Navaratri October 2024

I have a unique perspective when it comes to yoga therapy.  I was a yoga therapist,  working with women in recovery, when fifteen years into my journey I feel victim to abuse by the very teacher and teachings into which  I had extended my trust.  For a woman with complex-PTSD,  who had found so much of her own healing in yoga that she dedicated her life to teaching it to other women - this was devastating.  My modality for healing my trauma became the source of a devastating new trauma for me.  It was hard to know what to do with that paradox.  So, I let is all fall..

Silenced (as many other victims were) I walked away from my career and my personal practice.  The one thing, however, that I could never quit was Navaratri.  Having experienced the celebration in Udaipur, India, as well as having practiced it annually throughout my yoga years, the spell Navaratri cast upon me could not be broken - not even by betrayal and abuse.  I credit this practice, the one that just wouldn’t let me go, with helping me find my way back from the brink.  Focusing once yearly on celebrating the divine feminine as a way of connecting to my authentic Self, gradually led me, on my own terms, back to the wreckage that was yoga.  It took over a decade before I could start but I eventually began the necessary work of healing this new trauma.  

Navaratri  is perfectly nestled  in the freshly fallen autumn leaves where I live now which is a much different climate than that of India.  This ten day celebration appears on the horizon with the New Blood Moon in late September or early October beckoning me to the winnowing floor to continue this essential work of women’s  recovery - that of sorting the wheat from chaff and determining what is to be salvaged and what must be left behind.  The fresh flower petals, honey, milk, sweets, inspiring stories of feats of strength, compassion, courage, and beauty… the uplift of using one’s own voice in celebration of the enduring cycles of the divine feminine as shared through stories, reflected in nature around us, and evidenced in our own lives - all of it crafts a refuge.  Navaratri creates a space safe enough even to weather a paradox like the one I found myself stranded within for years…

I am far from a priestess, and years ago, I learned the very hard way, that in order to stay safe, I need to steer clear of lineages that insist on adherence to dogma or a power-over-other system of external authority and empowerment.  So, needless to say, this is not a traditional presentation of Navaratri.  It is a very heartfelt one instead.  True to A Tending Tent - it is handmade and homemade - made in the home of true self.  This enactment is one that honors that which endures even in the face of betrayal and loss - I‘ve let fall the bits that I have found cannot serve a woman committed to living a recovered, sustainable, authentic life.  I’ve added stories and practices that open our embrace wider to welcome more of ourselves and each other home. 

Fall is the season that we are invited to come home to ourselves and re-member in community how to  tend to what wants to be mended while welcoming, with gratitude, all of it.  Our harvest in full.