-Martin Cruz Smith

       For the past few nights I have been waking up in the middle of the night unable to go back to sleep. I know, as mothers, you are familiar with this. For some it occurs all pregnancy, for some only as we veer into the third trimester. As it is with me. Here I am in the 3rd trimester.

      The day after these nightly awakenings I find myself in a sense heavy, slow moving, and on the brink of my consciousness, there rests a tearful awareness, dare I say anger or fear, about my work ahead as a mother. The work of sorting through 1)- my own conditioning, my own wounds, my own unmet needs, my own selfishness about how life should look and be. And  2)- that of being the presence, the loving kindness and warmth that I so desire to offer to this child that grows within me.

      There are waves of irritation that I can’t seem to get things done like I use to, or that I have to pee so much which when coupled with Braxton Hicks (Ive had then since I was 20 weeks) makes going for a walk a short lived and uncomfortable experience, or when this babe has hiccups and it wakes me at 2 am and I can’t get back to sleep. 

      At moments like these, I am fearful to embrace what is on the edge of my consciousness. For, in truth, it is an anger, a rage, a Kali destructive wrath seeming to be aimed at ‘that which grows with in me.’

And simultaneously I expereince an un-wanting to really know that I am feeling that because of the guilt of feeling it. My mind controlling the wave of potential emotion due to the idea that if I really feel this I may permanently imprint this new being with a complex from my own darkness! So I resist it in some way, push it back to the edges of my awareness. 

      But it keeps pressing forth. It wants to be known and seen and spoken of. This is the feminine way. The Female goddess’ way- the earth way- creation and destruction. Like the goddess Kali, we hold in our bodies as women (and also in the psyche of men- buts thats not what this is about here) the power to create and the power to destroy. 

It is the power to destroy that so terrifies me. 

Yet with the eyes of Kali, this terror becomes something new. 

Kali is the Indian goddess of:

-the dissolution of outworn structures

-radical rebirth

-the process of childbirth

-death

-the fury of battle

-righteous anger

-wildness and radical audacity

-liberation though ‘dying’ to the egoic self

-absolute voidness beyond all forms

-fierce love and ecstasy 

From “Awakening Shakti" by Sally Kempton

      This is just to name a few of her roles. She is the goddess of dual nature- such as that which dies and that which is birthed - they are interconnected. She purifies that which is not necessary to reveal that which is.

She comes to show us where our ego separates us from her— separates us from the absolute beauty of divine love that just is- the void, nothingness, that which is beyond form, the beginning place and where we shall return. 

      She invites us to see beyond the duality - the anger and wrath- to the dissolution into oneness- to recognize that, in my case, anger and irritation but shadow the magical process of growing a whole new consciousness in the world!

      This helps me recognize that it is only my ego identification that can’t be awake at 2 am without irritation because it thinks this ‘I’ should be sleeping. Seeing beyond it, my irritation is a Kali call to recognize that 2 am is just a moment in time- its not really ‘sleeping time’ as my ideas (ie my socialized ego) have told me. When living truly in the present, 2 am just is and ‘I’ am just experiencing it in the now. 

      It helps me recognize that a short walk interrupted my having to pee and coupled with Braxton Hicks is just that- there is no thwarting of who ‘I’ am being had by “that which grows within me.” It is just as the sun, or the tree, it just is, it just is being what it is! Only the ego mind makes it something else. Kali comes in my anger to help me burn these Egoic understandings away.

      For it is true, ‘that which grows within me,’ lives in this loving presence as a given- being un-socialized and free of ego structures! And for me to meet that, and thus be the loving kindness I want to be as I parent, then the dross of ego understanding about how things should be needs to be burned away. The irritation, anger is my doorway to revealing the love that I already am beyond the‘I’ that I think things are happening to!   

      So the tearful heaviness and burden of supposed guilt is simply a manifestation of my ego structures, meant to humble that ego and asking to being laid upon the altar of Kali, so that they may burn to reveal the intimate heart that I already am. Something needs to die in order for something else to live. Or energy can only ever be changed in form, but never eliminated.

      These parts scream through irritation, until they wake me in the night and demand to be felt fully and processed deeply. “Use me to grow,” they ask! “Use me on the altar, use my energy to burn, thus to transmute. You need energy to ride the heart waves of the absolute interconnectedness and non-self being-ness of true Mother Love; which shows there is no ‘I’ and thus no ‘you’- that there is only THIS, only love. This fury, this unfelt rage, is the energy you seek to do this work, so recognize, acknowledge and do not shun its arising within you! Use it to herald in the truth beyond the form, the spirit of ultimate connectedness and love!” 

This is the fire of Kali, revealed to me through my anger, this is the work of becoming MOTHER.

I am Mother Becoming.

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti!!

Where does Kali beckon to you in your life?