Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  Sally was preaching to the choir—I’m sure anyone reading this can relate. I loved that she said “keep on truckin’.” I’ve experienced no shortage of guilt, shame, and pain with my relapses. As I became more serious in my practice and path, I learned that part of what kept me reverting to drugs and alcohol was that I wasn’t going to those raw and tender places within myself and becoming vulnerable. Once I started to do that and lean into the pain, my life didn’t get perfect, but my relapses began to happen less often, and were more surmountable in the sense that they were less difficult to come back from. I would look at myself and ask, “What the hell am I doing?” as well as recognize that I deserved better. I could do that because I was learning to have compassion, gentleness, and care for myself. I was applying the resiliency Sally spoke of. I would be in a terrible mess, but I’d be able to call myself on my own shit and say, “Look, I have a decision to make here. I’m in a bad place, and I’m either going to keep going down that road or pick myself back up.” Sink or fucking swim—the choice was mine. I chose to stand back up and—to the best of my ability in that moment and in the ones that followed—be vulnerable with my thoughts, emotions, and feelings as they happened. I found my way through them by holding space instead of giving in to them. Then I could begin to gently look deeper at what was inside that brought me back to drinking and drugs. I’d explore what wasn’t healed (the material that was conscious to me, at least) that was still causing me so much pain and sent me tumbling back down that dead-end road.

  Accessing that vulnerability requires a certain amount of compassion. I wanted to learn Sally’s views on compassion in general, especially within the context of the current divided and angry political climate in the United States. How would Sally suggest we practice compassion rather than anger in these situations and in general?

  She recommended “looking past the physical person and trying to see what their story is, what their pain is, what’s behind their mask, and also what is the human being behind the ideas I may not agree with. Where is the pain in these people? And, especially, what is their goodness?

  “I tend to be judgmental about people who are smug about what they have, who feel that they deserve it but are afraid that if others have more, what they have will be taken away. So in that case, I’d try to consider what it would feel like to lose everything I worked for, to feel hopeless about things getting better for me. And I realize that almost all human beings experience that at some point.” Sally reminded me about the way the Dalai Lama speaks of compassion, to realize that every human being wants to be happy, and that every human being is suffering in one way or another.

  Sally took it beyond compassion. “The thing that I’ve been seeing recently is how much everybody needs to be respected. As much as we need compassion, we need to have respect for other people. People know when they’re not respected or taken seriously, and I find that this is one of the things that makes us most resentful. I think that’s what so many people in our country are feeling.”

  I absolutely resonated with that. I thought about all the nights I’d lie awake, sick and suffering, mad at God, mad at everything, or perhaps more accurately, scared of everything. There was so much fear in me. I would think about that and how the expression “Hurt people hurt people” made so much sense. By remembering that place of fear and pain in my own life, I began to think about how much fear and pain must be inside people in hate groups and how, at the heart level, I could relate to that. That took some of my anger toward them away because I saw they were hurting very much like I’ve hurt. We express our pain in very different ways, but it is pain and fear that underlies all of it—for myself, for members of hate groups, and for all human beings, period.

  Sally grokked what I was getting at. “A lot of us confuse compassion with pity. It’s because we are naturally experiencing me here and you there and not necessarily feeling the true connection between us. During the times in my life when my heart was open completely and I experienced what I would call ‘true’ compassion, I felt a literal oneness with other people. It’s not ‘I’m over here feeling compassion for you’ or ‘You’re there feeling compassion for me’—it’s a realization that there’s no difference between us. That we’re all threads in one fabric. Our hearts ache for others. We rejoice with others because they are part of our own being.

  “Admittedly that’s an ideal, a high state. I’ve experienced that kind of compassion at a few wonderful peak times in my life, though I’ll freely admit that it’s not my daily experience. Yet remembering those moments, recognizing that those feelings are the true ones, shows me that there is no way I can separate myself from you or my heart from your heart or my pain from your pain or my happiness from your happiness. To remember that allows a feeling of compassion, which is not ‘I feel sorry for you’ or ‘I’m going to try and empathize with you,’ but is more like ‘I am you. There’s no way I can’t be you.’ ”

  I related what Sally was saying to my own direct experiences of this nondual oneness. I sat with that for a minute, and then began to wonder who there is to even be compassionate in the first place, since there’s just this one compassion occurring that involves all of us. I hoped Sally could connect this to her wisdom rooted in the tantric Shaivism school of yoga—a tradition that originated after 850 CE in Kashmir. She helped me understand how the Divine feminine can reconnect us with nondual awareness, which was the basis of her book Awakening Shakti.

  She started by sharing her understanding of the Divine as nondual. “We can’t understand the Divine feminine without recognizing its relationship to the Divine masculine. In the Shaiva tradition, Shiva Shakti—empowered consciousness—are two sides of the same truth, the same sacred reality. Tantra describes reality as having two main qualities: It’s still, unchanging, and transcendent, and it’s also playful, creative, and completely present in the physical and subtle worlds. The tradition of nondual Shaivism also takes it for granted that there are many subtle realms between that absolute transcendent reality, the ever-present awareness-love, and the physical world. Of course, most of us aren’t aware of these levels of reality, just the way we can’t hear some of the frequencies that dogs hear. But the Tantras say that there are subtle, powerful energies who occupy a very subtle sphere of reality but who also function as energies throughout the physical world and within the human personality. In tantric Shaivism there’s a recognition that the human being contains all worlds, all powers, all planes of existence. Everything is accessible within us, which is part of the allure of meditation.

