Reclaiming the Goddess Within.
All women are born goddesses. By undertaking a personal journey to reclaim her true essence, every woman may fully realize the goddess within. We must consciously strip off the layers of shame, guilt, anger, and need. Find our naturally flowing, radiant stream of love, compassion, creative power, bliss, and nurturing within. This may sound to be a daunting task, but it is possible. I am a living example.
When I awake at 7 am in the morning, my first thought is the enthusiastic affirmation: I am an embodiment of divine love. My second thought is: How may I express the many dimensions of my love today? For days at a time,
I feel divine bliss tingle through my being like the sensations first awakened by true love. I am confident in my purpose for living: To bring love to the world as the embodiment of Shakti.
In each moment, I enthusiastically create new dimensions of loving expression. I create the world around me and feel joy like a swelling orgasm in my body. This sounds wonderful, and it is, but you may be wondering how you may get there. Was I born special? Is this even possible for others? The answers are yes and yes.
My journey to un-become a goddess began in childhood when I learned that the Christian church holds no place for a girl’s passion for god and being godly. Around the age of nine or ten, I realized that God was considered a man. The Christian teachings of my childhood church held no women role models with whom I could identify as a young woman with an awakening sexuality.
Mary’s immaculate conception was impossible for me to identify with. I rebelled against the idea that to be godlike meant that I had to be a man. As a woman, I had the choice of being Eve, the cause of all suffering, Mary the virgin, or Mary the whore. I struggled with the idea of gender being related to God.
I knew that being a woman/girl was just as special, if not more special, than being a man/boy because we naturally express love in many more dimensions. I reasoned that because women could give birth. We were actually more powerful and more closely resembled the Mysterious power of the Universe that put humans on Earth. But then, I was a small child, and my full divinity was not conditioned out of me yet.
While the church and the Puritanical environment of New England were conditioning me to be a second-class citizen that exists to serve men and make babies, a close relative with the complete confidence of my family sexually and emotionally abused other women and me in my family, thus began my official training to un-become a goddess.
As a result of this early programming, I entered adolescence without a healthy sense of myself or my sexuality. I found myself emotionally, mentally, and physically used, abused, raped, and discarded in the meat market within which single individuals find themselves today. As a teenager already conditioned with the misogynist societal programming that women are evil and should emulate men to become wholesome, I entered into a deep depression. This programming was killing my soul.
Remnants of the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s seemed to be a ladder out of a dark, dank pit in which the patriarchy wrongly kept women. I took charge of my programming and put my energy into being assertive, loud, strong, and fast, masking my emotions, pretending not to have any, and being intellectual. Unfortunately, this served to confuse my inner divinity further. Adopting these masculine traits seemed to be the answer to becoming famous, successful, and happy.
However, my nature became confrontational, only alienating me by intimidating my peers. My dominant attitude and the tom-boy dress did not attract boys but aggravated them into becoming aggressive and cruel to me. My only understanding of strength was masculine. I thought that being a feminine girl meant I was weak.
I desperately wanted to be loved, so I thought that adopting tight, revealing, or otherwise feminine clothing would help win me the love of a boyfriend. But it only made boys and young men view me as a sex object.
I was trapped between being viewed as a strong butch, insensitive dike or a weak feminine sex object. I hid under baggy jeans, wrinkled oversized T-shirts, hiking boots, and with short hair under a baseball cap for a while. I did not want to expose my delicate, weak, vulnerable feminine self. Then I went to the other extreme, wearing makeup and dressing beautifully daily. Neither of them made me happy or helped me find true love, so I looked for more.
When I finally figured out some sense of balance with my attitude and dress, I entered numerous relationships to find love and bask in its glory. But, after the initial hormonal rush wore off at the six-month mark, arguments became more frequent, and I inevitably realized that I didn’t love my partner. I felt powerless to be the person my boyfriends wanted me to be, and I had even less luck changing them to be the boyfriend I wanted them to be.
My version of love was a need, loneliness, infatuation, lust, boredom….but not love. Where does one learn to love today? Our parent’s never got their needs met as children, so they became needy parents, unable to meet the needs of their children. They continue the cycle of needy children becoming needy adults. Where is the love that fulfills and brings joy into life? How can we find it for ourselves?
In a high school world history class, I learned about ancient civilizations that believed God was a woman, the Great Mother Goddess. I was overjoyed and shocked that others did not share my enthusiasm and thought that understanding these ancient Goddesses was the key to our happiness. Here was proof that humans existed who revered the feminine qualities of women. Life in those ancient times seemed to be more peaceful, harmonious, and graceful, and women enjoyed the freedom of expression and love. What the heck happened today?
