Aghora: Unleash Your Energy - Run With The Wolves  

By Swati Chopra  

Aghora: Unleash Your Energy - Run With The Wolves  

Today is International Women's Day. Around the world, in conferences and debates, ways to 'improve' women's lot and empower them will be discussed. They will remain a view from the outside unless we find a way to tune in to the spirit of the eternal feminine, and rediscover the creatrix that lies reduced to a vestigial place in our psyche after centuries of neglect. Today would be a good day to begin a renewal of this ancient relationship with our innate, instinctual, feminine self.

Why do I talk of the 'eternal feminine'? Aren't all women 'in touch' with it just by virtue of being women? As inextricable as the biology of womanhood, the blood and babies, the bread and bones, is with the experience of the feminine, it came to acquire an intuitive, creative aspect as well. Rooted in the physical process of fertility and birthing, the feminine - woman, earth, goddess - were revered as the very matrix of creation.

Even today, in spite of her spirit being driven back and built over, the primeval creatrix dwells in our being. We glimpse her in moments of inspiration. She is implicit in the natural cycles of our lives, when we give birth and rear our young. More than a function of gender, she is the stirring towards unfettered, uninhibited expression that all of us feel but few listen to.

In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes explores this as the 'wild woman' archetype. She sees a direct parallel between the subjugating of the inner wild woman with environmental destruction. "Like wildlife and wildlands, the spiritual lands of Wild Woman have been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others."

When women surrender their creative lives, allow their spirit to be brutalised, their sexuality suppressed, they suffer from a deadening of the soul that makes it difficult for them to function joyfully. Their intuition dulls, and they no longer "run with the wolves". The foisting of regressive cultural stereotyping that denies women the freedom to be themselves weighs down their spirit. One way they can reconnect with their feminine spirit is in the form of the Divine Feminine - by identifying the limited self with the Primeval Mother.

This is available to us in the way of Aghora, the radical spiritual discipline of Tantra. For the Aghori, the practitioner of Aghora, the cosmos is feminine - Adya or Adishakti - the original Shakti (energy) that everything manifest and unmanifest is part of. To realise Adya, the Aghori begins by activating her Kundalini Shakti . Each practitioner must relate with the Goddess personally as mother, lover, or friend. The ultimate aim is to establish Her within. It is a journey from the limited self to the infinite, eternal Feminine.

Even though mother goddesses abounded in Hinduism, Aghora never became part of mainstream Indian spirituality, and its radical influences have been either sanitised or expunged altogether. Its myths, however, continue to exist in our cultural domain to point the way back to the terrible yet gentle power of the Feminine. As Aghori Vimalananda says in Robert Svoboda's Aghora: "She is really you. You are a minuscule part of Her, and you must love yourself to make progress." Acting from this awareness can only enrich our interaction with ourselves and the creative wild woman within.

.

.

More from same author see: Swati Chopra  

See also: Aghora, Faith and Belief, Spiritual Guidance, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul)