She Of A Thousand Faces

The divine feminine had her skull necklace stolen.

A few years ago I called my yoga class Rose Flow Yoga.

The rose as a symbol of the feminine - soft, opening, fragrant, beautiful. I wanted to offer women a practice that honoured both softness and strength. A space to rest. To be held. To stop performing. But I forgot the wildness of the rambling rose. The one that scrambles over walls and goes where it wants. Ungovernable. Abundant. Growing as she chooses, blooming without restraint.

The modern wellness world has handed us a divine feminine without any fire. Without power. The rose may be fragrant and seductively velvety - but she has thorns.

When I met Shakti - She of a thousand faces - I realised the picture was incomplete.

Shakti is powerful and multifaceted. She births galaxies, and She breathes life into cells. She appears as love and as truth. As creation and as destruction. As tenderness and as fierce protection.

She is love - but with teeth. The kind that makes you face what you think you can't face, because you have to. She is not asking us to become quieter or smaller.

She is not a projection of socially acceptable femininity. She is uncontrollable.

It seems we've confused the qualities that get rewarded in women with the qualities of the divine feminine herself. Compliance. Gentleness. The careful management of everyone else's comfort. That's what women are encouraged to mould themselves into.

Shakti creates with precision. She paints every petal with Her cosmic colour palette. She builds a cell with breathtaking exactitude. She knows precisely what needs to die and what needs to live.

This is not softness. This is power beyond measure. This is intelligence beyond the imaginable.

There is a morning practice I return to. You bring your hands together and look at them.

At your fingertips - Lakshmi. Abundance. The capacity to create. In the hollow of your palm - Saraswati. Wisdom. Everything you need to know. At your wrists - Durga. Power. Courage. Noble deeds.

All of it already in your hands, waiting to be acknowledged, waiting to be used.

This is what the divine feminine actually is. Not something to become. Something to embody.

As you've walked through your own life, you've probably noticed there are two emotions you're not really supposed to have. Anger and desire. Not coincidentally, they are the two that most clearly say: I am here, I know what I need, and I will not make myself small to make you comfortable.

"It's your hormones." "You're too much."

You've heard some version of both. And you learned, quietly, to agree. To manage yourself back into acceptability.

But look at who She is.

Kali, with her necklace of skulls, her red tongue stuck out to horrify, is righteously angry. She loves with a fierceness that will not allow the false. She is not out of control. She is exact. She is fury forged into a devastating power.

Rādhe loves Krishna with a completeness that is her power. She longs with every part of herself. She is jealous. She is demanding. She gives herself to Him - and she is the beating heart of the love within all creation.

These are not aberrations. These are faces of the divine feminine. Which means your anger and your desire are not problems to be managed. They are powers to be honoured.

The divine feminine doesn't ask you to manage yourself into smallness. She never did. She is the living proof that the full range of what you are is sacred.

Any spirituality or practice that asks you to abandon who you are is not growth. It is a diminishment dressed in spiritual clothing.

As I've tried to show, the divine feminine isn't a personality type. She doesn't float through meadows wearing a long dress. She is a thousand things at once.

As you are.

She is the recognition that life itself moves through many expressions. She isn't the absence of emotion. She is the willingness to be fully alive.

Aliveness is not a wellness poster concept. It is life lived fully and unapologetically. It is a willingness to be touched by what life brings you. Laughter that takes you by surprise, love that makes you weep, beauty that catches your heart and pulls.

Life is not made of a single note.

Most of us have spent years building a tower in which we hide all the parts of ourselves that might be too much. Heavy oak doors. Rooms kept securely locked. The keys put out of sight. The anger in one. The desire in another. All the parts of yourself that might overstep, that might be too much, that might cost you love or approval or belonging.

Give Shakti an afternoon in your tower and She'd open the doors, throw open the windows and rearrange the furniture.

That is not a departure from the path. That is the path.

The Feminine Divine is asking you to return to the skin that was made for you. To live life fully - whether that's the simple joy of an ordinary day, the sorrow of a loss, or the delight of love.

All of it belongs. And all of it yours.

Beauty includes wildness. That rose, the one with the perfume and the velvet and the thorns - she is you.