To me, Kali Ma the Hindu goddess represents destruction. What comes to mind in association with her is smoke lingering in bombed out buildings, immolation, and implosion. This may sound intense, and it is, but those of us who have worked with Kali know everything that is done is done in love. She clears out space so that the new and better can arise in our lives. She is the goddess of The Tower card in The Tarot. The bridge has been burned and there’s no going back. I found myself in the grips of Kali’s medicine when I canceled my month long trip to Germany a week before I was supposed to leave. The months I had spent dreaming about being ushered around a foreign country condensed into a poisonous smog. The air raid sirens were ringing in my head and the thought, “Now what?”
Our hair is infused with our essence. It captures who we are at a snapshot in time and unlike the flesh it doesn’t decay.
As a symbol of release I decided to shave my head as an act of reclamation. A shedding on the identification of with body as who I truly am. A middle finger in the face of society’s ideals of femininity. The hair on our heads can represent ideas and I needed to radically break with my old mode of thinking for the new ideas to sprout. An external symbol of casting off the old identity and the emergence of something new.
The breaking away from the past was a necessary step in my process in order not to be consumed by the grief. About 2 years after shaving my head I started thinking about cutting my hair for the first time since the shave and returning to my spunky, short-haired look.
Then a download dropped in: my desire to cut my hair was symbolic of my desire to cut myself out from my past. The time had come to go back to the past and clean up face what I had been running from. To voluntarily feel what I had been unable or unwilling to feel. My hair had grown and so had I and I was ready to set into the arena transmutation. So instead of cutting my hair, I decided to dye the ends blue, the color of peace.
So much of healing comes from holding the past versions of yourself with unconditional love and compassion. In seeing the pain and saying, “I’m strong enough now to witness you in your suffering and love you through it.”
