How Maa Kali came into my life

How Maa Kali
came into my life

Warning: this article contains references to male violence and sexual violence.

Beyond the Rotten Apple: Understanding Patriarchy

How had I felt safe? And why had I believed that male violence was something from my past?

For a long time I had placed the men who had hurt me into a particular category in my mind. They were the monsters, the exceptions, the men who were somehow different from the rest. That distinction made it possible to continue living in the world. If the people who hurt me were monsters, then ordinary life could still be safe. I could trust again. I could love again. I could believe that what happened to me belonged to another chapter of my life. But one night and the time following, that illusion finally collapsed.

I had just given a talk about sapphic love through the ages, something I had felt deeply grateful to share, only to be violently pulled back into another reality. A stranger threw me from my bike and groped me on my way home. It was not only the incident itself that broke me open, but what it represented. I had been trying so hard to believe that I was safe, that I had learned from the past, that I could be careful enough, aware enough, spiritual enough, to prevent those things from happening again. Yet there I was, once again on the ground.

That night, I cried not only for what had happened that evening. I was crying for everything that had happened to me since childhood, for all the times I had trusted men who were supposed to love me: family, friends, romantic partners, people I had allowed close because I believed they were safe. This time it had been a stranger, but throughout my life, the violence had not always come from strangers.

And my experience is far from unusual. The World Health Organization estimates that around 840 million women globally (almost one in three) have experienced physical and/or sexual violence, most often from an intimate partner. These numbers are likely an underestimate, given how much violence remains hidden, unreported and surrounded by shame, fear and silence.

This was the part I could no longer look away from.

I could no longer see what had happened to me as a series of unfortunate encounters with individual men. It was intertwined with life in patriarchy: a system in which violence against women is not simply an isolated problem, but one enabled, excused and normalised through generations of male privilege and power.

And during this time, the Epstein files were being released. I found myself watching the lack of accountability and feeling the same frustration: how could men cause so much harm, and how could so many people and institutions allow it to continue? It was becoming harder for me to believe that this was simply about a few “bad men”.

The men who hurt women are not always obvious monsters. They can be fathers, brothers, friends, husbands, lovers, teachers and colleagues. And perhaps this is why the idea of the “rotten apple” stopped making sense to me. If women everywhere are taught from childhood to hold our keys between our fingers, watch our drinks, share our locations and text when we get home, then the problem cannot simply be a few bad individuals.

I could no longer see what happened to me as a mistake. It was part of how patriarchy functions: men being able to inflict extraordinary violence on women, while society so often asks women to adapt to that violence rather than demanding that men (and the systems protecting them) change.

That realisation was devastating because it meant I could no longer tell myself that I simply needed to be more careful. There was no perfect amount of caution that could guarantee safety. I could make good choices and still be harmed. I could live in another country, surround myself with spiritual people, practise every day, try to become more conscious, and still find myself on the pavement because a man decided to violate my body.

From Fear to Fierceness

The day after the attack I felt completely exhausted. Not only physically, but existentially. I was tired of rebuilding myself, tired of learning to love my body again after it had been violated, tired of trusting again and then discovering that I had trusted the wrong person. I had spent so much of my life finding my way back to myself after being hurt, and the thought of having to do it all again felt unbearable. I remember thinking that I could not keep doing this.

That was when Maa Kali came into my life.

My partner had a sticker of Kali for me. She was fierce, wild and almost frightening, and something about her spoke to me more than ever before. I wanted that fierceness. I remember thinking, what if I had a goddess like this on my side? What if an energy this powerful was protecting me? I became fascinated by the story of Raktabīja, the demon in the Devī Māhātmya whose blood had the terrifying ability to create another demon every time a drop touched the ground. The more he was wounded, the more of him appeared, until the battlefield became filled with copies of the same demon. Kali enters the battle and understands that simply fighting him in the usual way will not work, because every wound creates another manifestation. She drinks his blood before it can touch the ground, stopping the multiplication, and ultimately destroys him.

There was something about the demon’s blood that stayed with me. In my own life, my physical boundaries had been crossed again and again. Each time, I had to rebuild my relationship with my body, with myself, with trust and safety. Like Raktabīja’s blood, the pattern kept reproducing itself.

In yogic philosophy, samskaras are the impressions left by our experiences, patterns that can become deeply embedded and repeat themselves. I began to see that I could not singlehandedly destroy patriarchy or stop male violence from existing in the world. What I could break was the circle that violence had created inside me: the fear, hypervigilance and the self blame; a belief that if I could only be careful enough, I could prevent the next wound.

Kali did not make the battlefield disappear. She stopped the demon from multiplying.

Perhaps that was what I needed from her too. Not a promise that I would never be hurt again, but the strength to stop organising my life around the fear that I might be.

To rebuild my relationship with my body, with love, with trust, and with life itself. The violence was not mine to control. But the fear did not have to keep reproducing itself through me.

I put the Kali sticker on my little Honda Today scooter. It was a tiny, slightly battered scooter that nobody would mistake for intimidating; which somehow made Kali sitting on it even more perfect. I had always identified with things people underestimated: quiet, sensitive, seemingly soft. Why would Kali need some enormous motorbike? Real power doesn’t need to proof itself.

Every time a man looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable, I would imagine myself as Kali on a battlefield, and somehow that helped. The little scooter became a reminder that strength does not always look strong. Sometimes the fiercest things are carried by the smallest, softest and most underestimated forms.

