Kali is the Hindu Goddess of Destruction and Rebirth.  She is the destroyer of the illusion.  In life we are constantly falling into illusions about ourselves, our lives and others.   These illusions keep us stuck in structures that are not in alignment with our souls highest calling or with our deepest truth.  When Kali Comes Knocking, the illusions in your life are ready to be shattered!

Kali is often depicted as a demon rather than a Goddess.  She rides a lion. She wears a garland of severed heads and a skirt of dismembered arms, while wielding a sword covered in blood.  She is shown consuming her own children.  Kali is one of the “Dark Goddesses,” but we have to understand the role of the “Dark Goddess.”

Dark, in this context has to do with our own shadow aspects, the parts of ourselves that are unconscious or hidden.  Our culture prefers to keep the shadow at bay and so it is easy to demonize its properties.  Yet personal and spiritual growth can only come when we confront our own shadow nature.

Within that shadow contains our deepest fears and our deepest truths.  We need to confront our fears in order to get to the truth.

Kali does consume her children, but these are not blood children.  Her children represent her creations.   When the thing she has created has outlived its form it is consumed in order for a new form to emerge.    The severed heads of her children also represent liberation from the Ego.

Kali brings the destruction, or erosion so that renewal can take place.  Every Fall we see the leaves on the trees dry up and fall away.  But in the spring comes the renewal, the rebirth.  We, as human beings, go through these same cycles and the more we are willing to accept them and not resist them, the less pain the cycle of erosion will cause.

Kali comes knocking when we are resisting change and yet change needs to happen.  We’ve been in that job or that relationship too long, but we are holding on because we are afraid of change.  Kali doesn’t care that you are afraid of change.  She will show you little mercy as she burns down your house.  She is like the tornado who blows in and blows everything apart leaving you standing in a pile of debris.

Sometimes when everything in our lives seems to blow up, it is difficult to see that there may be a higher purpose in all this.  We don’t realize it is really our soul that calls Kali in.  Our soul wants to be in alignment with our highest truth, our greatest purpose, and when we are out of alignment and not making any course corrections on our own, the course corrections are made for us.

Kali is not the kind, gentle force like the Goddess Quan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy who hears the worlds cries and offers compassion.  No!  She is a force to be reckoned with.  When you are stuck in a rut, she is the wind that blows you out of that rut.  She comes in the torrid affair your spouse is involved in that blows your marriage apart.  Or the rapid firing from a job you’ve had for twenty years.  She can even come in the form of that cancer or disease that forces you to question your life and your mortality.  Or she comes in the financial devastation that causes bankruptcy.  When Kali comes knocking, it will not be easy.  But most often it is necessary.

Kali is not only the Goddess of Destruction.  She is also the Goddess of rebirth, renewal, regeneration.  With every death there is a birth.  We die to one form and we are born into another.  The caterpillar dies to his reality only to be reborn as the butterfly.

Each time Kali has come knocking in my life, I’ve gone through a dark night of the soul.  This is a time where it seems everything that is my life falls away and I’m not sure who I am anymore.  I’m not sure where I belong.  I’m not sure about anything!

Through the destruction of all my illusions, I found my voice.  I began speaking my truth and following inspiration.  My business was built on this truth.  And my business was the one thing that stayed intact as the other structures fell down around me over and over again.

Pandora’s Box became my platform in which to speak the truth. I named my show Pandora’s Box because I resonated with the story of Pandora.  Pandora was a mortal woman who was given a box and yet told she could not open it.  Her husband was given the key to her box and told to keep the key from her.  Her curiosity about what was in the box led her to steal the key while her husband was sleeping.  When she opened the box it was said a great evil was unleashed upon the world and once opened the contents of that box could not be put back in.

In my interpretation, that box didn’t contain the evils of the world.  It contained Pandora’s Shadow.  In her own quest to know herself, she was drawn to take the journey into her own shadow.  Her husband was the gatekeeper to her shadow, very much like the man in my life who tried to keep me from myself.  He didn’t want me exploring myself that deeply, because a part of him knew if I did, I would leave the relationship.  I would discover that it was only an illusion.

Pandoras husband also represents our masculine aspect, the part of us that looks at life from the perspective of the rational, intellectual, and practical.  If we dare descend into our deep, feminine, intuitive nature, and explore the depths of our own being, we begin to leave the patriarchal constructs behind.  We no longer follow our head; we follow our hearts.  We don’t always listen to reason but learn to trust in our intuition.  We don’t see our dreams as lofty and impractical, but rather as a calling from our soul.  Once we embark upon the path of deep spiritual exploration, there is no going back.  We can’t go back to the state we lived in before Pandora’s Box was opened.

You could say when Pandora opened her box, it was a Kali Moment.  The illusions she had been living her life under were shattered as she was confronted with her true nature.

In the Tarot, there is a card called the “Tower.” When you receive a Tarot reading and get the “tower” card it could easily be called “The Kali Card.”  The tower represents the collapsing of a structure that you have built your life on, so when you get the “Tower card” it means a structure in your life is either going to collapse or already has collapsed, depending on where the card lands in your spread.

“Tower Moments” are times where life feels it is crumbling down around you.  But we have to learn to see these “tower moments” or “Kali moments” as times where the old is being cleared away, to make room for the new.

It is in our resistance to what wants or needs to happen in our life, that causes our greatest suffering.  When we know that a relationship needs to end but we keep clinging to it for the safety and the familiarity, we bring greater suffering upon ourselves, and others.  But when we can accept the change that wants to happen in our lives, we will have a much easier time of it.

We have to let go of the old in order to make room for the new and we have to have faith that the new is always greater than the old.  It is greater because it is a more honest and truer version of ourselves that is emerging.

In any given moment we are either growing or dying.  When we resist change or growth, we begin to decay.  The type of decay I am referring to here is when we lose our zest for life, we become depressed, we become stagnant, the life-force energy isn’t flowing freely, we have locked our heart in a cage and our mind in a prison.

Science has discovered that we actually have two brains.  One is in our head and the other in our heart.  The interesting thing about using the brain in our head is we have to go through all the filters to get to a deeper truth.  It has to go through the ego, the fears, the rational, the logical, the reasoning in order to make an important life decision.

The heart brain has no filters!  It is a direct line to the truth.  This is why when we follow our heart, we are in alignment with our deepest truth.  The more we follow our heart, the less we need the Kali energy to come in and destroy our current reality.

It doesn’t mean that following our heart doesn’t lead to the destruction of our current reality.  Because in life there is always the cycles of death and rebirth, erosion and renewal.  Our heart simply recognizes when it is time for a change, and it can do so consciously.  We will often consciously call in the “tower moment” to collapse the current structure.  We may consciously decide to leave a relationship when it no longer feels right.  Or we may quit a job when it feels stifling.  We may make a decision to move to another location because our soul longs for a change in our environment.

It is when we resist the change our soul is calling for that Kali comes knocking!  She comes rushing in and destroys the constructs we have been hiding behind.  She comes rushing in and shatters the illusions we have been living in.  She comes rushing in and collapses the ego that wants to hold on to the familiar.  And when there is nothing left to hold onto.  We surrender to the change that wants to happen in our life.

This is a change that aligns us with our true self, with who we really are, and the path that is in alignment with our souls highest calling.

So, the next time Kali comes Knocking at your door, invite her in!  Know that her ultimate truth is LOVE.  She loves you enough to want you to be true to your divine nature.  She loves you enough to remove those resistances that have kept you stuck and stagnant in a worn-out paradigm.  She loves you enough to liberate you from your Ego and align you with your heart.  She loves you enough to set you free to be who you have come here to be.