It’s an auspicious time for honouring the Goddess Laksmi as we enter the middle of Chaitra Navratri - a nine day Hindu festival honouring the Goddess in many aspects.
Laskmi’s blessing is that of abundance, prosperity and spiritual wisdom.
She’s a radiant beauty and her many names describe her as Hiranmayi ‘The Golden One’, Vibha ‘The Radiant One’, Shuchi ‘The Purest One’, Aditya ‘Resplendent like the sun’ and so on. She’s also Srī, the pure essence of auspiciousness, Grace.
She’s the Goddess of Abundance and sometimes she’s called upon or thought of as the giver of power and success and indeed, Her Grace gives leaders their power and she does indeed bestow wealth but to chant her mantra or worship with the hope of gaining material wealth is a rajasic approach that doesn’t bring about her greatest gifts. One of my teachers, Anandra George (a wonderful Nada Yoga teacher) said that such an approach is akin to popping mantras in a slot machine and hoping it will pay out coin… Which made me laugh especially because when you see Laksmi pictured she often has coins falling from her open palm just like that.
So what is this Abundance energy that Laksmi represents, if not simply material wealth and power and success?
According to Sally Kempton: Abundance is the natural expression of your own radiance—and the practices associated with Lakshmi are all about opening you to the light you carry.
In my own life, I notice I feel abundant whenever I’m restful, open and self accepting. It’s when I stop striving, stop trying to get more, do more, be more that I realise, I already am. Am whole and complete just as I am. That I have a right to exist, just as I am - even as I may aspire to live in greater alignment with my values. Self Acceptance and Compassion. A sense of feeling Whole and part of the greater Whole. A feeling of Enoughness.
I also feel this sense of abundance in places of great natural beauty and when I take the time to notice the sunshine touch the Earth and warm my skin, or a new leaf unfurl or a seedling start to sprout. One of my teachers, Natalie Rousseau, talks of Laksmi as an Earth Goddess and describes her as that creative energy of gardening, the power that causes plants to grow. Her eternal partner is Vishnu, who is the sustainer of the Earth and there’s a beautiful story of them both when she appears as Bhu Devi - the Earth itself and he rescues Her.
One of Laksmi’s most potent symbols is the Lotus. She’s sometimes known as Padma, or Kamala, meaning Lotus or Padmagandhini, ‘having the fragrance of a lotus’ and many more.
Her creation story, the Samudra Manthan, tells of how She rose out of the Ocean of Milk during the great churning, as the asuras and devas worked together to bring the amrit, the nectar of immortality, up from the depths of the ocean.
Laksmi was one of the ocean’s gifts and she rises, right out of the murky depths, resplendent on a lotus.
The churning of the ocean of milk can be read as a metaphor for the churning of consciousness that takes place as we embark on the Spiritual Path. The back and forth tug between the forces of good and evil, is the tapas of our practice. Notice how the devas and asuras work together, similar to how we turn towards ourselves in meditation and begin to own our tendencies and habitual ways of being. It’s a collaborative process.
And of course, the blossoming of the lotus, is the blossoming of compassion and love in our hearts.
I love the how the lotus doesn’t just appear from nowhere, pristine and untouched but rather it emerges right from the mud. And in fact, its roots remain deep in the mud and that is where it sources its sustenance. And while it’s beauty is ethereal and there’s a sense of the lotus as this symbol of transcendence, I like to note how deeply connected it remains to the Earth. To me, it symbolises this possibility of heaven on earth. The lotus reminds us, we don’t need a pristine life and perfect circumstances to bloom, that we might right now, right here, bloom where we’re planted. And in fact, the very circumstances that you find yourself in, are the right ones, for you to awaken into your highest potential.
It reinforces for me, this idea that all that we experience here on Earth, is not separate from the Ultimate Reality, this Tantric perspective of all of life as Divine. Even the stuff that’s a bit murky, or undesirable, dark and scary. Have you heard the expression ‘No mud, no lotus’? The mud is necessary for the lotus. When we draw nourishment from life, accept these ‘gritty earth gifts’, when we root down and embrace the reality of our lives, spiritual understanding blooms. But we must stay grounded.
