Kali – Goddess of Transformation, Destruction and Transcendent Energy

Kali’s archetype is associated with love and protection. She connects us with our power, our strength, and our emotions. She calls us to be alive, juicy, passionate and committed.

Kali is the goddess of life, death, and rebirth, and bring us in touch with the eternal movement and cycles of life. She brings us renovation and transformation, and with her fierce love supports us to let go of old structures and limiting concepts, so that life can start flowing through us again, bringing new energy and capacity to act.

She is the archetype of the wild woman, fully in touch with her emotions and instinctual self. This is the energy and strength that women draws from inside herself in order to give birth, when she needs to roar and bear down, connecting with a raw an inhibited part of herself which is just like the divine mother Earth herself.

Kali is the force of nature that comes to free us from old habits that keep us stuck and no longer serve us, and sometimes she may appear like a thunderstorm shaking everything up and waking us from our sleep. If we are not in touch with her fierce love and are afraid to surrender, she may seem terrifying. And, when we open to her powerful love, she is the mother, she is the lover and she is the ultimate teacher of freedom.

In her iconography, she comes out of the forehead of the goddess Durga, roaring like a thunder, swirling her bloody sword, slicing off the heads of demons. She is an intensely emotional Goddess and can get intoxicated by her emotions and become destructive. Therefore, the process of letting go requires the presence of awareness, which is symbolized by Shiva, her consort, holding and supporting her wild emotional dance with his silent awareness and vast consciousness.

She is the embracing mother that reminds us to love the non-beautiful part of ourselves, the places in our bodies, hearts, and mind, which we tend to hide and reject. And with the loving fire in her eyes, she guides us into our dark places, in order to find the treasures that are hidden in our inner world.

Kali’s fiery dance is a dance of life and love, and in her ecstatic dance she brings everything into manifestation and dissolves it. In the work with Kali we dance wildly and playfully, we open to our emotions with full expression and awareness, when our bodies come alive and our eyes become open and shinning. And mother Kali lovingly ask us questions such as: What are you ready to let go and release? What are you resisting in yourself? What is changing and how do you relate to it? What are you hiding from yourself and others? What are the old habits that keep on repeating in your life? What is opening in you, what is new?

Kali is related to our erotic and ecstatic energy and to our deep longing to let go of control and meet our orgasmic, pleasurable, and creative nature. And she shows us that when we have a sense of orientation, safety and grounding we can allow our wild, natural and emotional energy to express, settle and flow naturally through the river of life.