  “Deity energies, whether they are the Hindu deities like Durga or Krishna or the Buddhist deities like Manjushri or Vajrayogini or the ancient Western deities, are specific vortexes of energy. We experience these energies around us—as weather, as emotional energies, as particular resonances that we pick up in nature or in groups. We exist inside our own energy systems. This is something that more and more of us are able to recognize, especially now that traditional forms of healing, Chinese medicine, and so forth are becoming more familiar.” Sally took it even further. “What is more difficult for us postmoderns to accept is that there is also a level at which deities actually appear in forms, which can be felt or even seen in meditation or dreams. The images of deities function as meditation aids that eventually can lead us to an actual experience of the deity energy, often in a form. Similarly, mantras related to specific deities can supercharge our bodies and our consciousness with unique forms of presence. Deities then can be experienced as helpful presences, protectors, vehicles for receiving grace from the infinite. There’s an entire science of what is sometimes called deity yoga in which we practice enlarging our capacity for experiencing our own divinity by invoking deity energies through visualizations and mantras, and eventually coming to see that we have these energies within ourselves.”

  I wanted to know more about that! Could Sally use the Hindu goddess Kali—the Divine mother and Shiva’s consort—as an example of how we can work with deit
y energies?

  “Kali is a great goddess to talk about. One of the questions that comes up when we Westerners are talking about Hindu goddesses is ‘Why Hindu goddesses? Why Hindu deities?’ They’re obviously not a part of our tradition. But over the past century or so, Westerners have been immersing themselves in Indian culture. In some cases, it’s clearly a kind of spiritual tourism or cultural appropriation. But I believe the deeper draw that serious practitioners experience is because these deity forms are alive. Because they are invoked and loved every single day, by millions of people, they are accessible with not too much effort by anyone who approaches them with a degree of openness. It’s not so different than the way, say, the energy of Jesus or Mary can be felt in certain churches. Because so many people have been calling on these energies in such a concentrated way, a pathway is formed. Then the mantra of a deity or a prayer can serve as a doorway into what I would call light realms.

  “Kali, of course, has become a catalytic icon in the West. Her form is highly psychoactive, especially for women. To many Western women, Kali’s image can summon the inner archetype of the untamed feminine, the woman who is not hiding her audacity, her intensity, or her sexuality. Yet ultimately Kali is a goddess of spiritual liberation—the dissolution of all thought forms into pure awareness. In the iconography, she’s shown as a more or less naked young woman. Most of the icons of Kali show her being about sixteen years old, with full breasts, wearing a necklace of skulls, which represents the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet—that’s a long story. She classically carries a bloody meat cleaver in one hand and a severed head in another (that represents the ego, severed by her sword). In the traditional story of Kali, she’s a bloodthirsty warrior who manifests out of the warrior goddess Durga, while Durga is battling a horde of demons and conquers thousands of demons.

  “What’s interesting to me about Kali is that she has so many faces, as a true goddess should! She started out in the Hindu tradition as a scary, marginal figure to whom you prayed if you were looking for the power to kill your enemies. She gradually came to be seen as the full-spectrum Divine mother. Great sages like Ramakrishna called Kali ‘Ma’ and extolled her compassion and her beauty. She’s both a goddess of life and a goddess of death. She’s the goddess of dissolution and destruction and also of the violent creativity of the birthing. Of all the feminine deities, she’s the one who can most powerfully take a sword to your obstructive tendencies, and ultimately to your false self-identification. Kali is the force that dissolves your masks and false ideas and shows you what you are at the very core. She melts you down to the bone, then shows you the vastness of what you really are. In her most esoteric form, Kali is the great void into which all forms dissolve. She’s a multilayered goddess who can kindle radical ecstasy inside you. And if you call on her, you need to be prepared for some radical transformation!”

  Sally’s take on the Divine feminine was so much more expansive and inclusive than any I’d encountered. I mean, right there, you hear the word “feminine” and many people assume it’s about gender, but what she was talking about incorporated the relationship between the Divine masculine and the Divine feminine, as well as the importance of all of us realizing the full potential of our energy.

  “In India, Divine feminine practices are called Shakta, meaning that they invoke Shakti, the cosmic, dynamic energy that is the source of everything in the universe. The basic understanding behind tantric understanding about reality is that the Divine masculine and the Divine feminine are utterly intertwined. On the cosmic level, there’s no gender separation. There’s only a vast, androgynous, transcendent beingness. Once there are forms—once the big bang has happened—you are in the realm of Shakti. What that means is that men as well as women are Shakti. Our gender identities operate only at certain stages of consciousness. In the tantric tradition, the qualities of the Divine masculine are pure awareness, detachment, freedom, stillness, and unchanging existence. The qualities of the Divine feminine in the tantric tradition are energy, power, love, the capacity for knowing and acting, and, critically, the power that both binds you to the experience of limitation and also reveals unity. In fact, a Shakta practitioner will tell you that all forms of success are actually gifts of the goddess. Anything you want in life is in the hands of Shakti or the Divine feminine.

