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| Goddess Durga 18th Century, Author Unknown |
By Gaye Sutton © 2012
It was autumn; the time of year that one of
my favourite poets calls the ‘sacred,
sensual, significant time of the year’ 1 The trees were blazing
colour, the sky grey and the harvest almost over. I’d been telling stories at the Addictions
Centre for three weeks, encouraging the women to paint and draw
afterwards. Some of them loved to paint
and some struggled with their confidence.
But they all loved hearing stories.
The mornings were fun; they were an upbeat bunch, the women the
Addiction Centre staff called their ‘chronics.’
But that fourth week; the atmosphere was
dull and flat, everyone looked morose especially Janie and her mates. The morning check-in took a long time. Janie had ‘relapsed’ at work over the weekend.
She sat with her blonde head bowed; her small frame huddled into the corner of
the couch, her voice almost a whisper as she told us about the temptation, her
attempts to resist and the caving in.
During morning tea in the kitchen, talk
turned to the hopelessness they all felt about ever losing the label chronic.
“They [the staff], don’t expect that we’ll
ever leave this group and I’m not sure I believe we will either,” one said and
several heads nodded. I leaned against
the bench, remembering my despair about what I thought of as the impending end
of the world and our apathy about it. I’d begun collecting re-creation stories,
stories of hope to sustain myself and it seemed to me, that this was a moment
for one of these.
Once everyone was seated on couches and
chairs again I stood and began my story…”The world stood poised on the brink of
destruction once before.
Rivers dried up, plants refused to grow.
People starved. There was war everywhere.
Slaughter prevailed. Dancing
stopped, even singing was forgotten. The asuras, the demons, were loose, raging
unchecked across the world, drunk with destruction…”2
It’s a myth about the cosmic battle between
Durga, who rode a lion out of
a column of fire that stretched from the sky down to the top of the Himalayas, and the many, many
demons she had to fight to save the world.
A battle so fierce ; “…oceans
boiled, the sky stretched thin, the mountains shook…”
A
powerhouse tale of an alliance between many of the Hindu goddesses and a
reminder that the last fight is one we must win alone. The atmosphere, when I finished, was electric
and the women moved eagerly towards the art materials on the table and worked
in deep silence.
Afterwards, I asked each woman to tell us
the story of her images, as I held them up and responded to each story by
personalising the image. Janie’s
painting was of black mountains, covered in snow. A huge column of fire
stretched from green foothills to the heavens. Durga stood in the flames, but
her feet were planted firmly in the green earth.
“She’s got her feet on the ground and she’s
in the flames, but fighting her way through, to save her world.” Janie
said.
I held the painting up to her and said, “This
is you Janie, grounded in the earth and fighting the fire to save your
world.” It was a powerful moment and one
that Janie referred to often in the weeks that followed.
We moved back to the couches where I told a
personal story about my discovery of Kuan Yin, the Mother of
Compassion in Buddhism,
which begins with a powerful meditation recorded in Jon Blofield’s book: ‘In
Search Of The Goddess of Compassion’.
As the story ended, a discussion began;
about spirituality as opposed to religiosity, their antipathy to the Twelve
Step Programme because of finding a male God unacceptable. It was a turning point. Several of the women joined their local AA groups, taking
feminine representations of the divine with them to meetings. It helped them
stop resisting notions of the divine.
Some of them adopted Kuan Yin as a mother archetype and used her to make
contact with their compassion for themselves.
When my stint at the service finished some had been sober longer than
ever before.
1. Dinah Hawken. Writing Home
2. China Galland, The Bond Between Women :A Journey to Fierce
Compassion
She loves the way mythology; “informs and enlivens our daily lives,” and is always looking ‘for the links. Gaye can be found at www.storyweaver.co.nz or on her blog http://storyweaversjournal.wordpress.com/ .
