"Resting in the lap of the Divine Mother"-an interview with Chameli Ardagh
By Eduardo Sierra

This is one of the most delightful and engaging interviews I’ve experienced. Chameli and I met at an outdoor cafe in Nevada City, CA. We talked about love, relationship, divine feminine and ‘beau-tiful’ masculine. Here are some excerpts:
Eduardo: Saniel Bonder notes, “In order to be released of the hyper-masculine conditioning, the man must submit to the deep or Divine feminine in his partner.” What do you think?

Chameli: I think that is a wonderful vision to have; and it's a wonderful vision for two partners to consciously choose to practice. It takes a responsibility of the woman to have that kind of transparency in order to hold that surrender. In my relationship with Arjuna we have definitely played and danced like that. And it's wonderful. But I will say it goes the other way too. I also surrender to the masculine guidance, to his guidance. But what I see with the divine mother energy; it is a “holding.”
A lot of the hyper-masculine neurosis we see in both men and women today, because at some point back upstream, we lost the Mother God. We lost the feminine face of God. We live with this tension that we have to do it all ourselves, and we have to make it happen, and we lost the trust that we are held and carried by the Mother.

Eduardo: As opposed to the hyper-masculine conditioning which is ever trying to fix things.

Chameli: Yes, we have lost that sense of resting in the lap, or the arms of the Mother. That is sad, because that has a lot to do with our trust, in each other also.
Eduardo: So you're saying that not only is that willing to submit to the feminine a factor, but also the readiness of the woman to hold that place as the mother, the Divine Mother.

Chameli: Most women have a huge wounding when it comes to the masculine. Most women couldn't hold that surrender, because we're so wounded ourselves. As a result, in women's work, we do a lot of touch. The feminine touch is a very non-invasive energy.
The masculine is a penetrating energy; the feminine touches in a more inviting way. And we do a lot of that. And what I've seen in my own body and with other women is that, slowly, slowly, it's almost like a flower opening, the body opens. This touch, it's reprograming, it's opening and being able to receive and give through the body in a different way. What I've seen is that my body, after years of practicing like this, could receive the masculine Divine, which is a huge penetrating energy, in a completely different way. It was through the feminine. (Again, by) resting in the lap of the Mother; I can then receive the masculine.

Eduardo: Prajnaparamita, “Mother of All the Buddhas,” she is the ocean of all existence. And we are the fluff on the waves on top. And so if you were the ocean, then how could you not receive?

Chameli: Yes, exactly. We believe that we are little islands, separated islands—it's just a hallucination of the mind. Einstein called it "an optical delusion of the mind."

Eduardo: Right on! I think, personally, that “mothering” is one of the real strengths of the Waking Down Mutuality folks. Offering that mothering energy and holding space while people sort of catch up to become more healed human beings. As Maslow (‘Hierarchy of Needs’) notes, until the lower needs are satisfied, the higher ones can't emerge. First thing is the mothering energy (for remedial nurturing, healing, etc.) and by being loved unconditionally, we ‘get’ our own Divinity. Then the fathering energies will be effective. Otherwise they’ll be abusive.

Chameli: That's also beautiful what you said about how when that is opened, and we have a foundation of trust, that we are carried, then we can really honor the masculine. Really honor the beauty in masculine clarity and direction and sometimes the masculine is not the one that nurtures, but tells you how it is. Which are beautiful qualities. But of course people contract in fear or contract in resistance if we don't have trust.

Eduardo: You know how crucial trust is, trust that was brought on by touch, for example, helped me to open up. When you were talking about feminine touch in your circles, what are you all learning about the role of touch in allowing us to relax out of our seeker self into simply being who we are?

Chameli: We have our bodies, they are shaped and molded from the belief that we are separate and we need to protect that and be a certain way. And so it's almost like we have this hard shield on our bodies. Even when we start to wake up and realize that we are not separate, we can have a realization, but for the body, it takes a much much longer time to realize.
Eduardo: Healing on a cellular level eh?
Chameli: Exactly, if you had a hand tight like a fist for 30 years, it's going to hurt a little when you start opening it. You need gentleness. You can't really push it open. That's where the touch comes in.
It's inviting openness, slowly and gently, gently. That's why it's called embodied spirituality; the body reflects the realization we have, the realizations live through our bodies. But it will take a longer time in the body, because matter is slower, by nature. It's a slower frequency. The body, muscles, nerves, flesh, all of these things. But it's what we need to do, to be fully giving our gifts.
Eduardo: So healing the deep cellular type wounds that are in us, takes more than just an enlightenment or an awakening?

