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MAHA BHAIRAVA CHANDOGRA GHORA KALI : “The Great Golden Howler” – She is the culmination of the 12 Kalis who holds all previous sets. She is the dark Mother from whom we are born and into whom we will resolve. She is nesting in you and you are nesting in her. She is all that you see, touch, taste, smell and hear. She is the world as one; she is oneness as the diverse, wondrous world. Everything is everything.

Happy Birthday to me! 1-11-11

MAHA KALA KALI : “The Mighty Kali” – This Kali is the AGENT of IMPRINT. She is the ACTION of making a gesture that seals any empowering thought into your own consciousness. The world is like soft wax – and you get to make imprints that shape the world. The imprints you create have real consequences.

If for example, you post a photo of an Arizona congresswoman on your website in the crosshairs of a gunsight with the instruction “Kill,” please KNOW that you are shaping the world’s reality. The Mighty Kali asks us to take a real look at all of the ways we imprint and are imprinted – and then choose to be creators of the world and not victims. The weekend’s events in Arizona weigh heavily on my heart today, especially the death of an optimistic 9 year old girl born on September 11, 2001. A girl who considered the imprint of her birthday a “holiday” and not a burden. Today I dedicate the effort I exert in my practice to her memory. I imprint myself with hope. I release a breath of compassion to Cristina Green’s family. I treasure my own child with extra hugs and kisses, for life is valuable and fragile and precious. I imprint love.

KALA ANALA RUDRA KALI : “Timeless Fire Howler” – Assimilate and digest the toxins of your life! Don’t just store them, break ‘em down and howl ‘em out! Your deepest hurts INFORM who you are but are not ALL you are. This Kali is the ecstatic assimilation of all the hurts, traumas and abuses that have sculpted your life.

kala: time

anala: fire, bile, digestive juice, light (as HEAT)

rudra: the blood, the howl

BIG WHEEL KEEP ON TURNING

PROUD MARY KEEP ON BURNING

AND WE’RE ROLLING, ROLLING

ROLLING ON THE RIVER

PARAMA ARKA KALI : “Flash of Lightning” – She’s the PROCESS of making a better choice. Take notice of an opportunity and seize it. She’s the CARPE DIEM Kali. Make the choice you’re really making, not the choice you MIGHT make. 

She is the Kali who says, “I am… I have… I create…” and not “I think I’m gonna go ahead and…” or “I will…”

Seize the moment. The light is shining. Like a flash of lightning. Do it. 

MARTANDA KALI : “Sun” – There’s no escaping the light of the sun. Life on planet Earth is impossible without it. (Even at night, True Blood fans, the sun is present in the form of reflective moonlight.)

This Kali is the landscape of memory. We experience our memories in contexts and settings. The smell of pizza triggers a memory of a cloudy summer day next to a chlorinated pool while wearing a soggy red cotton bathing suit and watching a pretty brown eyed girl with blue lips smile over her blue-raspberry snocone. 

The great 10th century yoga philosopher Abhinavagupta writes of this Kali : “Experience of the subject is conditioned by the experience of embodied conditions.” And so she invites you to receive ALL sensual experiences – taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing – just like the Earth receives the sun. That is, FREELY, FULLY and REFLECTIVELY. The combination of the senses drawn inward in meditation create something you want for the sake of your own witchcraft- your 6th sense!

The Shakta (goddess) tantrics are the great pioneers of yoga RASA, the playful engagement of the senses and tastes and flavors of embodiment. 

Beginning on Monday, January 24 I’ll lead a 4 week meditation and philosophy series on Rasa theory and practice at Akasha Yoga from 7 – 9p (in NoLiTa on Great Jones Street near the Bowery). Please email easnyc@gmail.com to register.

RUDRA KALI : “Howler” – An interesting feature to this Kali is that she’s 51% masculine. She marks the transition from any action to the imprint (or groove/samskara) that the action makes. 

Small people are especially open to imprinting. A sexually abused child for example is forever etched by their experience. Well into adulthood their experience of sexuality is informed by all the previous sets of experiences.

One time in Harlem I saw a verbally abusive father phyically assaulting his small son, about 6 years old. I didn’t just see one man abusing his child, I literally saw through the fabric of time. And I saw and heard a lineage of verbal and physical abuse that extended back generations, likely to enslavement. 

A Rudra Kali experience is anytime a subject recognizes that it’s the object of another set of subjects. Like your DNA. Your experience right now is the culmination of endless sets upon sets upon sets of other relationships. Cultivating Rudra Kali in your own experience can be deeply healing. This Kali is a SHAMAN. Shamans see through time, space and identity to promote healing. A good Shaman can look at you and see the sets of relationships that made the impressions that make you YOU. And a great shaman can smooth out those grooves.

