She holds her hand out to you, and, unafraid, you take it and step onto the crocodile’s back. The crocodile swims farther down the river, and as it navigates through the waters, you feel yourself glowing, the light within burning bright and coming to the surface. And like Akhilandeshvari you find the shape of your form changing, no longer keeping solid. You think of all the things you want to reshape in your life, all the pieces of your soul that need to be reshaped, and in your mind’s eye you see these things changing, breaking, and reforming in the glow of your own inner light.
The goddess puts her hands on your shoulders and says softly, “Do not fear change. Every time you feel your life is shattered beyond repair, I will be at your side. I will show you that you can rebuild and be the more beautiful for it.” The river begins to fade, and you know that when you feel broken inside, you will be able to call on Akhilandeshvari’s light and begin to reshape yourself.
Akhilandeshvari is the somewhat obscure Hindu goddess who presides at the temple in Tamil Nadu in southern India.11 She is connected to the element of water, navigating the river of the universe atop a ferocious crocodile. Known as the “goddess who is never not broken,” she is portrayed with her body divided in many floating pieces, not quite whole and not quite shattered either.
What is beautiful about Akhilandeshvari is that the very thing we dread the most is the very source of her power: she is in pieces. She is broken, constantly moving and creating new experiences and wisdom out of the broken pieces. She rides a threatening crocodile, symbolizing our fears, to navigate and propel her forward. She accepts her fears and that we are never complete, that we are instead constantly forming and reforming. We are always broken, and to grow we must be. Akhilandeshvari reminds us that being broken into pieces by disaster, heartache, and trauma is an opportunity to re-create ourselves. She intentionally remains constantly in flux, ever tearing herself apart, creating and re-creating herself. Akhilandeshvari is ever open to change. Resolutely, she refuses to be limited, to be stagnant in a single form.
As much as we wish it were not true, our biggest breakthroughs often involve pain and risk. Routine and stability at times prevent us from growth. We cling to routine because it is familiar, no matter how unhealthy it may be for us. Familiarity is safer in our minds than the unknown. Yet you are at your most powerful when all the comforts of routine have been ripped away from you, when you have no other choice than to pick yourself up and change. That moment when you are broken and bleeding inside, when you are on the floor weeping and shaking. In that moment, no matter how broken you are, you are at your most powerful. There is nothing else left to lose, nothing else to hold you back, and all your potential is at your disposal. In that moment all things are possible and nothing is off the table.
Unlike some of her more fearsome counterparts, who wear severed heads and look horrific, Akhilandeshvari instead is portrayed as calm and peaceful. She may rule over what to many of us represents the most difficult times of upheaval in our lives, but she does so with a kind of serenity. To Akhilandeshvari, failure is not a sin, not something to be looked down upon. She pulls herself apart intentionally, knowing it’s her choice how she puts the pieces back together. She teaches us to accept that failure is inevitable, that at times it’s needed. We will all fail at something, and when we spend all our time and energy pretending that we have not failed at something or that we can fix it, we rob ourselves of the lessons we can learn from the experience.
In her speech at a Harvard commencement ceremony in 2008 J. K. Rowling described how failure reshaped her life:
I had failed on an epic scale. … I was the biggest failure I knew.
… So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed. … And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. 12
There is a certain kind of shame that comes with failure, in not having our lives “together.” Many times we go to great lengths to hide the parts of ourselves that we perceive as broken: an unhappy relationship, an addiction we can’t overcome, an event from the past we can’t get over. Admitting to others that there are parts of ourselves or our lives that don’t work, that we are falling apart, can seem like an admission of failure. But we forget that failure at times is natural. We can’t win everything. We can’t figure everything out all the time like in a fairy tale. Yet there are things we learn from failure, from being broken, that we can attain no other way. To gain power from being in such a state seems unthinkable. At least it does until we admit that in one way or another we are always broken, that we are many pieces constantly moving and finding how they fit or don’t fit together. Our lives and minds move and shift like tectonic plates. If one piece stays static too long, the others shift and push against it till some massive tectonic explosion occurs. If we were one solid piece, if we really had everything figured out, life would be static, and we would have no capacity to change or learn. And this is Akhilandeshvari’s lesson, that failure is not a sin and that at times we need to fail; we need things to fall apart all around us to be able to reshape who we will be.
Spiritual Bypass and Accepting Failure
When working with Akhilandeshvari, it is impossible to not contemplate what failure or being broken really means. We all have had moments in our lives, probably life-changing ones, when we felt like our lives were shattered. Our failures can range from our first broken heart in grade school to the more devastating failure of losing a job or loved one in our adult lives. But regardless of how life-altering or minimal these failures were, more than likely we were ashamed of them. Failure isn’t fun, and at the time it’s hard to see how it can have a positive effect on our lives. In fact in many ways our modern culture has a bit of an obsession with being positive. With spirituality, we are taught how to rid ourselves of “negative” energy, a term we lump into an ominous box that encompasses all that is bad in our lives and ourselves. But if we are always trying to be positive, we never really open up that box and explore what is inside. We never really deal with it, and there is not enough sage in the world to banish those things we refuse to look at.