Chameli: Exactly! I've been exploring the different Goddesses from different cultures. This has been an amazing process, because they are mirroring different aspects of the enlightened or Divine Feminine. And to see all the different ways they are expressing themselves, which is not always still or quiet or peaceful. You know, they are these wonderful, so potent mirrors to look into, to recognize.

Eduardo: True of the feminine in this culture who’ve been insufficiently exposed to that.

Chameli: I've been doing this series of classes with each Goddess, and then we practice. To really recognize, to remember aspects of ourself. There's one wonderful myth about Inanna, who is a Sumerian Goddess. She is one of the oldest myths we have written in human history. This was 3-4,000 years ago, when the Goddess was very much alive. She is a passionate Goddess, and belongs to the sky Gods. Her ideals are brightness, light, insight, airy, fast; masculine qualities. And then she chooses to descend into the underworld where she meets her dark sister, who is the queen of the underworld. And through her descent she needs to strip all her Goddess clothes off, all of her identifications. So she loses everything.
She dies and gets resurrected, so that she can come up again, but she comes up again completely transformed, because she has embraced the darker side, and the more feminine "down there." Insight comes, but not through aha-insights, rather it's a cell-to-cell, becoming of a new being. That's a wonderful potent picture of embracing that part that we have, literally pushed out in the underworld on the side of our consciousness. Into hell or wherever we want to push it, whatever we don't want to deal with. There is a strong Goddess energy in the middle East, lots of the religions have come out of that.
Eduardo: So you propose that that recognition comes from the time prior to patriarchy?

Chameli: Absolutely. I see the patriarchy as lasting really more like 3,000 years or so. The Inanna myth was still alive. It was written down 1,700 BC. She was still very much alive in that time.

Eduardo: You know how celestial deities can manifest, like Saraswati—look at Durga, didn't she manifest Kali? What was the nature of Inanna?

Chameli: She was the Goddess of love. But she was also the Goddess of war, and also of sexual love. There's lots of poetry which speaks like; “fill me,” a lustful kind of energy. Very raw and unfiltered, a wild Goddess. And when she also goes down, she embodies the transformation of the soul. When she's running around in the sky, her roots are cut by the ankles. Her intuition leads her down. She embodies the embracing of the darkness.

Eduardo: So the legendary tale is about her doing that. What a wonderful thing to let women know, that has not been included in their consciousness.

Chameli: And I've been doing that process, we've been following that journey. And what happens with the women, is that they access this deep source of wisdom, that has no place in the intellect, or has no place in what we have learnt in our culture. Intuitive wisdom, is a feeling in your gut of what's true. To embrace the times of darkness and times of crisis, when all falls apart, it's part of life. It's a part of a new beginning that we have lost in our culture.
We have this mentality; “think positive, get over it, take a pill.” It super emphasizes the light, the brightness, the logic, the rational. We've lost the framework to understand and to live that. We've lost it because we're so imbalanced toward the hyper-masculine. Also whenever disasters happen in our world, like tsunami or fires, in our logic we can't find any place where that is acceptable. But there is a place where we can be with that, deeply grieving, deeply feeling that pain, and at the same time being with the is-ness of it. To be with it, is actually a part of life. It's happening. And there's no place in your mind where you can get to a resting point, where you could find a reason for it, or anything. There is no reason. It's just pain. To stay with that, to be there with that pain and allow your heart to feel it is to really open and be broken IS the point.

Eduardo: Now that takes courage, what gives you the courage to do such a thing?

Chameli: The more we embrace the feminine, the more we embrace that there is no choice. There's just being with life as it appears. And then let it go again. And then it's a new moment. And on and on...

Eduardo: This sounds like the Buddhist practice of non- attachment.

Chameli: Non-attachment has been so misunderstood. It has been so used as a spiritual escape route for not feeling. “I'm detached.” "Oh, it's all an illusion." That is a theoretical concept; it's dangerous. It's really really felt, it's not a theoretical abstract idea. You're still in it, when you talk about emptiness, it's also part of the feminine.
Even if you deeply realize that this is all empty, you're still fully here, and involved, and fully feeling. Because that's also part of it all. In the temple we recently did the Green Tara practice. I study a lot of the old scriptures and find practices that a lot of Buddhists do as a visualization. When we do it the feminine way, we do it very much in the body, and we do it in interaction with each other. Sometimes we embody the Goddess for each other; we practice Devi Yoga.

