Navaratri is coming, a very good period for increasing our spiritual practice and our awareness in daily life, few tips on how to get the most of it.

Nava means nine and Ratri means nights. Navaratri is traditionally the Indian festival of the nine nights of the Goddess Durga. During these nine nights, Durga, the Mother Goddess fights the multiple manifestations of the demons she meets in her quest of purification. She will, herself, take different forms in order to be victorious from this battle. Durga is one of the main female archetypes present in the Indian pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. She incarnates a figure of the divine feminine, which supports us in our spiritual evolution. She is the Mother Goddess who guides us and helps us to get rid of our attachments, our inner resistances, everything that keeps us in ignorance and suffering. These nine nights symbolise our inner struggle to purify the negative tendencies of our lower self, the ego, the mind. 

 

Durga is often represented as riding a tiger (or Lion depending on the illustration), this represents her unlimited power, putting the virtue in service to destroy all evil tendencies. Her multiple arms indicate that to overcome the impulses of negativities, man must develop different qualities in different situations and circumstances: detachment to overcome selfishness, self-knowledge to overcome anger, generosity for greed or resentment, etc. Love ultimately is the universal weapon that allows to heal the feeling of separation.

 

In our daily live, because of our interaction with the world through our senses, our actions, our speech and our thoughts, we have the natural tendency to accumulate a lot of ‘stuffs’ at the level of our body, the levels of our energy, our emotions, the mind and the spirit. Meditation and regular spiritual practice help us to clear it a bit, like a hygiene for our mind, offering us a chance to recenter and free ourselves more from some tendencies. Through regular practice, we  gradually release some of the loads, traumas, repressed energies and emotions that get locked in our body-mind consciousness and that we carry with us, mostly unconsciously. Those knots, if we do not address them, lead us to reactivate unceasingly our suffering, trough negative repetition patterns. By using consciously a period like navaratri, we get a real opportunity to work more deeply on releasing some of these karmic knots and opening thus to more clarity and awareness. The good news is that we are entering in one of these portals very soon, so let’s use it…

 

The work of purification will gradually widen and deepen during these 9 days. It can affect all levels of our being simultaneously or successively, but the Indian Tantra describes the progression as follows: this period of 9 nights / days is symbolically divided into three cycles of three nights.

 

The first cycle is represented by the Goddess Durga, symbolising a purification taking place mostly in the physical world. In terms of yoga, we speak of the physical body and energy primarily, making it a beneficial period to purify our diet for fasting or practicing conventional purification methods.

 

The second cycle is symbolised by the Goddess Lakshmi and promotes the purification of our emotions, the astral body. This is helping to bring awareness to all our  emotional knots, projections that we carry towards the others and that we often overlook as not being initially coming from us but being rather the fact of others.

 

The third cycle is under the Goddess Saraswati, it is considered linked more specifically with the purification of our mind at the deepest level, to help us to detach ourselves from our false beliefs, which limit us in our perception and prevents us to open ourselves to the recognition of the depth of the Self. This is in terms of yoga connected with the purification of the mental and causal / spiritual body.

 

Whatever is the level involved, it constitutes an invitation to take more self responsibility in our acts, emotions and thoughts, by realising that whatever comes to us in our daily life is just but a reflexion of our own projections, beliefs and ideas about what reality is and how we interact with it. It is deeply connected with the roles we are identified to in our daily life and that restrain us from a more vast perception of truth. By rising our awareness, we can simply free ourselves more and more from the ignorance that keep us into suffering and open towards more clarity and happiness. 

 

 

How to make the best use of this beneficial period?

 

 

By paying more attention to what we eat and drink: the purity of our diet, drink more quality water consciously, hydration is a very important tool to help to purify and free locked energy-emotions from our body, by doing some period of fasting or respecting some specific diet to help purge our bodies from toxins.

 

By Taking the opportunity to amplify our meditation and deep relaxation, in terms of duration and / or frequency. For example by choosing to get up earlier to have more time to meditate.

 

By taking small pauses during the day and adopt micro-practices of awareness: we stop for a while, close our eyes, breathing deeply three times and observing for one minute what ever manifests to us without judgment, just presence. If possible, do this micro-practice at least 5 times per day or more.

 

By adopting periods of silence during the day to recenter ourselves.

 

By avoiding distractions and useless discussions, vain activities, staying more away from social medias, having period of times without consulting our smartphone or computer.

 

By looking at our life purposes, what direct us in general, how we are tuned or not with the voice of our Heart, or intuition and evaluating how to adjust ourselves more to it.

 

By connecting more with nature and if possible silently, through walking, meditation, connecting with the various elements.

 

By bringing more attention to our mental projections, expectations, emotional games that arouse when we interact with others. If necessary doing a practice of writing what bothers us to bring it to a deeper level of introspection, tracing how we become identified to our masks and fall under the spell of negative repetitions in our life.

 

By paying more attention to our dreams, their symbolism and their message.

 

By praying to the Cosmic Mother, asking for her guidance, we can use a image that touches us and helps us to connect with the archetype of the Divine Mother, by using a mantra if we know one that we can safely use or simply repeating the syllable 'Ma' internally, whispering it or out loud during the day, before falling asleep or when we wake up.

 

These are just few ideas of what can be done during this auspicious period, obviously there are  much more, follow your heart and see what can help you to expand your consciousness to new horizons and understanding of yourself and of reality.

 

May you make the most of this period of Navaratri, Jay Ma Durga ...