Beyond the Male Gaze of Spirituality

There was another realisation underneath all of this: I had spent so much of my spiritual life looking towards male gods, male teachers and male philosophical traditions. Where were the women? Where was their wisdom? I had become increasingly disillusioned with how often spirituality seemed to centre men, when the experience of moving through the world as someone who identifies as a woman is profoundly different. We survive so much, carry so much, and develop forms of wisdom that I had barely been taught to look for. I found myself longing for the voices of women, for the goddesses, for a spirituality that could speak to that experience.

Kali was not a completely separate world from the Hatha and non-dual Shaiva path I was already walking. Shiva and Shakti are deeply intertwined within these traditions: consciousness and its power are not truly separate. Yet I had approached spirituality mostly through the mind. I could understand Shiva as consciousness, contemplate non-duality and analyse the illusion of the separate self. I could approach deities as archetypes, but I had rarely allowed myself to simply love one.

Perhaps that, too, was part of my disillusionment with a spirituality so centred on men: I had learned to value what could be understood, analysed and transcended, while the feminine (and devotion, embodiment, emotion and mystery) felt somehow less serious.

Kali disrupted that. She invited me beyond what I could intellectualise and into something I could only experience.

When Philosophy Became Devotion

I began doing sādhanā with Kali every day. At first, I barely knew what I was doing. I only knew that I needed something to help me continue in this world. It felt like surrender, like a last attempt to find a way to live with what I had experienced. What I never expected was that something born from desperation would become one of the deepest spiritual transformations of my life.

I turned to Kali because I wanted protection. I wanted a fierce goddess who could stand beside me in a world I no longer trusted. When I first saw her, she frightened me: the blood, skulls, wild hair, tongue, weapons and terrifying expression. But slowly, almost without me noticing, something changed. The anger softened into love.

Now, when I look at Kali, all I feel is love.

I cannot explain this rationally. It came through sādhanā: through devotion, repetition, and moments when I would suddenly feel an overwhelming tenderness that seemed to come from nowhere. Sometimes simply thinking of her would bring me to tears. I began to experience Kali not as the terrifying goddess I had first encountered, but as a mother who loved me completely. A love that did not require me to be perfect, did not disappear when I was angry or confused, and did not ask anything in return. It was simply there.

Sri Ramakrishna, whose spiritual life was devoted to Kali, said, “Kali is Brahman, Brahman is Kali.” Brahman is the Hindu concept of ultimate reality; the oneness underlying everything. For Ramakrishna, Kali was not separate from that reality. She was it.

This began to change something in me. I had spent years thinking about consciousness, reality and the idea that nothing is truly separate. But through Kali, this stopped being something I could simply think about. I began to experience it through love.

There is a difference between understanding that everything is one and actually feeling held within that oneness. Between knowing about love and surrendering into it.

Kali brought me into that difference.

She helped me realise something that sounds incredibly simple, yet has become one of the deepest truths of my practice: I am love. That is closer to my real nature than the fear I have accumulated around it.

Life had taught me to be afraid to live openly. Violence had taught me that openness could make me vulnerable, that trust could become dangerous, that my body could be taken from me and my tenderness used against me. Part of me wanted to protect myself by becoming harder. But Kali did not make me harder. She made me more capable of loving without pretending the world is harmless.

When Truth Cuts Deep

And I do not want to make this story too beautiful. Kali did not make everything better. In many ways, she made things harder. She began asking me to be honest with myself; to face my patterns, my attachments and the stories I had built around what happened to me. Most painfully, this meant confronting my self-blame. I would never tell another woman that she was responsible for being assaulted because she drank too much, wore too little, trusted the wrong person or failed to protect herself. Yet I had spent years telling myself exactly those things.

Self-blame gave me an illusion of control: if my choices had caused the violence, perhaps changing them could prevent it from happening again.

But taking responsibility for how I live is not the same as taking responsibility for someone else’s decision to violate me. I can make choices that support my safety, but I can never become perfect enough to guarantee it. Letting go of self-blame does not mean giving away my power. It means putting responsibility where it belongs.

Kali also asks me to be honest about the life I am living now. That has meant letting go of relationships, work and attachments I had become comfortable with, even when I was not ready to lose them. There has been a lot of grief in those endings. But I am learning that protecting myself does not always mean avoiding pain. Sometimes it means refusing to abandon myself.

Kali cuts through illusion. I once thought I needed her to protect me from the world; now I think she also protects me from the lies I tell myself. She has changed my understanding of the feminine too. She is not pretty or agreeable, not interested in making herself smaller so others can be comfortable. She gave me a place for my anger: anger that women deserve safety, that bodies deserve respect, that tenderness deserves protection. She did not ask me to become less angry. She asked me to become more honest about what that anger was asking of me.

I came to Kali wanting protection. What I found was a fierceness that did not require hardness, a devotion that did not require me to abandon discernment, and a love bigger than the fear I had carried for so long. I no longer believe spirituality can promise that nothing painful will happen to us.

What Kali has given me is not protection from suffering, but the feeling that there is something within me that cannot be reduced to what has happened to me.

I came to Kali in desperation, asking for protection. Somewhere along the way, I fell deeply in love with her; for her fierceness, her truth, the way she cuts through illusion and her motherly love.

Maa Kali Namaha.

How Maa Kali came into my life