Tag: Hindu Goddess

The Mud and the Lotus: What India Is Teaching Me by Vanessa Soriano

About 5 years ago, I began a consistent yoga practice.  Right around the same time, I started a PhD program in Women’s Spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies where I eventually wrote my dissertation on Women’s Spiritual Leadership.  Throughout my studies, I realized that the path of the Divine Feminine is an intricate journey that accentuates the mind, body, soul connection.  The yogic path does the same.  In late 2018, I enrolled in an intensive 5-week 300-hour yoga teacher training in India where I continued my spiritual explorations.  Hindu culture reveres the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine and yoga is viewed as a pathway into God/dess through the body.  Here’s the first part of the story…

I’m in India and it’s 5:30 a.m. and an hour of pranayama awaits me.  The yogis define prana as the life force that animates the entire body and yama relates to discipline.  The practice of pranayama consists of breathing techniques that aim to control the breath in order to connect to the life force that resides within.  Accessing this life force can invoke feelings of bliss and a connection to the Divine.

Class starts, I’m officially starving, and I haven’t had enough coffee. Continue reading “The Mud and the Lotus: What India Is Teaching Me by Vanessa Soriano”

What Would Durga Do? by Barbara Ardinger

durga1_4inIt’s one of my favorite T-shirts. Every time I wear it, people who know who Durga is comment. So do some people who don’t know who the Hindu goddess is.

 

“What would Durga do?” is of course an echo of the question What would Jesus Do?

I’ve just done a bit of research and learned that this phrase may come from the Middle Ages, that it was famously used in a sermon in about 1891, and that it became very popular among evangelical Christians during the 1990s. What would Jesus do? I think he’d remind us to pay closer attention to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6, 7), especially the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matt.: 7:12). The Golden Rule is of course given in the other major religions, too. WWJD has also been turned into WWBD—“What would Buddha do?” I think the Buddha would tell us to live more mindfully.

But who, you may be asking, is Durga? Why does she have all those arms? Why is she carrying all those weapons? Why is she riding on a tiger? I’ll answer with reference to Patricia Monaghan’s New Book of Goddesses and Heroines (Llewellyn, 1997). While all the Hindu goddesses are ultimately one goddess with the collective name Devi (“goddess”), Monaghan writes, the goddess appears in different forms. “One of the fiercest of Devi’s forms is Durga … [who is] also the eldest.” She appeared during the “primordial war between gods and antigods” and is the “first manifestation of goddess energy” (p. 106). Continue reading “What Would Durga Do? by Barbara Ardinger”