Eduardo: Because it seems to me like integral Goddess-ness would include all of those: peaceful deities, wrathful deities, all of it. Because in relationship with the masculine, sometimes you need Kali energy. I see it is important work you're doing, introducing archetype Goddesses, because women need to be able to pass any of those. The wonderful unconditional love, yes, also the wrathful one. To the degree there is ego-clinging, the wrathful deities seem to kick into action.

Chameli: Buddhism is in many ways a very masculine path, It's founded and practiced by men mostly, from the beginning, so it's a reflection of the masculine preference of emptiness and also the cultivation of “positive energy,” to avoid the heated energies. But not the Tantric Buddhism. What I've seen in the practice of the wrathful Goddesses is that the more we embody it, become familiar with that aspect of the feminine, the less it becomes destructive.
Like anger, it's just an energy, it's not destructive in itself, it's just an energy. But it's the re-pression, the neurosis, the resistance around anger that creates destruction, where we start to hurt each other, where it comes out the back, all kinds of ways in which anger becomes destructive. But anger in itself is not destructive. No energy in itself is destructive.
There are no negative energies. It's just a label of the human mind. We like to label things with positive-negative/light-dark. Take away the labels, there is just energy. But the labels create neurotic relationships to these energies. It's infused in our culture, we're marinated in this belief that we shouldn't have certain kinds of feelings. All these findings lately about when we are in negative energies we get sick...
I don't think so. I think it's the resistance to the energies that makes us sick. That's what we're exploring in our women's work, to observe that Kali is simply fierce energy. And it doesn't have to harm anybody. And the more we can become familiar with that, the more the juice and the power and the passion can flow in us. We don't have to be afraid of that.

Eduardo: In Tantra every energy is useful, no energy is thrown out. In this transformation, anger becomes clarity.

Chameli: When I look at some of those texts, I can see the interpretation of the man who wrote them down. Sometimes you can read between the lines and you can find, a more whole meaning. And that's what I find so exciting with these Goddess myths, a fresh and alive meaning to the message of the Goddess which is felt in my body, more than intellectually.
When I went to India the first time, I went to Dharamsala, and met Buddhists. That's how I learned meditation. But I see that I am born as a Western woman, and that is a unique position—I can bring the feminine back in a way that was not possible before, because women didn't have that freedom that I have today. Feeding the demons—we do it with each other, we are being the demon for each other, and we find a way to be and meet. We do a lot of Buddhist practices, but in a feminine way. The sisters that I feel are in my lineage are the Tantric Buddhist yoginis of India in the 800 Century who were the teachers to many of the Buddhist scholars.
And these women were gathering, female teachers with female students, and practicing together. They are very much sisters that I feel are there sharing. The women came when the buddhists were so academic. What they call the founders of Tantric Buddhism, they all had women teachers. They would say, "Come on, out of your books and come into life." They entered relationships with these women and realized a whole other meaning to Buddha's world through living it. As one of the women said, Buddhist words cannot be understood through the intellect but through symbol, which is beautiful, the essence.
Eduardo: Yes. I really respect and admire the work a lot of Waking Down in Mutuality folks have done, helping us move from the need of mothering to a sense of relationship with a Goddess. I didn't know it was so rare, that my mother loved me in a way that left no doubt that I'm loved, and that I'm worthy of love.

Chameli: The process of thought sometimes has a bad rap in spiritual circles, it's actually more about learning how to channel your thoughts into wonderful expressions of art and other creative expressions. But we allow it to run wild.

Eduardo: I wonder if it isn't at the archetypal level, primordial Saraswati coming through. Because when I get into the higher states in my creative moments of writing poetry, it is a very mystical state. It is like channeling. Do you have any sense about that?

