The goddess who is never not broken
Ancient India, the birthplace of yoga, produced a dizzying number of stories about gods and goddesses and their various exploits. The stories are symbolic, meant to teach about social mores, values, and psychological states. Usually the god or goddess has a “mount,” and this vehicle/animal has a meaning as well.
The goddess Akhilandeshvari is the avatar of change, crises, and the events in our lives that leave us in a crumpled heap, feeling broken, lost, and unsure of what comes next. These crises come to all of us at one time or another, and might include the loss of a job, a divorce, a traumatic accident, or the death of a loved one.
Akhilanda translates into English as “never not broken,” and ishvari means “goddess.” Her existence acknowledges the profound shock of losing the foundations that our identity is built on; and at the same time recognizes that we do go on. Gradually, with time, we emerge from our grief and become someone different. We never feel quite as whole or quite as safe, but we learn to thrive from a different psycho-spiritual place. We traverse the fear and sadness and helplessness, and then we have to make a choice. We can choose to be bitter and angry, blame others or seek vengeance— or we can pick up the pieces and keep going, until the next disaster pulls the ground out from under us. The lesson is that we will always need to keep adjusting, to keep breaking apart and putting ourselves back together again. And if we are lucky, and we have good support, the new version of our self may be more insightful, more empathic, and more creative than the original. Akhilandeshvari represents learning to accept how little control we have, and learning that we can choose to let go and flow with the unpredictable and unnerving.
Akhilandeshvari’s mount is a crocodile. The crocodile kills its prey not by gnashing it with its teeth, but rather by pulling it underwater and spinning it around until it’s too disoriented to come up for air. Unsolicited changes and crises are disorienting!
I think just about everyone in the world at this moment is feeling the pressure of the crocodile’s jaws. Massive technological changes have re-shaped the way that we work, (or don’t have work), the way that we communicate (or don’t), and the amount of information that we are bombarded with 24/7. Anybody can write anything on the internet, with no formal controls to weed out what is true and what is a lie, and even the natural world is not behaving “normally.” Today a massive chunk of the Antartic ice shelf cracked off and calved into the ocean, and here in Southern Ontario we’ll soon need a goddess of sump pumps (it’s the wettest summer I can remember). Our whole world seems to be churning, and our expectations about how life is supposed to go aren’t relevant anymore. As Leonard Cohen said, “…forget your perfect suffering/there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.”
Fear is the product of our “lizard brain” (the oldest structures that work below the level of consciousness) and fear amps up the potential for violence (we’re already seeing a rise in hate speech and hate crimes); BUT, there is also enormous potential in this moment to invent new modes of relating. Perhaps we can move away from looking backwards and digging in our heels to looking forward and seeking solutions. The world is never going to become simpler or easier, but if we can cling a little less, and open our minds a little more, there’s no telling what we might create— as long as we can acknowledge that everything will always be a little broken, and nothing really goes according to plan.
Letting go of expectations is never easy. Anne Lamott once said that “everything I’ve ever had to let go of has claw marks in it.” Nonetheless, this is the path that Akhilandeshvari embodies, and who am I to argue with a goddess riding a crocodile.
take joy in being a little cracked,
Elaine
PS The image above is an illustration by Solongo Monkhoori (Msolongo.com)
