Adi Shakti

“The body occasionally goes through what is called a healing crisis. This often occurs just when an individual is working to consciously reshape his/her health.” –Ted Andrews, The Healer’s Manual

I can’t deny that all is exactly as it should be.

I have been doing a lot of Reiki for people near and far over the past two months. That means I have been doing a lot of Reiki for myself as well.

I started meditating (doing Reiki) with crystals on a cedar staff as a way to focus my attention on the chakras of the person I am treating. It seems to amp up the effect. Some of the people I treated said that when I place the staff near them, they feel a palpable increase in the Reiki.

Then it happened. I had a healing crisis.

I didn’t recognize it at first. I just thought my world was crashing.

But tonight I see evidence of grace.

I had painted an entire page of nothing but red when the crisis first hit. I wasn’t thinking about what it meant, I was just feeling it.

Red.

I thought I was just intensely angry and hurt.

But today I started cutting the painting into pieces to make a mandala which I intended to use as a shield against all the bad vibes flying around, and I also wanted to make a little red house for my vision board; I wanted to remind the Universe that I needed to move out of where I live now, the sooner the better.

Well, the house idea didn’t work so the red pieces of painting were just lying on my desk in a heap. The mandala wasn’t working out very well either.

I’d been chanting Adi Shakti all day after downloading it from Bandcamp. I’d just received a random email notifying me of a new recording by one of my favorite singers, Brenda McMorrow.

Now, if you backtrack to a poem I wrote earlier today you will see that the healing crisis I was having had to do with my mother.

So chanting to the divine feminine was a good prescription for what ailed me.

Here is the part where it all started to come together.

I picked up a piece of the red painting and was going to paint one of the Reiki symbols on it. I stopped, though, and looked again at the fragment. There was an image there. It was completely random. {Yes I am using the R word again because it matters.} There was an image of a woman’s face appearing in the different tones of red.

So I outlined it with whatever drawing thing I could find in a hurry.

Intrigued, I kept looking at the image I’d traced.

I was still chanting Adi Shakti, but I needed to look up the meaning again because I had forgotten what some of the words meant.

The more I read, the more certain I was that this whole mother crisis and the red painting and the fluke occurrence of getting one of my favorite chants in my email were not so random after all.

I wanted healing. Deep healing. And there I was, having to work through the core issues of my dis-ease: my own birth, my very existence as it has played out in the messy and emotional maelstrom of my relationship with my mother.

There were angels and midwives all around to help me through; I relied on texting friends, phone calls and all sorts of art projects to keep me from losing my heart. I even made an ocean drum and played it till my hands tingled. And I have to mention the exquisite music of Lisa Gerrard, who gave voice to the evolving parts of my being that I could not release on my own.

And then, there she was. The face of the divine feminine, a silver outline on a stormy red background. It was a calling card from God that said, “I got your back. All is well. All is as it should be. Well done.”.”

I feel like the crisis is over now. Meditating on the divine mother helped me work through some of the most painful issues I have with my own mother.

Love won.

“Adi Shakti, Adi Shakti, Adi Shakti, Namo Namo

(I bow to the creative power of the Kundalini, the Divine Mother Power)” –3ho.org

(I bow to the Primal Power)

Sarb Shakti, Sarb Shakti, Sarb Shakti, Namo Namo

(I bow to the all encompassing Power and Energy)

Pritham Bhagvati, Pritham Bhagvati, Pritham Bhagvati, Namo Namo

(I bow to that which God creates)

Kundalini Mata Shakti, Mata Shakti, Namo Namo