“Do not be afraid to suffer,
give the heaviness back to the weight of the earth.”
RILKE
Last weekend I hosted a Yantra Painting workshop in my apartment (although technically Belle actually hosted it since I was gone 80% of the time teaching).
It was led by my friend Sarah Tomlinson who’s the go-to gal for Yantra Painting.
What is a yantra you may ask?
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Yantras are mystical diagrams, ways of depicting the energy of a deity or a planet through beautiful, complicated geometric shapes.
They are often used as aids for meditation.
In fact, even the precise, painstaking process of creating your own with the use of a compass and a ruler over several hours can lead a person deeply inward.
One cool thing Sarah does is to begin the workshop by gathering everyone around in a circle with all the images of the yantras from her new deck spread out on the floor but without any description of what they represent.
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You simply find the one you’re most drawn to energetically and then she tells you its deeper meanings.
I found myself strongly attracted to this one:
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And then over the next two days as I randomly shuffled the deck, it literally fell out and into my lap three times.
Interestingly it’s for a goddess I’d never heard that much about: Dhumavati.
In fact, on Spotify if you search for “Ganesh” you find 1600+ songs lasting 215 hours and 47 minutes.
If you search for “Dhumavati” on Spotify, only 7 items come up, 2 of which are random and atmospherically named.
Why is she so incredibly unpopular?
It turns out the Dhumavati is basically (as Sally Kempton writes) “The Bag Lady” of the Hindu pantheon.
She is the goddess of sadness and despair, of failure.
She’s old, ugly, angry and always a widow, the very bottom of the social order in traditional caste society.
In most depictions, Dhumavati, accompanied only by her crow, sits in a chariot without any means to move forward. She is, quite literally, going nowhere.
No wonder there are so few chants about her…and yet….
She is one of ten goddess known as the Mahavidyas or Great Wisdoms.
In her deck of yantra cards, Sarah has emphasized the positive aspect of Dhumavati in her description:
That’s where the energy of Potential lies…after the Letting Go, just beyond the Disappointment and Failure.
I often have mixed feelings about the aspects of New Age philosophy that are so relentlessly positive they ask us not only to move through suffering as quickly as possible but also to dismiss the lessons it has to teach us.
With Dhumavti, there’s no getting past the fact that the boons she offers come from those periods of life when we’ve successfully navigated failure and disappointment, when we’ve found unexpected blessings only after great loss, and, most importantly, when we’ve reached a point of truly Letting Go.
All this also reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Frankly, there’s little danger that Dhumatvi is suddenly going to become as popular as beautiful Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, or playful Ganesh, the remover of obstacles.
And yet her gift may be the most valuable boon of all: the Wisdom of Letting Go.