Chameli: Absolutely. We are part of this flow of expression of existence. It's constantly creating itself and destroying itself, and we can be part of that dance. The more we get out of the way, the more that dance can express itself the more we are transparent. There's a wonderful story of Saraswati; the wife of Brahma, the creator god in Hindu mythology. Brahma as the creator, Vishnu is the preserver and Shiva is the destroyer. They all have their feminine counterparts. The story is that Brahma was sitting–in the beginning, there's nothing else–it was a feminine aspect, a feminine Goddess there, sleeping. And he got more and more interested in her. But he could never catch her; every time he got close, she created herself, for example, as a cow. So then he created himself as a bull. And he could chase her. But then, she became a bird. And then he had to become a bird. And this was how all of these things were created in the Universe. And he got more and more obsessed, and he created himself with five faces, so that he could all the time keep an eye on her. And he got more and more obsessed and crazy, and the world started to get really crazy, because all things started to get out of control. And then Shiva came to Brahma and told him; "You have to wake up! This is crazy Brahma. Look at this. It's chaotic. Stop it!" And Brahma was still looking for this Goddess, and didn't listen.
So then Shiva cut off one of his faces so he woke up, like from a trance, and that's when Saraswati manifested herself. And she came in and taught him how he could channel his amazing creative energy into beauty, into art, into music, and the written word. She's the teacher. He's the image of how we get lost in our minds, and we chase one thought, and it's endless, like a maze. And she's the teacher of how all of this can actually be beauty, how all of this can be gifting. I just love that story. So the mind is the guide or creative energy that wants to be expressed through us, but most of the time we are occupied in our obsessions.

Eduardo: What a beautiful story! Here she is:

Chameli: It’s a willingness to stay present and see how life is unfolding itself. And that is a very challenging practice. Sometimes it's very uncomfortable. That's what I call embodied spirituality. It's the willingness to stay present in the midst of all of it.

Eduardo: Where your willingness to make a commitment to does that come from?

Chameli: To me that is really not a choice when you realize that's the only truth you have! [laughing]. When my ideas of a future state of enlightenment where everything should stop and be completely harmonious ever after; those myths dissolved and weren't attractive anymore. When they no longer resonated, what happened was the realization that this is an endless unfolding. Then the choice is about, "how can I meet this?" The question is not like should it be like this or that. It's not a comparison anymore. It's "Am I going to resist this moment or am I going to welcome this moment?" That's the choice we have. And resistance is hell. It's the door to hell. And when we are embracing the moment, even the deepest pain, we're here.

Eduardo: If resistance is hell, then acceptance is sort of release or ...

Chameli: Heaven. And acceptance is not an abstract thing. It's a very down in the body willingness to stay present. And it takes some practice, because our habits will always , we will always want to go up in the mind, into numbness or into all these ways that we've learnt to escape. The willingness stay present is a very down in the body meeting with this moment. Breathing into this moment, giving it space so it can flow. Arise and dissolve, arise and dissolve, and on it goes ‘til the body ends.

Eduardo: Would you call it endless awakenings?

Chameli: Yeah, or enlightenings.

Eduardo: So where do we get this idea that enlightenment was a ... and it's done?

Chameli: That's a masculine wish.

Eduardo: Well, it's also an illusion, a myth. Ted points out that awakening is more like growing up, an ongoing process of unfolding.

Chameli: And you will always meet a new moment. So you can never rest and say "I got it." Life is always new. Each moment will appear and can you be with it? I wrote this piece years ago, which said that “I'd rather scream in pain and anguish than to kiss dusty lips of yesterday's bliss.” Even if it was blissful, it's still a memory. It's stale in the next moment, so then it's a new moment, and you may look very different in bliss. But it's fresh.

Eduardo: To me it's one of the most high heroic acts of heart and courage to let go, to release, to jump off that cliff and not know if there's going to be someone down there to catch you.

Chameli: But in that, that's what I see in the role of a teacher or the mother or having a relationship to a deity. On that point, we can do a practice, there's a certain kind of surrender needed. Then it's beautiful to have a certain form of the Divine that we can relate to, that can hold your hand somehow. That is there when when you surrender. I've seen that. Because before I was very much in this advaita kind of emptiness; "the divine has no form." But the last years I have much more relationship to these different Goddesses, to form. Because it's beautiful, like Rumi says, "I know we're one, but please make the appearance of two so that I can love you."

Eduardo: Exactly, what's the fun of having dinner alone?

