NAVARAATHRI SPECIAL SERIES #9 Dhuumaavati

Disappointment is a multi-layered teacher. Not many of us would choose to apprentice with it, yet sooner or later, most of us do. People disappoint us. Luck runs out. Status declines. Strength fails us. Then, the goddess Dhuumaavati flies into our awareness, accompanied by her crow, a harbinger of worldly misfortune who ironically also bestows the inner gifts of detachment, emptiness and freedom.
In traditional India, especially in the higher castes, there was no more inauspicious form of the feminine. In a culture where status for women is by the husband, widowhood is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. From a worldly point of view, Dhuumaavati stands for despair, sadness and failure. Yet she has significant and subtle boons to give. Without passing through Dhuumaavati’s winnowing basket, we remain trapped by our dreams of success and our fear of loss, especially the losses that come with age and sickness. With her grace, we can mine the exquisite wisdom hidden in the heart of life’s most difficult moments.
Dhuumaavati rises from the smoke of Sati’s funeral pyre after Sati immolated herself at her father’s sacrifice. Her face blackened by the flames, Dhuumaavati comes into the world filled with the outrage and despair of the insulted Goddess Sati. Sati manifests as the form of the goddess who is rejected by the masculine; punished for her moment of assertive anger by being condemned to live outside masculine protection and thus outside mainstream society. Dhuumaavati is the feminine unsupported by male authority.
She is everything that we want to turn away from and refuse to admit to our lives. But she is also the dignity of the outcast and the power that turns bad luck into enlightenment. The trick with Dhuumaavati is to find her enlightened core, the transformative power within hopelessness and failure. This requires inhabiting your worst fears and facing into your losses. When women on their own, women without a man, wake up at three o’clock in the morning to confront their inner demons, it’s often with a vision of being homeless in an alleyway or forgotten in some urine-scented corner of a nursing home. For some of us – men as well as women – that is a genuine possibility.
Dhuumaavati reminds us that any one of us could lose everything, that when safety nets break down, no one is immune from losing their health or their money or their mind. War or famine or the breakdown of a nuclear power plant can take away everything you relied on. Dhuumaavati asks the question: Can your inner equilibrium survive that level of collapse?
Not everyone can go into the cave of disappointment and find the secret well-spring. Most of us do our best to avoid failure, as indeed we should – which is why Dhuumaavati is not a popular goddess. In fact, orthodox Hindu priests will often say that married people and people with families should avoid her because she has a reputation for dissolving family ties. Because Dhuumaavati reveals the transience of pleasure and the unsatisfying quality of worldly satisfaction, she is very much a goddess of the later part of life. As a life guide, Dhuumaavati has most to teach those who’ve worn out the path of pleasure and effort.
She, it is said, makes you crave aloneness, the kind of solitude that is happy to stand outside the game. As an inner archetype, Dhuumaavati is your capacity for letting go of the things you thought you needed. It’s a skill that can carry you through repeated experiences of radical disappointment. Those who are poor and marginalized often internalize rage and disappointment, which can turn into hypertension, domestic violence, or depression. To be able to receive the gift in disappointment is a rare skill. 

~ Simple Sita ~ #OnlyAtKK