There are moments in a spiritual life when something arrives that is not simply interesting, not simply useful, not even simply beautiful. There are those moments that are true in a way that bypasses every rational checkpoint the mind tries to put in it’s place.
For me, that moment happened almost 15 years ago, the first time I sat in a class on the Mahavidyas, the Ten Cosmic Powers of Shakti. Shakti means power, energy or pulse, representing the divine feminine in Tantra, which is the mystical lineage in Hinduism.
I didn’t know then what I know now.
I didn’t understand their cosmology, their placement in the Tantras, their function as the pulse of creation itself. I didn’t know the Sanskrit, the metaphysics, the lineage, or even how to pronounce some of their names with any real accuracy. And, yet, my body knew. My heart knew. Some ancient part of me knew.
Before I understood who they were, I recognized that they were. It felt like remembering. As if a door I didn’t know I carried suddenly slid open, revealing a world that had been living inside me long before I ever had language for it.
The Lineage the World Gave Me, and the One Shakti Sent
There has always been a quiet irony humming at the edge of my life:
I come from a family of five sisters.
Five girls growing up under one roof, sharing meals, fights, hand-me-downs, secrets, and the strange intimacy of a childhood lived in a house always filled to the brim.
We are close in our own ways — familiar, loving, — and yet, we are also vastly different.
Different minds.
Different coping strategies.
Different spiritual languages and emotional landscapes.
We were shaped together, yes.
But we were not chosen.
We were given to each other by birth, not by destiny.
And so when, I hesitated and then finally said yes to a Mahavidya course, and then walked into a room with five women again, a small, almost imperceptible click happened inside my chest.
Five sisters by birth.
Five sisters by fate.
These women were not my blood, but they became something else entirely,
chosen sisters, gathered by the gravitational pull of Shakti Herself.
We were six in total: five of us and one teacher.
Six women sitting on cushions with notebooks, water bottles, and a fire rising in the room none of us could explain.
None of us truly knew what we were stepping into.
But each of us had enough curiosity, or enough hunger, to say yes.
A yes that would change us all.
A yes that would help me build a new relationship with myself, one that is still unfolding, rippling, widening even now.
🌑 The First Class That Shook Me Open
That first class was not gentle.
It was seismic.
While others took notes or nodded calmly, I felt myself rearranged from the inside out.
Each teaching landed not in my mind, but in my fascia, my bones, the space behind my sternum.
The Mahavidyas were not presented as personalities.
They were presented as Cosmic Powers, expressions of Shakti that shape reality and the human psyche.
Kali as Time, the destroyer of illusions.
Tara as compassion, the vibrational Ohm.
Tripurasundarīi as the beauty and harmony woven into existence.
Bhuvaneshwari as space itself.
Tripura Bhairavi as the primal heat of discipline and devotion.
Dhumavati as the Great Void.
Chinnamasta as the radical decapitation of ego.
Bagalamukhi as stillness that stops chaos.
Matangi as the outcast and the untamed Word.
Kamalamika as the lotus abundance of life.
Each one was like a bell rung inside my chest. I didn’t understand intellectually. Yet, I recognized them. The recognition was not polite, it was primal. Our teacher spoke of the cosmological structure of the Tantras; sometimes I could barely hear a word. I was listening to something else. Something older. A truth and knowing that rose in my spine like memory.
Not softly.
Not politely.
But with the force of truth.
I wasn’t merely learning.
I was remembering.
The Mahavidyas were already moving in me, wordlessly.
🔥 When the Goddesses Choose You
Our teacher told us we would each “randomly” receive two goddesses to work with intimately.
Randomly.
As if Shakti works that way.
Five women.
Ten Mahavidyas.
Two for each of us.
When Space Opened and Stillness Spoke
🌌 Bhuvaneshvari — She who is Space itself.
The vastness in which everything arises and dissolves.
The cosmic container for Kali’s dance of Time.
⚡ Bagalamukhi — the Power of Stillness.
The one who stops chaos mid-motion, freezes the unraveling thread, stills the tongue until the exact right moment.
Not silence — precision.
At the time, I didn’t understand how perfect their pairing was for me.
But my body knew.
My heart knew.
