What Mother Kali Can Teach Us About Trauma

Black and naked (except for a necklace of 50 human heads)—hair wild and tongue out, Kali certainly knows how to make an entrance! Brandishing a sword and a human head in her two left hands, she destroys everything in her path and then dances maniacally upon the dead. In terror, awe and morbid fascination, we stare. Fight or flight?

But how can we fight she who destroyed everything we thought we knew? Cut to the core, how can we run? No matter: in a battle against the universe itself, where would we run? Old instincts flare, but they no longer serve. When Kali appears, life as we knew it ceases to exist.

As a Medical Intuitive and Life Coach specializing in transitions, I receive many “post-Kali” calls. Individual traumas vary: life-threatening illness, disabling injury, divorce, job loss, natural disaster, financial emergency, or—sometimes even more disturbing—an uncanny sense that things are about to change. (Kali phones ahead with her party plans.) Despite variations, these experiences hold one thing in common: they demand attention. What little warnings, gentle nudges, intuitive hits or lesser traumas did not accomplish, Kali has. Distractions, whether silly or sophisticated, just can’t compete with complete annihilation.

In order to begin rebuilding, we first need to examine the destruction. Doing so takes courage. Even though we ultimately need to look at the mess ourselves, it helps to have a Kali-survivor involved in the surveying process. Someone who has already faced Kali knows the pain of loss in a way that well-meaning friends or family sometimes cannot understand. There are losses and then there is what I call a “Kali loss”: the sense that our entire reality was an illusion and nothing real remains. This feeling does not respond to typical cheer-up methods because those methods, too, reveal their illusory nature. Alone and scared, we yearn for deep, unchanging truth. Anything less just adds to the overwhelming carnage.

Most people cannot afford to witness this level of destruction because doing so might crumble their own comfortable sense of reality. Instinctively, they put up walls to protect themselves, fighting us when we try to share the magnitude of our experience. When our usual support system fails, we’re supposed to turn inside, but inside’s a terrifying mess right now.

We cry out to the universe for help and Kali herself arrives—in the form of someone who has already witnessed his or her own destruction and rebuilding. Someone who honors the beauty and life-giving force of such experiences. Someone who can afford to look at our mess because his or her reality has already crumbled and reassembled in a powerfully expansive way.

Non-attached to our previous conceptions or enculturations, s/he can more quickly and easily sift through the rubble, drawing our attention to pieces ready for new construction. S/he also helps us to look Kali in the face, recognizing our own prayers for change and ability to manifest the answers. When we paradoxically turn to Kali for help, she reveals herself not just as destroyer but as Mother-Creator.

Initially we might find Mother Kali in a book, a synchronous new friendship, a spiritual advisor, or Life Coach, but eventually we begin to recognize her in ourselves. By witnessing our own destruction, we find those parts that cannot be destroyed. We find our Essence, “that” which defies all labels and runs through everyone and everything.

Kali’s black form absorbs all color and all vibration: she contains it all. The sword and head in her left hands symbolize Divine inspiration striking down our ego. The 50 human heads around her neck represent the 50 sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet—the root of all language. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” “But the Word is very near. It is in your mouth and in your heart so that you can do it.” We feel Divinity surging through body, mind and spirit, and we, too, begin to dance. “Let the dead bury their own dead. Come, follow me.”

Only then do we notice Kali’s two right hands—ready to bestow the blessings. As a Mother, Kali does not shelter her children. She throws us into the fire and lets all illusion, enculturation and attachments burn to a crisp. We scream as costumes turn to ash, railing against a universe that allows such suffering.

And then it happens. We emerge from the fiery, bloodstained pit. Lighter, easier and full of Grace. We no longer fear death because we’ve already been through it. Signs of life sprinkle the horizon as green shoots push their way through now fertile soil. We learn that some trees will not plant seeds until the searing heat of fire tears through their casings. Pain and sorrow reveal themselves as parts of Life. Freed from the limitations of fear and resistance, we can revel in naked existence. Recreating ourselves in ways that express the fullness of our being. When ego goes up in smoke, we turn ourselves inside out and let our Light so shine. Namaste.nn nnn n