Lion Goddesses and ferocity

Lions and Tigers have always been associated with ancient goddesses. You have, for example, goddess Sekhmet in Egypt, the lion goddess, who herself comes from a long ancestry of lion goddesses. And you have Goddess Durga in India, again coming from an ancestry of goddesses who were associated with tigers and lions. In fact, in some of the earliest goddesses in that are found in India, you see images of the goddess standing between two tigers, holding them on either side of her by the scruff of their neck.

So what is the lion, the tiger and its importance in an archetypal tradition? What they invite us to do is to consider ferocity. We don't like ferocity, and indeed, most of modern spiritual traditions have told us that it is exactly what we shouldn't be, we should be calm and quiet and still and patient and ferocity is the opposite of all that. However, ferocity is the quintessence of expression.

In archetypal traditions, the earth herself is ferocious in the Indian archetypal tradition. If you look at it, in terms of the geology, the center of the Earth is this molten, and the heat from this molten core is what moves all of the plates in the Earth's crust, it is powered by this heat from this molten core. And at times, you've got this of course, exploding as cataclysmic events it could be an earthquake or, or a volcanic eruption. So the flow is not always lovely and sweet and nice.

I think when we think of the Blue Planet Earth as being very forgiving and calm and quiet, we are really missing, maybe half or more than half of the story about her molten core. So, just as the Earth has this molten core, we in our consciousness, our body, which is of course, the Earth, has also got this molten core, which lies beneath our waters, archetype really invoked as being the Ocean between our hips.

So in the waters is this molten core of our being the fire of our being, and this fire is not disruptive always, but it is what fuels, our movement, our dynamism, our passion, our poetry, but also at times that kind of explosive eruptions because you, you can't have the one without the other. In reality, all of these opposites coexist. And the flow is also about that movement between all of them. In the interstices of the polarities is where reality dances.

So this ferocity is archetypically invoked as the lion or the tiger, the apex predator, the animal who we once feared. And sadly, this is an aside, the loss of fear of these animals is also the loss of our connection to that wildness and ferocity within us. But that is for another video.

So the Lion and the Tiger is inviting us to encounter that ferocity. And this is not an encounter that our minds willingly take us to. In one of the stories, there is the story of this young boy who is dispatched into the forest to find tiger's milk, only because his foster mother wants him dead. So you see, no one's going to go into the forest willingly to encounter the tiger. We do it when it's choiceless. We do it when this call of our Molten Core our authenticity is unavoidable when we are not able to silence it with all sorts of distractions. That's when we are ready to go into the forest to face the tiger.

When we face the tiger, we don't tame the tiger, we don't domesticate the tiger, because we are going there as this young person, this young, adventurous person. So what we do is we have to earn the Tigers respect and the trust. It's like we have to eyeball the tiger, we have to lock gaze with the tiger, and beautifully, have that respect, allow that mutual respect to emerge so that the tiger will allow us to ride her. I'm imagining that riding the tiger is not just a simple thing of “Well, now that tiger has allowed me to ride her and all is going to be well”. But any moment that the tiger may sense incongruence, she can throw us down devour us.

So this dance with our authenticity with that ferocity of our authenticity—it's not a status, it's not a destination. It is an encounter that we must invoke ritually, again, and again. And every time we must encounter whatever Tiger we meet, because our authenticity it's not a permanent state. But it is also something that evolves that emerges from everything that is going on around us from everything that we are within and without, and therefore must be encountered, afresh renewed.

And that is why it is the young person going into the forest. Because we go each time without the burden of our expectations, without the memory of whatever it is we have encountered before, without thinking, Hey, I've got this technique now to make the tiger respect me. Because all of that will lead to our being devoured by the tiger and may never return from the forest. So that renewed consciousness and that humility and that curiosity when we go with that, we encounter whatever Tiger of our authenticity is there. And we also recognize the ferocity.

So The Goddess on the Tiger, we recognize the ferocity so that when we ride the tiger, we are the Goddess. We are the Goddess authenticity of our being, and we dance together with the ferocity of the tiger in our journey back from the forest.