by Tau Tara
Not all relationships are meant to be a walk on a breezy lane, a pleasant experience of what connection feels like when we accept and are accepted, feel immense love and loved by the other.
Sometimes our relationships are the playground of our shadows.
When it’s time for us to learn about ourselves and go deeper still into our authentic selves, our shadows draw out the perfect players for this game and attract them into our lives.
And while in the beginning it will all seem great, once the conscious selves have settled in, our shadows surface and play their game.
They trigger each other left, right and center, sending us on an endless loop of dissonance, which soon turns into arguments, justifications, manipulations, attacks, blame…
This can of course quickly turn toxic, abusive or even violent. And often calls for a severing of ties with and walking away from – for the best healing of both parties.
But when two players can be honest to themselves to admit that they might have unresolved trauma and if each can be courageous enough to acknowledge this, there can be healing.
Even if they aren’t able to compassionately hold it at once, but if they can make the concerted effort to keep integrating their disowned power, their disjointed selves, then opportunity to dissolve the anger and to start integrating the shadows begins.
Shadows after all are aspects of our own selves that have gone rogue only because we have in some way denied, neglected, or suppressed them because of fear, pain, shame or guilt.
And when we call back and integrate these disowned parts, we then no longer have shadows that need to attract other dysfunctional relationships and painful situations to trigger us into awareness.
But it goes without saying that the shadows come up to our notice only in and through relationships.
Which is how every relationship becomes a gift, a teacher, and allows us to become aware of ourselves and heal ourselves in the process.
I had this dream once of these two dark goddesses of wrath and rage who were holding invisible mental mirrors which they invoked from within their magical hands.
They protruded their sharp fangs and pointed claws, stomped their feet and raised dust.
Their hair rose like dangerous serpents, two animals in fight.
Their powerful loving hearts are temporarily put aside as they help each other in this unpleasant process of reflecting back to themselves their own shadows, a deeper love.
They are both wise and beautiful, but tonight their shadows are up.
In the land where I currently reside, I found out recently about a powerful wild goddess called Maari who is known to arrive during the cold, dark, rainy season.
She is the goddess of rain and thunderstorms, as also of diseases and depression.
Depression both in the sea that causes powerful thunderstorms and in humans as terrifying inner storms.
Maari loves Neem leaves.
And this is my offering to these wild goddesses who are such a necessary part of our lives and our healing and our growth, but are slowly fading from the lands and the minds of her own people.
The goddesses of wrath, chaos, depression and the dark shadows
As they come stomping and raising dust
Their blood curling in lust
No lotus holding, benign, ever smiling, ever forgiving, compassion oozing, forever 15 looking goddesses these.
Beware
They are wrath and fire
Anger and thunder
Chaos and depression
As real as life
As real as any human condition
When the goddesses of chaos arrive,
They only have one agenda- to dance
Dance your body, dance in your head
Stomp their feet, raise up to the surface all that you have suppressed, hurl obscenities.
And cast old spells,
That can unknot ancient psychic knots,
That reveal old painful pasts,
That repeat worn out patterns
That repel us from each other
And reveal more and more of us and the other
And get enraged by what is seen in the mirror
Our own pain, own shame, own games, own lies, own hidden power
And get petrified.
Yes, ancient psychic knots,
Tangled and twisted through ages of manipulation, division, and suppression
A thousand years of lovelessness
That disconnects you from you, from the other, from all life.
The goddesses of wrath are not to be mistaken for the gods of war
Where life is taken, and destroyed
In a game of good vs. evil
And justifies the hunger and greed of power,
And righteousness of a few.
The goddesses of wrath and the shadows come straight to you
For a massive internal battle
They make you meet your multiple selves
The many disjointed you,
the several divided selves of you.
And make them fight with one another.
This battle between who you are,
And who you can no longer pretend to be.
Creating chaos, disrupting your life’s design
Smashing that well built image of you, you know is false, is heavy, is killing you, but you won’t do anything about.
The goddesses of the shadows don’t have any weapons except sharp fangs, pointed claws, sometimes metal scythes,
And a large invisible mirror they invoke from the palm of their magical hands.
Smoothed and smoothed,
Only to reflect off your falsehood
And make you sit with your truth.
Who are you?
She makes you slip.
She makes you sleep.
She shows you at first only what you wish to see.
Then as time goes by, she ensnares you in the mirror of truth.
And as the image of your false self begins to distort,
And you begin to break, and break hard,
Unable to walk away from the snare you have willingly walked into, they begin their dancing inside your skull.
She locks away your tears when you want to weep and then makes you to wail when you would rather die than cry.
She makes you face yourself
Your shame, your strength
Your power, your fire
Your desire, your guilt
Your heart, your love.
She opens your inner eye for spectacular dreams and visions.
And makes you see, smell, taste, touch and feel your blood red soul as divine.
The battle they make you wage, within
The many layers, facades ripped apart, without
Your masks clawed open
Your life destroyed under a second
Until you stand stripped naked and utterly real.
You are no longer a victim, no longer a hero, no more a warrior, or a saviour
No longer driven by your accumulated belief systems, or indeed any systems,
These wild feminine beings are tricksters and whores, witches and magicians, healers and oracles.
Be warned.
Open yourself, and they open you to your power.
Resist, and they tear you apart.
Be warned that when you go to them,
They will make you see your soul
In the mirror of your own self
In the other.
– goddesses of wrath –
an early morning dream –
IN CONCLUSION
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About the Author:
Tau Tara is a young budding witch, engaged with the healing process and learning about her witchy gifts which she is still discovering through the power of plants, sounds, body wisdom and soul connection. Tau is spring born on Indian soil, chirpy in the sun, but sharing a special relationship with violent storms. She loves digging up ancient secrets from the buried past, and buried truths from primal spaces. You can find and follow her adventures on Instagram.
featured image: author’s property; artist: Rejath R
