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" Parvati is one of the strong goddesses. She’s also a goddess of love, with a seductive radiance directed at her beloved, yet at the same time focused inward, on her own essence. She’s a mother. She’s a yogini, a seeker of truth who inquires deeply into the nature of reality. She’s powerful and she’s tender, she’s willful and she’s playful—both at the same time. Moreover, Parvati is a goddess of relatedness. When you tune in to Parvati, you tune in to your own longing for sacred partnership. Parvati incarnates the feminine side of a form of marriage that many modern romantics crave: the union between the fully realized feminine and the fully realized masculine, the dance of intimacy where two powerful beings become one without sacrificing their individuality. Parvati’s image in bronze often shows her dancing, large-breasted, sinuous, and somehow mischievous with coy, lowered eyes. She represents the dynamic feminine in active partnership with her beloved masculine counterpart. Since her beloved is the notoriously untamable outsider-god Shiva, there’s an element of danger and illicit delight in their relationship, a quality of mystery that makes even their domesticity seem fraught with potential chaos. Parvati confidently embraces the great void where no forms exist. She fills it with her blissful presence, and voilà—that formless emptiness becomes a cozy plenum, a space in which life can flourish. Parvati can know the unknowable, tame "
― Sally Kempton , Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
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" Though Parvati is inextricably connected to her partner (one image of the two of them, called Ardhanarishvara, “The Half-Woman Lord,” has the lovers occupying two halves of one body) she also fully embodies her own powerful yogic will. She is beautiful, sexy, and athletic; she can actively pursue yoga without regard to traditionally feminine delicacy, yet she remains fully feminine. Part of Parvati’s mystery is that even as a wife she remains a virgin, in the sense that her independence is always intact. Even when she becomes a mother, it is by a form of parthenogenesis: the son of her body, Ganesha, is produced without benefit of insemination, "
― Sally Kempton , Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
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" the Shiva-Parvati love story ultimately takes place in the psyche, and it symbolizes a powerful stage of embodied enlightenment. When the god and the goddess come together in the individual and collective psyche, we experience what is sometimes called the inner sacred marriage: the full integration of spirit and feminine heart, intellect and feeling, freedom and fullness. For real self-actualization, the masculine qualities of transcendence, freedom, penetration, intellectual principles, and ideas need to come together with the feminine way of earth rhythms, connectivity, paradox, relationship, and change. They can then be enacted in the world, their transcendent values can become immanent, and we can recognize the interconnect-edness that flows between our bodies and souls. In fact, the cosmic masculine and the cosmic feminine are never two. In the process of differentiating, individuating, and embodying, they seem to separate—their apparent polarity becoming the world of polarities. The ecstasy and the pain of life in a body is precisely in the illusion of separation in which wisdom and love seem to come apart and have to be brought together again—at which point we recognize that separation was purely illusory. "
― Sally Kempton , Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
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" Around her waist is a golden girdle that anchors her red silk lower garment—a pleated length of fabric gathered around her waist and fastened between her legs, so that it leaves her calves free, like the skirt of an Indian dancer. She is seated on the back of a white bull, Shiva’s mount, in half-lotus posture, with the top of her right foot resting on her upper left thigh. She is smiling, and her eyes bless you. Say to her, inwardly, “I offer my salutations to you, goddess Parvati. Please bless me and fill me with your Shakti. "
― Sally Kempton , Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
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" If, like Parvati, our desire is strong enough, we make a full commitment. We see that it’s not enough just to be inspired, to feel longing, to be in love. We have encountered the beloved, but now we need to make ourselves into the vessel that can hold the emerging vision, the vessel that can be the beloved of the Beloved. Rumi wrote, “God too desires us.”7 But God’s desire is for us to become God, to realize our identity with the divine. "
― Sally Kempton , Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
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" Give up this insane idea,” Menaki pleads. Parvati refuses. “No,” she says. “I am the daughter of a mountain, and I am tough.” This is the moment when Parvati the maiden steps into her power. She’s moved by love, which combined with her now intensely focused will is powerful enough to shift the order of the cosmos. The story goes that from that moment, she receives the name Uma (“maiden”), which came from the sound of her “No, Ma.” The name Uma is often used to describe Parvati as the incarnation of focused will, a will so strong that it could only have arisen in the heart of the creative power itself. Uma’s will simply says “No” to objections and obstacles. Shiva has rejected her? No, he will not do that. My family doesn’t want me to practice yoga? No, I won’t accept their limits. "
― Sally Kempton , Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
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" There’s a sutra in the Shiva Sutras, a great text of yoga, that says that the divine power of will—the generative impulse behind the evolution of consciousness—is the maiden Uma. Parvati’s focused intention, her will to union with her beloved, is identical with what is sometimes called the evolutionary impulse, the cosmic and individual drive to evolve to higher levels of awareness. Because her intention is nonegoic, it carries a certainty of fulfillment, as well as a sure knowledge of the action to take to accomplish her goals. In creating a world, she created a separation from her other half. Now, the moment has come to reunite—not just in the transcendent formless space where all differences are dissolved, but in bodies, on the earth, inside the creation. Parvati’s yoga is "
― Sally Kempton , Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