This began my intense research into Goddess religions and ancient goddess traditions. I finally found my feminine role models for becoming godlike, becoming a goddess. The problem is that although we learn intellectual information. The background relating to the nature of our developmental conditioning and intellectual learning does not serve to reprogram our minds. Therefore, discovering all of the goddesses, priestesses, queens, heroines, and stars throughout time did not help me find my inner divinity.
I found it even more frustrating when I did my best to emulate these archetypes and my boyfriends didn’t treat me like a priestess, queen, or goddess. Dressing like a goddess, attending Goddess rituals, reading goddess self-help books, decorating my house with spiritual tools, and covering my car with spiritual sayings did not make me a goddess. I had role models, intellectual knowledge, a vast book collection, and an assortment of possessions but no understanding of how to radiate love, peace, and joy or how to teach others to feel love and peace within.
So, how did I get from point A to point Z? With my 30th birthday approaching, it became more evident that I needed to make a considerable change. I suffered for fifteen years with debilitating menstrual cramps, low back pain, and mood swings occurring for two weeks out of each month. I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and general dissatisfaction with life for even longer. Understanding myself and my sexuality took top priority. I left my last relationship determined to harness the power of my sexuality and use it to heal. I knew I had to do something drastic to relieve the pain and learn to love myself.
Within my vast collection of books on spirituality, healing, psychology, religion, and nature, I had several on Tantra. I gathered that it was a spiritual practice that involved sexuality and love, but I was unsure how. I felt very strongly drawn to everything I could learn about Kundalini and Shakti, essential aspects of Tantra. Understanding and harnessing their power in my own life seemed to be the final answer to healing myself and becoming empowered. I sought a place in India to spend the winter learning Tantra.
Without much difficulty, I found the Mahavidya temple on the internet by entering “Serpent Goddess” into the Google search engine. Their link to Tantric teacher training invites individuals to stay in their ashram in India, where Tantric Master Satguru Shri Param Eswaran helps each aspirant understand their sexuality, heal from past traumas and learn to love themselves. It was exactly what I was looking for. I was fascinated and read every page of the extensive website. I gathered the funds and signed up for levels I and II to be completed in a six-month stay in India.
I am now only three and a half months into the training, and my life has drastically changed already spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. I have experienced the divine bliss of my spirit’s natural state. I have reprogrammed my mind to think loving thoughts, which determine my emotional state. Our emotions program our physical body; thus, my body has changed too. A curvature in my spine, which I have had since age ten, is now nearly gone. Instead of feeling the acute and unbearable menstrual cramps and spasms during my ovulation period, I have spent the last week near orgasm ALL DAY AND NIGHT LONG!!!!!!
The individual who came to India with the name of Andrea melted into the past, and I took a new name to honor my rebirth into my true divine nature. I am now called Nagarani, Serpent Queen, and I consciously work with the serpent force of Kundalini Shakti daily. To reclaim the goddess within, I have had to unlearn, un-condition, and deprogram, then relearn, recondition, and reprogram my thinking to suit the embodiment of the goddess. The goddess qualities are love, compassion, nurturing, joy, bliss, wisdom, and spiritual abundance. I have learned to let go of the past and embrace the future with the excitement of a small child. I am learning the language of love, but because it is new to me, I can only babble incoherently like a baby with her first word. I am still a goddess with training wheels.
The special Tantric practice that facilitated such drastic change is ParaTan Inner Sakthi Yoga. Satguru Shri Param received the practice and teachings of ParaTan in meditation directly from the Mother Goddess Kali, who gifted it to bring love back into the world. Bringing love back into the world means first learning to love ourselves, and this is what Satguru Shri Param is teaching me with ParaTan.
The practice and lifestyle of ParaTan are based on the Shakti-power of sound and sound as Shakti-power, with several crucial elements. Sound breaks up cellular memories containing pain and trauma, clears them out, and energizes the nadi system. Nadis are channels for Shakti power/sound to travel along an extensive subtle energy network throughout our body.
These are the same as meridian lines and points used in Acupuncture. ParaTan Inner Sakthi Yoga Sadhana sessions and the regular recitation of mantras open the nadis and send Shakti-power flooding through them. This may then be focused and directed to reprogramming thoughts, which in turn changes cellular memory and the structure of the physical body. Reprogramming the brain to think positive, loving thoughts means entirely releasing our thinking conditioned by past experiences. Instead, we focus energy on creating new loving thoughts that program our body and cellular memory in each moment with love.
The practice is simple and immeasurably effective. However, I would not have gone far without Satguru Shri Param’s patience in guiding me repeatedly to address my human conditioning and less-than-divine qualities. Without his supervision, I would not even be writing this article, for I would not know the presence of the goddess from within.