Chameli: And I love that. I am more and more of a Bhakti, a devotional practitioner. It's not logic in me, because all I know is this One, but it's this love affair...
About embodying the feminine and being surrendered too, ... I see, in the women's groups, the need to embrace and celebrate the feminine because we are all in this culture over-balanced towards the masculine; it's not just to emphasize the feminine but to bring balance back. So what I see is a lot of women who come to me and say "Oh but when I come with the feminine to the man, he runs away, he doesn't want to deal with it, he's afraid of my feelings."... But then I ask her, "What is your relationship to the feminine and your feelings?" Because that's much more interesting.
I see that most women are also wounded. We judge the feminine, we judge our own nature, we have a hard time with feelings, because it's very chaotic. It's irrational. Because we are conditioned in the masculine ourselves. It's also scary for us. Our work is to somehow em-brace that. And the more we can embrace that, the more we can then meet the man in that way, we can give the feminine as a gift, as a celebration, like, here's all of this. Come! And then the man can surrender into that. Our own masculine judgments are in the way of this full flowering, because we have such a strong inner masculine ourselves. We are product the neurotic part of the masculine, that is what we have inherited from our culture. A lot of our work is to celebrate the feminine and become familiar with the realm of the feminine again.

Eduardo: So, to be able to function in that way, being present as the divine feminine, to a man who is willing to submit to that, in order to release from the conditioned patterns, the woman must first have done that in herself?

Chameli: But of course a man can do that as a practice himself, no matter where the woman is. Many men do that, they just see the divine in each woman, and worship that. And that is also a path. And no matter if the woman is conscious or not, he just sees that in her anyway.

Eduardo: As a Goddess worshiper, I used to do that with my ex-wife, and she used to get real annoyed when I saw her as the Goddess...

Chameli: So then, when we talk about the healthy yang, or the beautiful masculine, the integrated masculine. Here we talk about a whole other piece of castration and of wounding in the masculine, smothering, etc. When I see the dance between the masculine and feminine, it's like a circle, it goes on and on, sometimes the man comes to the woman with a very innocent wanting to have sex, or to share his erection, it's his gift to the woman. And the woman is teasing him along, and then she shuts it down. And he gets castrated in that. But she justifies that unconsciously, because of all the ways she's been abused by men historically. She's carrying that. So that means that she has the right to treat him like that. And of course, the more he's treated like that, the more angry he becomes at the feminine, because he's castrated when he comes with his gift, and he's being teased. And then he becomes abusive, and then she gets the right again to do what she does, and we go on and on and create this cycle. The more we can see that and honor our own woundings, the more we can also celebrate the masculine, the beauty of the masculine, and the beauty of his sexuality and that way he can come and bring his sexuality fully without being shamed.

Eduardo: Yeah but when he wants to penetrate her with his consciousness, where is that at?

Chameli: Well, that's beautiful too. [Laughing] I think that's important work also, to explore the "new man." Before it was the man who was the ruler of the family, the boss, the patriarch, and then it was the sixties when it was all flowing, very feminine, and now we see kind of a new exploration that is needed.

Eduardo: Thank God (dess)!

Chameli: That is a new exploration, and I think it's about an integration of the masculine and feminine in ourselves. It can allow us to embody who we are, which is a very spontaneous expression of who we are, when we get down below all of those layers we have about how we should be, how it is to be a man, and how it is to be a woman. When they evaporate more, it's a more spontaneous, natural expression, which for some will be very masculine, and for some more neutral and for some more feminine.
Even awakened consciousness has different flavors to it. And one is the emptiness. And one is love. Different words, but also different aspects, flavors. Sometimes you can feel your awareness and it has different flavors: if you want to explore love, if you want to practice to embody more love, what is you need is relationship.
It's also very innocent. Many people say if I just feel universal love for everybody, why should I just have this one person? We can get a little conceptual about these things, because it's very innocent, polarities are attracted to each other, it's like a yearning for fulfillment in the human body. It's this yearning to merge with the other. It's as innocent as flowers that yearn for the sunlight. When a man and a woman meet in that sexual union, there is that yearning of having a taste of that. A micro-cosmic taste of the big merging. So you can kind of embody that. It is so beautiful. And the yearning is endless. And it is sweet in itself.

Eduardo: As it was said of Rumi, the first style of his poetry was all about yearning, the second was celebratory, about merging.

Chameli: This is all so important, the knowledge of the East and West meeting. A balance between the approaches of the East and the West. In the West we are having to reconnect and remember our spiritual side.
And in India they are becoming more materialistic. They have to learn how to manifest, after they have rested so much in the formless. And they don't have a sewage system, you know.
The West is coming there, and the East is coming here, so it is an exciting time. And the feminine is coming. She's coming, so we'll see… The Goddess is back.