My intuition recognized in them the architecture of something I had always felt but never named.
Before I knew who they were, I recognized that they were.
Something ancient inside me bowed.
🌑 The Unspeakable World Was Speaking
Only years later did I finally have language for what was happening.
What I experienced then—and still experience—is what Alfred Korzybski calls the Unspeakable World: the realm before words, beneath concepts, inside sensation.
The Mahavidyas live there.
They don’t speak first to the mind.
They speak to the inner animal, the inner pulse, the place where intuition is not a feeling but a frequency.
In those early years, I didn’t study the Mahavidyas.
I absorbed them.
Their teachings moved in me the way weather moves across a landscape:
wordlessly,
inevitably,
exactly.
They were shaping me from the inside long before I understood that that’s what they were doing.
🌒 The Five Women Who Held Me
Those five women — my chosen sisters — became an unexpected constellation in my life.
One has already crossed into the next realm.
Two drifted outward as time does what time does.
One remains a dear, steady presence.
And yet I still feel all five of them with me, as if our circle exists outside linear time.
We witnessed each other in ways that still echo through me.
We laughed until our ribs hurt.
We cried in ways that felt like rituals.
We cooked meals, held trembling truths, and sat in silence when silence was the only language large enough.
In that circle, I learned something essential:
I was never as alone as I believed I was.
Not in childhood.
Not in the painful moments of my past.
Not in that cooler in Louisiana.
Even then — when I believed I was abandoned — I was not alone.
The cosmic powers were there.
And now, in the collapsing of time that only Shakti can orchestrate, so were these five women.
When I returned to the memories of violation, the pain, the fear — something extraordinary happened:
Time folded.
Space opened.
And the five women were suddenly with me in the memory.
I could look around inside that moment, and instead of emptiness, I felt presence.
Their presence.
The goddesses’ presence.
The presence of a deeper reality that had always been holding me.
This is the secret of the Mahavidyas:
They do not simply heal the past.
They reorganize it.
They infuse it with the truth that was always there but forgotten.
I was held then.
I am held now.
I have always been held.
🌺 When the Body Knows Before the Mind
More than a decade later, I understand the Mahavidyas in ways I couldn’t back then:
- their cosmological function,
- their tantric lineage,
- their psychological precision,
- their esoteric structure,
- the way they mirror and shape existence itself.
But even with all that…
My body still recognizes them first.
My heart arrives sooner than understanding.
My intuition rises faster than word I could write or speak.
This is, to me, the most honest way to encounter Shakti.
The mind catches up eventually, but the body is the first to bow.
The Mahavidyas didn’t just make sense to me.
They made me make sense to myself.
💠 Why the Mahavidyas Changed Everything
I was raised inside a different spiritual architecture, one that gave me order, ritual, beauty, and belonging, but also limits, silence, and rules that did not fit my inner life.
When I met the Mahavidyas, something inside me unclenched.
Here were goddesses who did not ask me to shrink.
Did not require me to be good.
Did not punish my messy humanity.
They include everything, my rage, desire, grief, intuition, chaos, longing, shadow. They not only include my power, they celebrate it. They sit at the source of it.
They are true.
Not mythologically true — existentially true.
They are the architecture beneath experience.
They are the pulse of the feminine that moves all things.
The Mahavidyas did not ask me to shrink.
They invited me to rise.
They did not ask me to behave.
They exposed the sacred order in my wildness.
They did not ask me to be good.
They made it clear that goodness was too small a story for my soul.
And in doing so, they gave me back my life.
Every part of my life that had once felt “too much” suddenly had a goddess who said:
This is holy.
This is me.
This is you.
That was the moment everything made sense.
✨The Powers That Have Always Lived in Me
When I look back at that first class — five sisters from my past, five chosen sisters in that room, ten goddesses circling us and within us.I understand something now that I couldn’t see then:
I wasn’t entering a course.
I was entering a lineage.
A remembering.
A return.
A reclamation.
The Mahavidyas did not arrive in my life.
They revealed that they had been there all along. And, once you see, feel, know them, it is impossible to go back to not knowing them. Because they are you. And, you are them. And, you know the absolute truth that the dance has only just begun.
