She wears Sri Yantra earrings, which alter her powers: instead of threatening and angry, she is mesmerising, transformed from an angry and restricted woman to a goddess with a role of universal governance.
Akhilandeshwari only wears the earrings during the day: during the night, her power is not confined but unleashed, which reminds us that she cannot be contained, that no one can remove the mysteriously destructive qualities she possesses, that in fact this brokenness is her power. She is the actual force of the Sri Yantra, and the earrings denote her unity with Siva—the yantra contains the energies of cyclic creation and destruction.
And she is the brokenness in us: those things that destroy us, break us, separate us from whole, healthy states of being, things we want to deny, repress, or push away. She forces us to seek them out, to engage in them, to understand what they are — she encourages us to seek the power in our brokenness, in our loss, trauma, fear, ignorance.
Akhilandeshwari is the goddess who rules over transitions or endings in our lives: the loss or end of our livelihood, of our loved ones, of our health, and in a greater sense, our loss of faith or trust in the temporal world due to its constant disturbances, its violence, its unpredictability. She dwells in the space between who we were and who we are becoming. She breaks down our thought patterns, conditioned behaviours, expectations. She is the goddess of transition. Grief, trauma, and despair are her prescribed medicines, and the purpose is to teach us that in the broken state of the aftermath, every piece of our self remains broken, but unitedly shape a new us.
While most wish to hide from such a goddess, there is no denying the heart’s desire to achieve what she offers: that our perceptions of the world, of what is real, of love, relationships, career, achievements, all these things that we identify as worthy, she shatters into many pieces.
It is a fierce and painful process, but she also gives courage to face what appears as many small deaths in our lives, the things that happen repeatedly that break us. She reminds us that we are “never not broken,” as her name implies; she encourages us to surrender to that broken state, find refuge in our vulnerability, our imperfection — our brokenness.
Akhilandeshwari is also the goddess of all the arts, and is supportive of creation — most especially the creation of our new selves. She bestows a compassionate and accepting nature on us, always reminding us that like her, we are never not broken, and that there is a tremendous beauty and wholeness in that. This is the power of “never not broken.”
I feel those pieces; feel unwhole, yet stronger and more capable in that difference. I can relate to Akhilandeshwari. She has made me understand, though, that very few can relate to things the way the broken do; that those who seek wholeness can never imagine that our brokenness is where our strength and power lie.
In the end, the sum total of me is not this body, or this mind: both will dwindle, falter, fail, and ultimately be reduced to ashes. I like the shifting balance of life, but the journey is bumpy. It has thrown me off, bruised me, broken not only bones but relationships, illusions of how things “should be” that linger and tempt and haunt the fool in us all.
I bow to those pieces: they are the transformed deluded axioms who, like boisterous children promised a trip to the zoo, vent their excitement at what lies ahead in an explosion of noise and chaos, their disturbance an actual preparation that leads, if we let it, to some semblance of peace and order.
Broken, but never not whole. Or maybe something even better...
Of the material body there is no endurance, and of the eternal soul there is no change.
~ Bhagavad-gita
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