart-mind coherence using the practice of kirtan and meditation. It's quite the formula!
We offer invocations to welcome, or call upon that particular aspect of divinity within our Self and within the cosmos. As above, so below; what is within the whole is within us also.
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