  “In the tradition, men as well as women—in fact, as far as I can see, men more than women—invoked the Divine feminine as a loving mother and giver of boons. The idea was that for mastery of life, you need to have a relationship with goddess. Most of the literature about goddesses that we have from the Eastern traditions seems to have been written by men. So traditionally in India and Tibet, there isn’t much written by women about goddess practice, and that is one of the things that are changing in modern times.

  “When I started giving goddess classes, I was teaching mainly in yoga studios, and there would be fifty women there and maybe three men. Usually the men would be either the studio owners or maybe the husbands or boyfriends of the women attending. What would happen is that the men would come up to me afterward and they would say, ‘Gosh, I thought this was going to be one of those female empowerment things that I don’t relate to, but it turns out that I could identify the goddess as a part of my own energetic experience.’ In fact, what happens once men recognize the feminine as a Divine quality in themselves is that they realize that these archetypal energies that we identify as goddess energies are actually very intimately a part of their own psyche. Men and women realize how much of their strength, their skill, their capacity for intuition and creativity are connected to Divine feminine energy itself.

  “Sacred feminine energy is naturally a part of everyone’s psyche, and it is both nurturing and strong, even aggressive. What the tantric view points out is that a man doesn’t have to depend on a woman for nurturance and acceptance, nor does a woman have to go to a man for strength. It is such a transformative, integrative understanding to take in this view of masculine and feminine. When you recognize that all of us are actually powered by the feminine energy, not only does it engender more respect for women, which is always a good thing, but also more comfort with men’s vulnerability and the connection between inner strength and vulnerability.”

  There was that word again: “vulnerability.” Meditation has helped me soften to my own vulnerability. Learning to stay with the memories and visions of the shitty things I’ve done in the past rather than get up off the cushion and walk away is a humbling experience, as is bearing as much loving witness toward the experience as I can muster. Thinking about that, I wanted to bring it from the theoretical to the personal. What role had goddesses played in Sally’s life? How had they transformed her?

  Her teacher, the great Indian guru Swami Muktananda, was a kundalini master. “Although he was not a ‘form’ guy, his teaching was very much that ‘the Divine lives within you and as you, so don’t worry about external forms.’ Nonetheless, he always referred to kundalini—the inner transformative energy—as a goddess. He would invoke the names of the great Indian goddesses to describe kundalini and help us understand the sacredness with which he viewed the awakening energy. He had built a gigantic statue of the goddess Durga in the back of his ashram, and after he died, his successor began to hold celebrations of the yearly autumn Durga festival, which is called Navaratri. These celebrations became more and more elaborate, which is customary in India.

  “My own journey with the goddesses began during one of these celebrations. I was telling a mythic tale about the goddess when I actually felt her presence inside and around me as an explosion of love and ecstasy. Ecstasy, by the way, is one of the qualities of goddess. She is ecstasy. You don’t know ecstasy until you have connected to the Divine feminine. From that time on, I began to experience the natural world—the trees and the mountains and the ocean—as having consciousness, sentience. I could feel trees and rocks and plants as literally being aware. Over time, I began to realize that this shift in my vision was a new kind o
f awakening, and that it had something to do with the forms of the goddesses. A couple of years later, I started teaching classes on the Hindu goddesses, on the iconography, and I would find that when I thought about them, when I thought about the goddess Kali, when I thought about the goddess Durga or Lakshmi, I would feel the unique energy signature of that goddess, and experience a kind of transmission about what their energy does in the world.

  “It’s very beautiful to look for goddess energies as they express themselves in the natural world. Storms and lightning connect with Kali. The beauty of a garden is very connected with the goddess Lakshmi or the goddess Lalita. The whole realm of inspiration is the realm of the goddess Sarasvati, who is the goddess of learning, language, and music. If you start to see the Divine activity, the sacred activity, in your inspiration, your capacity for speaking, your appreciation of music, and if you realize that these are not ordinary capacities, they are tinged with a kind of Divine allurement, then you can start to see your own gifts and capacities as sacred gifts, as goddesses acting through you. In my experience, this gives a new kind of sweetness and beauty to whatever you do, and also a growing capacity for surrender. There’s an intimacy that one can have with inner worlds that comes through looking at the world as the play of the Divine feminine. Then you can also find the Divine masculine as that unmoving stillness that is present no matter how crazy the play gets.”

  PRACTICE

  Lalita Tripura Sundari Guided Visualization

  Understanding that the Divine feminine is an entire path unto itself, I asked Sally to take me through a practice that anyone—male or female—who is interested in connecting with their Divine feminine could try. She suggested we work with the goddess Lalita, who in the form of the powerful, great mother goddess is beautiful and erotic, and has the power to slay demons as well. She’s an aspect of the feminine that is both playful and protective. Sally described her as “the love energy that draws molecules together and creates wholeness.”