I now understand why the Tantric teachings are always preceded by the warning that no aspirant should attempt to raise Kundalini on their own. Students are generally advised to find a competent and available guru to assist them on their journey. I may have practiced ParaTan and effectively increased my power, but it is unlikely that I would have successfully reprogrammed my brain. The increase in power accentuates the consequence of thoughts and emotions. If the aspirant’s thoughts are anything but loving and positive, the alternative thoughts cause madness rather than ecstasy. Satguru tirelessly pointed out my various issues so that I may understand what needed changing. Had he not, I would have gone mad.
Another critical aspect of the difference, I feel, is a result of the amount of energy with which my body resonates. While I’m here, I can massage Satguru’s feet, which transmits an incredible amount of Shakti power to me. His energy field is so strengthened with the constant ParaTan lifestyle that his energetic and vocalized resonance is as powerful as the mantras reverberating throughout the ancient granite temples in South India.
The ashram is located in a rural setting on the outskirts of Killankulam village, with very low environmental and mental pollution. Therefore I have been able to assimilate the teachings without having to fight my way through traffic and spend my energy bracing against the onslaught of consumer-driven, trauma-based mind control of the United States media.
Satguru regularly performs a powerful agni (fire ceremony) that clears the aura of the individuals participating and the surrounding 25 or so meters. Daily Puja in the temple aligns us with the deities, planets, gurus, and divine forces that assist us on the spiritual journey. Satguru Shri Param is also a four-star chef, so we eat healthy vegetarian meals, freeing us from the negative emotional, physical, and hormonal influence that meat creates in our bodies. We respect our bodies as living temples for the divine.
Mahavidya temple and ashram is much more of a family setting than what I know of other ashrams. In other ashrams, it is common to find many students, some of whom do not even get to speak with their guru but must stick around long enough to be honored with the opportunity. When the teacher does appear, it is frequently only to deliver a lecture and possibly assign a reading from the Vedas or Upanishads.
When I arrived, I was the only student. Satguru Shri Param’s loving wife and student Devanayagi met me at the airport, answered a million questions I had buzzing in my head, gave me a tour, and showed me to my room, assuring me that if I needed anything I could ask her anytime. It was only a matter of an hour or so after I got settled and had a nap to recover from the three-day journey that I met Satguru Shri Param.
His brilliant orange veshti caught my eye across the yard, contrasting with the swaying green grass, as he directed several village men in the affairs of cows and fields. I immediately knew it was him from the grace and power with which he moves, visible even from a distance. Soon he sat beside me on the kitchen steps where I was attempting to eat a pomegranate. So this is the Nageshvari lady. He grinned at me with a sparkle in his eyes I had come to know and love. I looked at him blankly, unsure what he was talking about. The Serpent Goddess, he prodded me jovially. Ah, yes! My first lesson began on the spot.
Satguru Shri Param and Devanayagi have a two-month-old daughter named Yogeswari, adding to the cozy, familial feeling here. The reasonable tuition from students such as myself provides rupees to employ local villagers who staff the compound and serves to pay for the living expenses and education of the teenage boys who live here. They range in age from twelve to seventeen and call themselves the seven-star boys. The village functions as a large extended family in a structure that has been maintained for thousands of years. The boys, the village ladies that work in the kitchen and fields, the driver, and the cowman all form a family unit. ON more than one occasion, I have had my lesson with Satguru Shri Param on the veranda with the cows grazing nearby, the boys playing cricket in the field, and ladies from the village stream in with their colorful saris to visit the new baby.
This is unlike any school I’ve previously attended, removed from family life, feeling more like an intellectual laboratory than a home. The Goddess is Mother, and Mothers function within a family and community. Devanayagi has become like my sister. The village women and the seven-star boys call me Auntie. Each of them won my heart with their different ways of loving expression and has become very dear to me. The simplicity of village life in Killankulam may not supply a lot of comforts with which I am familiar, but the beauty, love, grace, and open-heartedness they each display is a powerful affirmation and a great lesson in living. In coming here to India, I have the opportunity to live with a Tantric Master and his family, where learning takes place 24 hours a day.
All these things have helped me transform my life in four months. I may not be levitating yet, but as I stay on this path, I will inevitably grow from a baby goddess babbling the language of love to a radiant adult goddess, embodying love and becoming a living role model for all those who have not yet found their inner divinity. I have already planned to return next winter for levels III and IV. I did not know what the different levels entailed upon coming here. As I near the completion of level II, I will enthusiastically say that in the first half, one learns to reclaim their inner divinity. In the second half, I can only hope that I will learn to assist others in their journey to reclaim their inner divinity and become a ParaTan teacher.
By a student of Satguru Shri Param.