I’m especially looking forward to July 2011 for my pilgrimage to Peru to work with indigenous shamans! Details forthcoming. 

MRTYU KALI : “Convergence” – This Kali is a moment of convergence that stops time. Like when some fool posts on Facebook an embarrasing old photo of you from 1987 with braces and glasses and weird hair.  You step out of time for a second, recognize yourself, say “that’s me” and then you’re done. (Sometimes the act of REMOVE TAG completes the circuit.)

When an OBJECT merges into a SUBJECT time stops, dies, then flows again. This is an ordinary experience of, say, reading a novel. And these kinds of experiences of convergence tend to also evoke feelings of peace and ease. That’s why many people find reading to be relaxing before bed. And surely this is why, despite the madding crowds, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a wondrous sigh of relief – objects of beauty and fascination merge with subjects who see something of themselves IN those objects. All under one big glorious roof.

Deity meditation with mantra (subjects focused on objects) can also create access to time in ways that seem out of the ordinary. My own morning meditation was about 20 minutes, but I experienced it like hours. Wallace Stevens describes Mrytu Kali like this:

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

 The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

SAMHARA KALI : “Dissolution” – When you see one thing, you really see all the things it has ever been. The objects of experience are assemblages of other objects.

The oak floors upon which you stand were once an acorn. Sometimes I catch a glance of my 4 year old and see one of his grandparents. Once I was at Chipotle staring in revulsion at the steaming pork and heard the cry of squealing pigs at slaughter. (That was at the height of my vitamin deficient now defunct vegetarianism.)

Everything that is, was once something else. Samhara is the patron goddess of artful recycling. Like www.bennettrobotworks.com

YAMA KALI : “Restraint, Doubt” – As a practice, doubt puts you two steps ahead, not a step behind. Doubt allows you to see the same experience from different vantage points. Only when you say, “I don’t know” do you have the opportunity to grow and evolve.

Bring to mind some person in your life who KNOWS everything, who has an answer to every question, often before they’re asked. Or perhaps you know someone who ALWAYS expects the worst, in every case. “This is NEVER going to work out.” Ok, now that this person is in your mind, notice now how they are likely to be the most rigid, unhappy person you know. Just thinking about this person in my own life tightened my throat & jaw. NEVER & ALWAYS. Yama Kali refrains from these words as OFTEN as possible!

If you don’t give yourself permission to empower DOUBT, that is – say “I don’t know” sometimes, then doubt will turn into fear, anger and delusion. For example, “There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” See how quickly doubt turns to fear? Another interesting political strategy: repeat the same lies about your opponent over and over and over again so much that the lies become the truth. That’s delusion. 

It’s easy to see this in play on the political stage, but sometimes harder to see in your own life’s experience. Maybe, like me, you had a teacher in 3rd grade grade tell you, “You’ll never be able to play the violin.” Well I sure proved her right! We all have had well-meaning adults tell us lies about ourselves. And then her lie became my truth.

For a long time I told myself, “I have weak arms and shoulders. I just can’t do pull ups.” Now I’m not sure where this came from, perhaps exhaustive hours of swimming laps on my high school swim team. Regardless of its source, my affirmation I CAN”T became true for me. Recently I decided to give up that notion about my shoulders. I went from “my shoulders are weak, god I hate them” to “my shoulders are straight and strong. I shoulder my responsibilities with grace and ease.” And now I’m doing crazy pull ups and one armed push ups and all kinds of great things in my workouts I never dreamt possible. 

Take a cue from yesterday’s Kali and DESTROY something of yourself you’re certain of. Like me and my shoulders. See what happens when you turn your certainty into doubt. It’s a valuable practice. And I look forward to taking down other limited notions I have of myself in 2011. And I DON’T EVEN KNOW what they are yet! 

STHITINASHA KALI : “Stability Destroyer” – Please dissolve the notion that your life is stable. It’s not. This is good news in the new year, it means you can regenerate, evolve, become more.

The empowerment of this Goddess looks like the recent repeal of DONT ASK DONT TELL. She drives a wedge into the fabric of humanity for the sake of progress.

While many earthlings love to cling to the past and old ways of thinking, she ensures that that won’t do. 

Some more examples of Sthitinasha spring to mind – 

You might have thought you were stable in a 401K that now has half as much revenue as it had a few years ago. Time to create prosperity in a new way. 

This Kali is also like life with a toddler, just when you thought you knew how to handle them, they completely change again. 

Did you get the newest technology from Santa Claus? It’s already outdated.

My crossed leg just fell asleep as I was writing – wait a minute – it’s okay again.

This Kali dissolves the notion that you are stabilized in your experience.