Recently there has been a lot of mud in my life… Literally, a 5cm coating over the entire inside of my house and garden. And there’s been some difficult feelings - for me, mostly a tightening in my chest and gripping anxiousness when the forecast threatened more flooding, and some panicky, flighty responses to the sound of hoses and rain. Plus a heavy feeling of dread, hearing about places that flooded in the second storm that hit us.
Noticing all of this kind of swirling inside me, I had a beautiful opportunity to practice.
Here’s what practice looked like for me:
I smiled at myself as I ran around all over my house cleaning with fury on the day that the second storm was forecast to hit. Cleaning the house is one way to honour Laksmi and invite her blessing current into your home. But this wasn’t my intention. This was about trying to tame the wildness of the storms within and without. My internal dialogue: “Look at me attempting to wrestle control over my life when it feels out of control…How human of me.”
Then as I started tweaking when the rain started falling heavily on my windscreen on the drive home from yoga, I gave myself lots of love… “Oh you’re feeling scared? Your heart is racing. You’re worried about water over the road. That’s reasonable. This is a little scary. You can do this though.”
Then when I was invited to help clean a twice flooded house in Lismore and my brain started racing looking for a way out. “Ahhh, a feeling of dread. Repulsion. Fear. Yes. A heaviness in my feet and reluctance, slowness, in my hands. Images of faces of despair. The enormous task of clean up feeling too big, swelling like an enormous pile of rubbish in my mind’s eye. Too much to take on. Hmmmm…I feel you. I accept that.” In the end, I did decide to go to Lismore again. It felt in alignment with my values to go when I had the chance. But I told my friends my feelings. And they shared that they too were a little shook and not sure how they’d go.
When we got to the house we were assigned, it turns out our job was to help an artist called Denise wipe clean her epic collection of vinyl records. We stood in the shade on a beautiful day, outside and listened to the best music - Nina Simone, Crowded House, Fleetwood Mac, Simon and Garfunkel, The Supremes, INXS and more - and danced and laughed and told stories in one big production line, lovingly dipping each record in a mild soapy bath then rinsing perfectly clean in a clear one. Nothing could have been more healing.
And yet, it nearly wasn’t.
If I didn’t turn towards those feelings, with tenderness, didn’t Earth myself and feel into what was present for me, no doubt I would have made up an excuse to avoid going there. And I would have missed the opportunity for connection that was so instrumental to my own wellbeing.
Now I’m not saying we must override our feelings of dread - I hope you understand that. This is, actually, about honouring ourselves and what we’re experiencing. Not overriding, not dismissing, not ignoring. It’s about turning inwards, with tenderness, to all that we experiencing and embracing in compassion the whole of who we are.
This self acceptance allows us to bloom. We recognise that all is part of the whole and in turn, experience ourselves as Whole, just as we are. We might even begin to see our own beauty, as Sally Kempton says “the light we carry”.
To me, that is the path to Abundance. It’s not wishing things were other than what they are. It’s the opposite of that. It’s ceasing any struggle at all with what is and kindly, lovingly acknowledging what is and allowing that. Once we accept, that energy is liberated, free to become sustenance. As my favourite poet, Mary Oliver puts it “everything is nourishment somehow or another.”
Given that I am not Hindu and have only been introduced to the Goddess through my yoga studies, I don’t have a family tradition or ritual practice that’s part of my cultural inheritance to draw from at this special time. Dr Kavitha Chinnaiyan offers a course about Navratri which gave instruction in how to honour the Goddess during this festival, which helped me grow in understanding but I still don’t feel that it’s authentic to me to claim that ritual, though I appreciated the expert and generous guidance she offered. Yet, I am honouring through recalling the sacred stories, listening to the mantras and cleaning our home, placing little flower offerings and candles around. Another wonderful teacher, Rose Baudin, calls it living a mythological life.