Morgan Daimler describes this obsession with being positive and the spiritual concepts of love and light as an imbalance that occurs when we don’t explore our darkness. We must, like Akhilandeshvari, see the value in breaking ourselves apart to re-create ourselves from the very foundation. In a Patheos post about our shadow, Daimler writes,
In my experience, many pagans seem to think that positive emotions [equal] success and negative emotions [equal] failure in a spiritual sense. I disagree. Both are part of the human experience. You can’t idolize one while demonizing the other or you have created an impossible imbalance. …
… [T]here is a real risk with this mindset that we are creating an idea that if being sad or depressed is failing spiritually people will be even less likely to seek help when they need it for clinical depression and that really worries me; we as a community should be a support for people who need help, not an additional barrier creating unrealistic expectations of perfect happiness 24/7. Spirituality should make your life better, ultimately, not worse.” 13
At its core, this overemphasis on the positive and demonizing of failure is a kind of spiritual bypass. The term “spiritual bypass” was “first coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984” to describe “the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.” 14 Welwood suggested it was a fairly prevalent crutch, regardless of religious preference, that usually becomes noticed only in its most extreme cases.15 In its most basic sense spiritual bypass is avoidance put into a spiritual context. Robert Augustus Ma
sters, author of Spiritual Bypassing, argues that part of the reason for the existence of spiritual bypass is that “we tend not to have very much tolerance, either personally or collectively, for facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring pain-numbing ‘solutions,’ regardless of how much suffering such ‘remedies’ may catalyze.” 16 We try to apply the same logic to our spirituality as we do to taking an aspirin to make our headache go away. Within Paganism, negative emotions are things we burn sage to banish and buy crystals to absorb and negate. We talk a lot about how to get rid of negative energy but never really how to deal with it. Or that it can be useful. If we don’t face the darker parts of ourselves, the parts of our lives that are broken, then we can never learn from them. We’ll spend all our time banishing them and wondering why they keep reappearing.
Our concept of the spiritually enlightened person needs to radically change. Take a minute to really think about a person you think of as enlightened. It can be a person you know, someone famous, or just your own made-up ideal. What does that person look like? What do they act like, how do they appear? Is it a mountain guru who wears a peaceful, detached expression? Or is it maybe a familiar face with strength and resolve who has weathered life’s storms? There is no right or wrong answer, but it is important to consider what that image looks like to us. Spiritual enlightenment doesn’t have to wear the face of the always positive, peaceful guru. It’s okay to feel pain and sadness. Those things are part of our spirituality too and shouldn’t be swept under the carpet as shameful things that, as we become more spiritually evolved, will no longer be part of our existence or have meaning.
Devotional Work and Offerings for Akhilandeshvari
Devotional work with Akhilandeshvari can consist of meditation and inner work. Forgiving ourselves for failures and seeing the beauty in them and how they have changed our lives and influenced us is a task that takes time and a great deal of looking within. If you are having a moment of doubt or a horrible day, sit in front of Akhilandeshvari’s altar and ask her to help you and show you that failure is a part of life. Remember that you are constantly being destroyed and re-created like the goddess herself.
When I first started honoring Akhilandeshvari, I started noticing broken things. I found a small kintsugi bowl that I use for offerings to her. Kintsugi is a Japanese art form of repairing broken bowls or other pottery by putting gold in the cracks to fix them, making them beautiful because they are broken. In her bowl I started putting pieces of sea glass and other broken things that I felt still had a beauty to them. At times I would hold some of the pieces while I meditated on how things that had ended or broken down in my life had turned into something beautiful or changed me in a powerful way. When the bowl is full of odds and ends, I try to piece them together in a pleasing way and create some kind of art with them. I might glue them onto a board or decorate an object with them.
How you choose to honor Akhilandeshvari can be as personal or creative as you like. Whatever you do to honor her, allow yourself time for self-reflection.
