Saraswati- Goddess of Inspired Creativity

I avoided getting to know this goddess for a long time. But for months, I had been feeling an ego death sneaking up on me. Right around Christmas, I could feel this plateau happen. Something in me was dying, brought on by a building emptiness and discontent. I had to sit with whether or not I wanted to keep teaching. Or if I even identified with being a yoga teacher. At some level, that label no longer fit me. 

Saraswati is known as the flowing one, very closely associated with the element of water. It is the fluid in our bodies, or our mothers’ bodies, that incubates our potency and the energy of all electrical impulses of life. The fluids are the medium through which our ideas travel. Saraswati is very much this medium that pulls ideas into form. She is the goddess of inspired creativity. 

So, I allowed stillness to happen. 

There is an incredible amount of stillness in the moments when we first divide as an embryo in our mother’s womb. In that dynamic stillness, potency builds. Potency is the bringer of movement and life. It is the energy that is necessary for changes to happen. And, just like we learn how to listen to the desire to move as infants, this energy of desire emerges from excitement. As an adult, repeatedly taught not to listen to myself, it can feel a lot more like a whisper. 

As I waited for her whisper, I chanted and invoked her through ritual. I relaxed into gravity and allowed for the unknowing. In the myths, Sarswati emerges from chaos to create clarity and form. And as I chanted, she came. Like a bolt of lightning. My mouth dripped poetry, my body felt things it had never felt before. There was a sense of solidness and clarity in me that I had never experienced before. I fell in love with her.

She helped to remind me of my purpose. And to remember what is possible in the label of yoga teacher. Even if I was unsatisfied with the how that label has contained me. Even still, as I write this and move into a new phase of my life, I feel her here. 

So, as we move through this incredibly crazy period of life in the world, what do you want to create?

What has been calling you, whispering sweetly in your heart?

Let me know in the comments below.

Beautiful image by artist Rosie Santos. Find more of her work here.