What is the Divine Feminine in Indian spirituality?

Indian culture has a an ancient and rich tradition of Goddess practice or the Divine Feminine. Ancient Indian dance is one of the richest sources of the Divine Feminine in Indian culture. The Goddess practice is where Reality is larger than just the stories and narratives we use to understand and explain our limited perception of life. Expanding our perception is the freedom that is offered by Goddess practice in Indian culture. This freedom allows us to access all of who we are, including that part of our consciousness that cannot be expressed as words and thoughts. This is the depths or the darkness of the Goddess domain, which is only dark because we do not have the language. Ancient Indian dance is the language of the Goddess depths and is a powerful practice of liberation and expansion of our consciousness.

What is the Divine Feminine in Indian spirituality Transcript

SPEAKERS

Padma Menon

Padma Menon  00:00

Welcome to Moving Archetypes. I'm so honored to have your company today. My name is Padma Menon. And I've dedicated this channel to sharing information about ancient Goddess practices and traditions or traditions of the Divine Feminine. From my culture, which is India. I was born and raised in India, and I have spent a lifetime practicing teaching and researching ancient Goddess traditions, but primarily through Indian temple dance, which is one of the richest sources of ancient Goddess practices from India. So today, I want to share with you some reflections on a question that I get asked quite a lot when I'm teaching people all over the world. And this is what is a Goddess tradition. And this is important, because there are a lot of offerings of Goddess practices and traditions, particularly in the Western world today. And many of these traditions, sadly, have appropriated things from other cultures and other traditions. And they have repackaged them and they have marketed them to the Western marketplace. Now, what happens when you pull things out of its cultural context is that you lose the teeth of the practice. So if you are indeed looking for a Goddess practice that is truly transformative, and truly liberates you, then you may be shortchanging yourself. 

So what is a Goddess tradition? To explain this, I often use the analogy, which comes from William Shakespeare, I'm sure Shakespeare is familiar to all of you, he happens to be one of my favorite playwrights. And you know, the very famous lines of Shakespeare, which is that all the world's a stage, and we are all players, I'm sure you know it right. So let's start there. So this reality that we live in, is the stage. There is a script, we haven't really written the script. But we've all got parts to play. And we're very busy playing our roles, we've got costumes, and we're playing. And sometimes we can change roles. And sometimes, you know, we might kind of have a double role to play. But that's what we do. And on the stage, the script is very complex, because there are multiple layers to the script. There's the story about who's a man, who's a woman, who's a human being, who is God, what is God, what is religion, what is spirituality, science, economics, philosophy, spirituality, you name it, it's very thick with stories. And all the lights, of course, are trained on the stage. So that we are all visible and everything is clear, and everything is seen. But the stage is usually in an auditorium, right? And it's usually the smaller part of an auditorium. So outside the stage, where we cannot see where there are no lights is this big cave of darkness. And sometimes, at least in Shakespeare's times, stages had even spaces underneath. So you have all this space of darkness, within which there is the stage. In the Goddess practices, Reality is the whole auditorium. It's all of the larger part of it, which is darkness. And that lighted part, which is the stage. And the stage is the mind, not our individual minds. But the force or the energy of mind in Reality, which is the masculine energy. The mind is a master storyteller. It's the greatest of tricksters, the greatest of storytellers. And the mind is powerful. So the greatest trick that the mind plays on us is when we think we can control the mind when actually the scripts made by the mind control us. And the other part, this part, which looking out from the stage, we think is all dark. And because you know we like light, and we like things to be lighted, and we like things to be brought to light. We think that the darkness is bad, it's dangerous, it's evil. It's maybe it's black magic, but this darkness is the feminine, the mystery, the unknown and it is not a thing you can script, you can't bring it into language and the unknown. It's the feminine. Also, because it's not linear. A story is always linear, any script, it doesn't matter what you say, it's actually linear, there is a cause there's an effect, even language, you lay it out, you know, the one word follows the other word, and there's a linearity. So this darkness cannot be scripted. And it is akin to the woman's body, the nonlinear processes of the woman's body, it is the source of the stage, because the woman's body holds the source of life, and therefore, the source of Reality is feminine. And it is Reality that holds the mind within it, like this bigger auditorium holding the stage within it. So the invitation in the Goddess practices was come out of the stage, and step into this so called darkness, drop beneath the scripts, beneath word beneath language beneath text, drop into your sensations, because this is in the body, this stage is in the body completely, it's not out there it is in our body, the mind the sensations, so drop into the sensations. And then it will open up an experience of this totality of Reality, where we don't disconnect the script from its source. You know, we're not disconnecting the stage from the auditorium, because truly anything that happens in the auditorium will have a profound effect on the stage. So that is the invitation is to feel that flow, that connection between our sensations between what cannot be brought into words, and what we are able to bring up to the level of words. So when you find that expansion, when you find that liberation, through practice, and there are practices, very specific practices in these traditions, because they are completely practice based. So when through practice, you're able to find that connection, then you're able to move on the stage with a very different perspective, we know where the scripts come from. And we are able to source our action and movement from a space of power and freedom. Of course, there's so much more to be said about the Goddess tradition. And what I'm hoping to do is to do that in subsequent videos, I do hope that you will join me I post weekly every Sunday, and I look forward to the honor of your company. You will find more information about me and the offerings including my individual program in the details below. So thank you so much for your company today and I look forward to seeing you again.