Evocation for Akhilandeshvari
by Karen Storminger
Broken One, divine in all your pieces
Turning upon a sacred point
I call to you, Akhilandeshvari
Stagnant wholeness does not suit you
Ever changing, ever becoming
Fear will not consume you
Let it not overtake me
Instead you choose to ride upon its back
Embracing loss and brokenness
Teach me to embrace my own loss, to revel in my pieces shattered upon the ground
Gnashing, thrashing
Letting the movement swiftly change you
Splintered pieces washing upon the shore
You gather strength with each shard
Show me how to gather my own strength as I collect the jagged edges of myself
A mosaic of fluid beauty, re-creating yourself, re-creating myself as you do
Swirling, whirling, twirling
Wild dervish of life
Your light seeps through the cracks and
I see deep within myself, my own illumination through you
Beacon of change, strength, growth, and resilience
Akhilandeshvari, you are the beauty of life’s ever constant destruction and rebirth
I call to you, Never-Not-Broken One
A Ritual to Celebrate Failings
Our failures are usually the things we want to sweep under the rug. They are the things we want to forget or run endlessly through our heads trying to figure out how we could have possibly arrived at another outcome, how we could have done something differently. But our failures shape us. They force us in new directions, and, although painful at the time, when we look back, often we find that they were defining moments in our lives. Where would we be if they had never occurred? How would we be different?
It has become a kind of tradition on Samhain for me to honor the person I used to be. It was part of a ritual the group I work with had done for a Samhain ritual some years ago, and I continue the practice in my own personal work around the holiday. In the ritual we had a moment of silence for everyone to mourn the parts of themselves that were no more, when we could contemplate how we had changed, release the people we were, and welcome the people we were now. This ritual is a kind of follow-up to this idea, celebrating where we failed and how those failures have influenced us as well as allowing ourselves to know that these mistakes were okay, if not painful, to make. Failure is a part of existence. Being broken is a part of life’s journey. Being at peace with that painful fact is important. It is the first step to allowing us to forgive ourselves for our failings.
You Will Need:
Modeling dough or any kind of quick-drying clay
White candle or picture of Akhilandeshvari
Towel or newspaper
Offering bowl
Offering of your choice for Akhilandeshvari
Before the ritual, take the dough or quick-drying clay and roll it out so it’s a fairly flat piece. You may wish to use a rolling pin or a bottle covered in plastic wrap to do so. Next, find different things that will make interesting patterns. This can be anything from something you find in the craft store to using a fork to make lines and impressions in a pleasing manner in the clay. You could write out words in the clay that represent the things you feel you have failed at or are challenged by. If these things are better represented by symbols, you can carve those into the clay and press small crystals into the clay. Whatever you like. If you are using quick-drying clay, let it dry overnight. Modeling dough may require a few days to dry completely. Otherwise, you can dry it using a hairdryer or bake it in the oven for 5 minutes on the lowest setting to quicken the process.
If you wish to cast a circle or call quarters, do so, but it is not necessary. You may wish to have a picture of Akhilandeshvari or simply use the candle to represent her. Light the candle, saying,
Akhilandeshvari, I call to you
Never-Not-Broken
You who tear yourself apart endlessly
Destroying and reforming
Reshaping, remaking
Akhilandeshvari
May I know your serenity
In the face of change
May I know not fear
May I know your strength
As I reshape my life
Take a few moments to see Akhilandeshvari in your mind’s eye. Is she riding on the back of her crocodile? Is she in many hovering, swirling pieces or solid? When you see her clearly and feel her presence, take the clay sheet you have created. Place it on the towel or newspaper so you have a surface that can catch any stray pieces. Hold the clay in your hands and think about every time you feel you have failed, weren’t good enough, or were unable to change something that you wanted to turn out differently, or all the trials and hardships you have faced. Feel them going into the clay. When you are ready, drop
the clay or slam it down (without hurting your hands) on the towel so that it breaks into many pieces. Say,
I am allowed to fail
I have failed
I will fail again
Before me are the shards of myself
The failures that shape myself
The pain that had helped me remake myself
The scars that are part of my being
I am allowed to fail
I have failed
I will fail again
I will shatter what I am
And be remade anew
I will be like Akhilandeshvari
I will tear myself apart again and again
Ever changing, ever becoming
Pick up one of the broken pieces and look at the patterns on it. By breaking it, you have created something new and unique that didn’t exist without having been shattered. Even though it is no longer part of the whole, it still can contain a beautiful pattern. Hold the piece up and name it.
This is ____________
Once you have named what failing or painful event you want the piece to represent, think of how it changed you for the better or something good that came out of it.
From it I have gained ____________
When you are done, put that piece into the bowl as an offering to Akhilandeshvari. Do this for as many pieces as you feel you need to. If you have extra pieces, you can discard them. When you are ready, leave the other item you have set aside as an offering to Akhilandeshvari. It could be flowers, herbs, milk, or some other item that has meaning to you.
Thank Akhilandeshvari and ask her to allow you to see the blessing failure can have and to honor how these things have shaped you.
You may want to revisit the pieces over the next couple of weeks, take one out of the bowl, and meditate with it for a while before putting it back. When you feel the time is right, thank Akhilandeshvari and discard the pieces in whatever way you feel appropriate.
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